In which Sid and Doris brave Pennine blizzards to reach Lockerbie and visit the Ukrainian Chapel.
As you will know from the EuroEpic trip, Sid and Doris are capable of packing very lightly for a long trip, but this is not one of those trips. Four bags, four rucksacks, a bale of bedding and a crate of kitchen goods that isn’t in the photo because it very nearly got left behind in the kitchen test the Golf’s load-carrying capacity.
It has long been agreed in the Bonkers household that sighting a “Prestons of Potto” lorry on a road trip is a good omen, especially if everyone immediately says “Prestons of Potto!!” in a fake Yorkshire accent, so seeing one in the first few miles of the M11 is very cheering.
A trip up the Great North Road, as the A1 is less prosaically known, is not the epic journey it was when Roman legionnaires marched up Ermine Street, though traces of the route remain. The road signs are labelled To The NORTH, although we are going beyond that, to a place where the North is South. Sid drives, Doris drives and we enjoy an air display by a couple of lads practising out of RAF Leeming. We stop for pies, to include a Belgian bun as big as, well, about as big as Belgium.
Soon after we are on Route 66, or more accurately the A66 over the Pennines, and the scenery abruptly changes into folded green dales with many many sheep and then up onto the moors. And, startlingly, through a blizzard which though slightly dispiriting for holiday makers is not that unusual. We descend off the moors through some slightly surreal trailing wisps of cloud.
Sid brought a London lad for his first ever walking holiday to the Lake District one May. ‘John’, said Sid, as the sleet lashed over us and reduced us to crawling over the high tops, ‘this would be a good time and place to camp.’ We listened to the radio in the tent which advised against going out. We were asleep by 7.30 and John was not at all concerned, though I remember he may have prayed. And as John was the Vice Pope we woke to clear skies and a fine view.
Business Name Of The Day is awarded to a llama-themed group of buildings – the Llama Karma Kafe, the Llama’s Pyjama’s B&B, and most especially the Deli Llama grocery shop.
Lockerbie is mostly known as the town on which PanAm flight 103 fell in December 1988. Apart from anything else this was appalling bad luck as there are miles of emptiness around this tiny town.
Sid and Doris stop at the Hallmuir PoW camp to look for the Ukrainian Chapel. The camp is now the base for McCalls Coaches where Sid found two locals. One of them was disposed to be interviewed and told us about the Ukrainian population now in the town.
The camp was home to about 450 Ukrainians who had fought the Russians with the Galician division of the Waffen SS. As a condition of forming the unit they were only to fight Russians. As the USSR had starved the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 causing 5 to 10 million deaths Stalin was not popular with the survivors and they took up the fight willingly. At the end of the war about 50,000 Ukrainians were concentrated at a camp in Rimini and then dispersed through Europe in 1947, as to send them to Russia would mean their certain death.
So in 1947 about 500 Ukrainian soldiers docked in Glasgow, were taken in trains to Lockerbie and marched to Hallmuir to live in an old PoW camp previously used for Italian prisoners. If you followed the Not The Thistle story you will have seen the Italian Chapel on Orkney. It seems quite likely that the Ukrainians found another chapel built by the Italians and converted it to suit their Orthodox worship.
The huts were all made of asbestos so to attempt a renovation would be deadly or very expensive. Instead our friend tells us that the Ukrainian Chapel fund will repair the doors and windows and then put the whole thing inside a new shelter.
It was not open but you can see this excellent panel. And a tribute to the iPhone’s camera is this picture that Doris got through a grimy window into an unlit hut.
Lockerbie was a town of 4,000 people as of 2,001. This is a census year. Doris and Sid walked around the town. There is no reason why the town should have grown.