View of the moor from Moorside Grange hotel
Originally uploaded by Suzie Rozie.
It certainly wasn't planned that we spend our last night in Britain looking up at magnificent moorlands and down into the plains where Manchester lies. In fact, before we left the United States, we really didn't know what a moor was, even though we had seen the word all our lives.
Today, we know that a moor is a beautiful work of nature in Britain, a mountain unlike our craggy or tree-lined hills and mountains in the United States.
Our first realization of what a moor was came when we were in Kingsteignton and we toured the Dartmoor National Park on our first day there. We made it a point to look up the word when we got back to our apartment. I'm not sure what Lauren thought moor meant, but I had always assumed, without thinking about it, that it was swampy land. Not so. Not so at all.
It was with a good bit of surprise, as we turned off the M-6 toward the Moorside Grange in Stockport, that we found ourselves climbing a treeless, narrow road up a mountain. We recognized what it was right away, and the higher we went, the more sure we were that we had chosen the wrong hotel, that this was a place we should have stayed at the beginning or middle of our trip, not at the end.
The Moorside Grange (& Spa) isn't in Stockport at all, but south of Stockport, just up the moor from a little village called Disley. Even so, it's only 16 miles (and about 30 to 45 minutes) from the airport, so we're really not far away.
The Grange is a Best Western hotel. We usually think of the Best Western offering adequate motels near the interstate back home, but twice we've stayed at Best Westerns that were much more than adequate - this one and another in Portugal that had been the hunting "lodge" (a huge estate) of someone royal many, many years ago.
I watched the sun set to the west of the moor this evening, and the light playing against the roundness and the shades of green was mesmerizing. I, who have a tendency to topple to my face if I'm not looking directly at the ground, found myself wobbling left and right as I gazed at the hills. Far off in the distance, through the haze, we're pretty sure we can see Manchester. Although it's about 15 miles from here, driving, it's closer as the crow flies.
After we figured out where we were in the grand scheme of things, related to Manchester, we went into Disley this evening and had supper at The Ram's Head, a lovely former bed and breakfast that has its origins in 1840. We had a fillet of pork wrapped in ham and a tomato-based sauce, accompanied by fresh vegetables. It was delicious!
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