Scone, Perthshire,Scotland

Ereti and Wallace's house

We had a good drive to Scone to stay with Ereti and Wallace Mitchell. In 1975, Ereti and Lil set off on their big 'OE' (Overseas Experience). After 3 years Lil returned to NZ with John but Ereti stayed on and married and had her family in Scotland. She is still here although her and Wallace are hoping to sell their house and return to NZ now that the two boys are independent. The oldest, Alistair has a van leasing business while Jason is studying music at Londonderry University.

Ereti has been involved with the NZ Scottish Society for many years and they organise all sorts of events for those who have Scottish- Kiwi interests.

Wallace has built a mini marae (traditional Maori meeting house) in the front garden and we are posed in front of that. With us is Doug from Invercargill. Doug works for a slaughterhouse in NZ that runs an exchange programme with slaughter houses here in Scotland so he comes over for 5 months each year. Doug is also a 'hangi master': he prepares the fire to cook food in the traditional Maori way, in the ground. A hole is dug and then a fire is set over rocks. The food is prepared and covered and set on the hot rocks. Finally everything is covered to hold the moisture in and the food steams for a few hours and has a slightly smokey taste.
Back: John and Wallace Front: Doug, Lil and Ereti

Ereti and Wallace are great hosts and we spend our days reminiscing and our evenings playing charades. Ereti, Ron ( a golf buddy), Lil and Wallace picnic at St Andrews.

Gorebridge, Midlothian, Scotland

Headed off from Grassington through Newcastle to Galashiels along the local roads. We saw signs for 'Free WIFI' in Jedburgh so pulled into the council car park there and used our SKYPE to call our friends Craig and Cheryl Wilkinson who work in Gorebridge. It was difficult to find a phone box that would take coins, or a shop that sold cards for the card phones to call them so we were delighted to get a free connection.

We arrived in the dark and managed to get some supplies at the local Coop supermarket while we waited for Cheryl to escort us back to their place.
Rosebery House
Craig and Cheryl are both working on Rosebery Estate, she as a housekeeper and he as a driver and doer of all other jobs that need doing. They live across the road from Lord and Lady Dalmenys' house in a comfortable warm and cosy staff house.

It is becoming more and more common for New Zealanders, and probably others too, to work as housekeepers if they can get ancestral visas. It is particularly popular for those who are having a mid life crisis or whose children are now independent. Craig and Cheryl fall into the latter.

While chatting about Rosebery Estates, we learnt that one of the Earls of Rosebery had married Hannah, the only daughter of the Rothschilds, and they inherited the Rothschild wealth. A lot of these art treasures are now owned by the present Lord Rosebery and family.

The next day Cheryl and John played golf at the Dalmeny House golf course, near Queensferry, just outside Edinburgh.

The weather stayed fine enough to enjoy a couple of rounds on the 9 hole course which is for staff only. Dalmeny is a part of the Rosebery Estates as well.
Dalmeny House
Craig couldn't join us as he had to pick up his boss, Lord Dalmeny, at Balmoral Castle where he had been shooting with the Queen. Craig mentioned that John's grandparents had worked at Mentmore House and Lord Dalmeny told him to ring the housekeeper at Dalmeny House and ask to be shown the art treasures from Mentmore.

The next day Craig and John played golf at Dalmeny and then we were able to visit some of the rooms in Dalmeny House. The sign at the front said the rooms were closed to the public for all of 2008 so we were lucky enough to have a look around. There was a Gothic Hall with a chest that Captain Cook owned along with a whale harpoon. We could also see the Napoleon Room, the Rothschild Room, and the Mentmore Room. The only Goya tapestries outside Spain were hanging on the hall walls.

Interestingly, Craig and Cheryl's boss is an auctioneer for Sothebys and was responsible for auctioning the art work for Damian Hirst for 111million pounds.

We couldn't believe that there would be so many connections to John and his grandparents!

Yorkshire Dales National Park, Great Britain

Decided to head for the Yorkshire Dales as neither of us had ever been there before. The weather is getting noticeably colder and with schools and universities back to their studies we thought it might be reasonably quiet rambling the dales. We got caught in heavy traffic on the A666 heading for Skipton, the entrance to the Yorkshire Dales National park.

We headed for a campground that we found in our Caravan Club book but they were fully booked. They sent us off to another site and they sent us of to another. After about 4 sites we managed to find a spot in the car park of a transport company, in Gargrave. We had to walk a long way to the toilets and showers.

Next to us were a lovely friendly couple from Blackburn, Dave and Frida. We joined them for a shared meal, a few wines and lots of laughs.

The National Park Office in Grassington was well organized and they set us off with a map for a 2 and half hour walk through the dales. It was a beautiful day and the pay and display carpark outside the office soon filled up with hikers and their dogs, and the tour buses rolled in. We could then understand why it was difficult to find a campsite!

The walks ran through farms with grazing sheep, there were only a few signposts and no coloured tags or posts to guide the way.


Some places were walled off so you knew you were on the right path anyway.

I had always wanted to visit Yorkshire after having had our English teacher, Mrs Wright, read us instalments of The Secret Garden, with a Yorkshire accent of course.

The dales are rolling hills with stone walls dividing off each farm or field. The day started out sunny and warm but the hills in the distance were quite smoggy. Some of the streams had signs stating they were private fishing areas while others had 'no fishing' signs.

