We left Stratford in the morning, visited the carillon in Loughborough, where I was a Music Fellow for two years and did my PhD, had 5 o'clock tea with Dorothy in Derby, and then carried on through Dovedale aiming for upland Britain and the Penines. So it was dark by the time we reached our goal for that day...

Kettlewell

Kettlewell village lies in Wharfedale, W. Yorkshire half-an-hour's drive north of Skipton; family tradition has it that my grandfather's grandfather lived there. One explanation of the name is that it's 'Kjetil's vall', the farmstead of a Norwegian-viking named Kjetil; and I was certainly visited by a most extraordinary feeling of having 'come home' when I finally found myself in Hardanger Fjord.

Nice to find some roots, when you grew up in a place where your parents had no organic connection. On the other hand, my father also said that 'our' Kettlewell of Kettlewell was the station master, and there's no railway line, though there were three different plans to build one between 1846 and 1882 - perhaps he was involved in one of those...

Before getting too Wagnerian about my viking origins, it's worth remembering that if you go back those four generations, I'm only 1/16th Kettlewell, and probably everyone in Britain has as much viking blood as me.

Anyway I felt much more at home in Norway than in Yorkshire...