Basingstoke; Saturday, 29 June, 2024

I had a decent nights sleep and after a pretty large breakfast in the hotel headed out into town and across to the bus station to catch a bus out of town to the nearby village of North Warnborough.

Just on the edge of the village was my first stop of the day, the ruins of Odiham Castle, also known as King John’s Castle. In reality both names are wrong as the building was more a fortified hunting lodge built for King John between 1207 and 1214. It was though, from here, that King John set out on his journey to Runneymede in 1215 to sign the Magna Carta. Not much of the building remains today, but you can still make out the basic shape of the structure and how well fortified it would have been by the thickness of the walls.

I walked back into the centre of the village following the calm and shallow waters of the Basingstoke Canal which runs past the castle on it’s slow and meandering route through Hampshire and Surrey through Woking and finally emptying into the Wey Navigation and then the Thames near Weybridge.

I caught the bus back into town and after a quick pit stop to grab a sandwich back across town to the main leisure park and one of the towns main museums – The Milestones Museum.

Housed in the same kind of warehouse hanger that you’d expect to find on an out of town retail park the museum houses recreations of buildings and displays of vehicles from across Hampshire. Unlike an Ethnographic museum where the buildings have been carefully dismantled and reassembled at the museum the Milestones has recreations loosely based on buildings, so everything has a slightly artificial feel as nothing is more than 25 years old (the site having opened at the very end of the year 2000)

I spent most of the afternoon looking round the museum, which despite being modern recreations is still pretty authentic. After leaving the museum I caught the bus back into town to grab an early dinner as I thought it would be wise to line my stomach before my final attraction of the day.

Dinner consumed I headed back to the bus station and caught the bus out of town and the 30 minutes or so to the small village of Laverstoke and it’s Mill. There’s been a mill on the site since the early 10th century, and in the early 18th century a new paper mill was constructed on the site, taking advantage of the River Test that runs through the site. The mills owner won a 250 year contract with the then still young Bank of England to supply all the paper for their bank notes, which the carried out on the site right up until the 1960s when the mill finally closed any by the late 1990s was derelict. At the same time the Bombay Spirits company was looking for new premises as they had outgrown their original home in Warrington and over a number of years restored and upgraded the site to become their new home for everything except bottling (that being carried out in the plant of their parent company, Bacardi, in Glasgow.)

Today the Bombay Sapphire Distillery produces all of it’s gins from this site in Hampshire and along with a gift shop and bar they also run 90 minute tours of the site which include a sample G&T.

As the buses weren’t that frequent I ended up arriving a good 45 minutes before my scheduled tour, so I was forced to wait in the bar with a low-alcohol Gin Cocktail. There was a full strength G&T on the tour and after the tour finished there was a 40 minute wait for the next bus, so I decided to sample another Gin Cocktail whilst I waited – I was very glad that I’d lined my stomach in advance.

I caught the bus back into Basingstoke and headed back to the hotel, stopping off in a supermarket to grab something to snack on just to keep my stomach lined, before heading back to the hotel to turn in.