The walk ended at the small village of Grassington where we bought some local home made bread and relish and sat in the main square watching the hikers roll in. Some of the cafes even had signs saying 'Dogs welcome'!

Bolton. Great Britain

John's father Henry was born in Turton, Lancashire on 7th October 1912, so that was our next stop. Turton was a textile ( flax ) town in that era and we didn't expect to find many traces of that industry left today.
After a bit of research we discovered that a house belonging to one of the millowners, named Turton Towers, still existed and open to the public so we went there.

A gardener at the towers pointed out where one of the mills had stood beside a local stream so we walked along and took a look. The foundation stones of the mill are visible when the reservoir water level is low but after this wet English summer, it was not to be. We did however find some of the original mill cottages, now nicely refurbished.

My grandparents John William Parkin and Lilly Farrell were married at Astley Bridge Baptist Church on 19th June 1909 and we discovered there was still a church on the same site. The old one had been destroyed by fire and replaced with a new structure. There was a childrens play group using the new building but one of the teachers invited us in to look at some photos of the old church. John took a few snaps of these photos.




John can remember his grandparents talking about this part of Turton.

Chester, Great Britain

Drove to Chester and checked into a camping ground a short walk from the city centre. We were looking forward to our first night in the VW camper. The camp sites here are nothing like the ones in New Zealand. When we arrived the camp owner asked if we had children with us and didn't seem to believe us as she peered around the van looking for where we may have hidden them. We reassured her we didn't have any children on board and then she asked us if we had dogs. No we replied. She said dogs were welcome but not children!

The camp had 2 hot showers and 4 toilets and lots of bins for recycling and rubbish. There was a roof over two sinks which were labeled 'food preparation' and 'dish washing'. On the noticeboard above were photos of the caravan park covered with snow and dated April 2008. How they can provide such exposed facilities in such weather is beyond me!

There were no facilities to hook up to waste water or taps as we usually have. All the caravan owners carry huge plastic gadgets on wheels or roll huge round tanks back and forth to the waste water drain and toilet disposal spot several times a day.

The camp was conveniently located alongside the Shropshire Union Canal and were able to walk along the tow-path to the local inn and have a pint there.

We telephoned John's second cousin, Arthur Brighton, who lives in Chester. We had met Arthur and his wife Margaret when we were in Chester 12 years ago.


We had a great day visiting the ancient Roman ruins and walking the Roman wall that circles the old city centre. The walls were built in AD 70.


In the Middle Ages Chester was the north west's most important trading port on the River Dee but since then the river has silted.

Chester is really attractive with several Tudor and Victorian timber framed buildings.

In the evening we went out to a local restaurant with Arthur's sister Linda and her husband Roy.

At the campsite we were next to a motorhome with French plates. the English couple chatted to us about life in NZ and France. When Arthur and Margaret visited us they recognized our neighbours as friends of theirs who now live in France permanently but were back for a wedding in Chester.

Buckinghamshire, Great Britain

On our way north we decided to see if we could find any trace of John's ancestors. We started in Wing, a small village in Buckinghamshire.
His grandfather Arthur John Evans was born in Wing on 17 July 1886. A J Evans parents, Henry Evans and Sarah Giles worked on the nearby estate of Baron de Rothschild some three miles away. He as a groom and she as a housemaid. The Baron built Mentmore House and it still stands today. More on Mentmore and the Rothschild's in a later blog on Gorebridge, Scotland.

In Wing we stopped and looked around the village and the first places we saw were Rothschild Cottages where I guess some of the workers lived.




Mentmore House was surrounded by tall trees but John managed to walk along a golf course on the estate grounds and then climb over the churchyard fence to get a few snaps of the house.
Mentmore House.

The Evans family lived in Mentmore village at one stage, next to the policeman's house. Today Mentmore village only comprises of a few dozen houses. We saw the vicarage, the church cottage and the laundry house - but no police house. The whole village is still surrounded in rolling fields as it would have done in the 1880's.
The Church Cottage.

Next stop was the churchyard in Harlington where Susan Giles and Henry Evans are buried. We could find no sign of their graves but there were a lot of unmarked plots about. We did find tombstones for Jonathon Giles, Jane Corbet Ward, Annie Corbett Giles and Peggy Ross all together, so with the help of Arthur Brighton in Chester will check out their relationship to the Parkin's.

Northampton, Great Britain

We have been very lucky to have a campervan to travel in during our trip around Great Britain. Alan and Helen, our friends from Sussex, have lent us their VW camper as they will not need it while they are away in USA.

It has a fridge, cooker, hot water and a heater and is very comfortable. They have armed us with map books, National Trust Membership cards and Caravan Club cards so we can visit historic sights and find basic camps as well as commercial sites to park for the night.

Our first trip in the van was to Northampton to spend the night with John's nephew Matt and his partner Wendy. Matt works for Quicksilver managing a couple of stores in Milton Keynes, while Wendy is a food scientist.

We had no street maps of Northampton and Matt gave us his address and said it was 2 minutes from Carlsberg Breweries. Luckily we came off the motorway near the brewery and found a guide in a shopping centre car park that showed some of the local suburbs (but no street names). We identified Matt's suburb and headed for it. In no time we had found his place by heading for a new residential area. All good luck!

Had a great meal and then headed off the next day towards Bolton where John's dad was born in 19 12. He arrived in New Zealand with his parents when he was twelve years old.