Basingstoke; Sunday, 30 June, 2024

All three of the drinks the previous evening had actually been quite light on the gin and pretty heavy on the tonic, so rather than a hangover the major issue was just the volume of liquid consumed, and the need to remove it a couple of times during the night, so I hadn’t had the greatest of nights sleep when my alarm went off.

After breakfast and checking out I once again headed back towards the bus station to catch the bus out to the old part of the town, the village of Old Basing. The village is home to Basing House, once one of the most impressive and largest private homes in the country. In it’s heyday this fortified Tudor mansion had over 300 rooms and occupied a prominent point on the skyline. Unfortunately for the building it’s owners sided with the Royalist side in the English Civil War and despite withstanding two previous sieges it fell to the third siege and was subsequently destroyed.

Today just the bailey fortification that the old house sat upon, along with some stones and fireplaces on the ground floor remain, but you can still get a pretty good idea of the scale of the site.

Alongside the house there is also a restored walled garden and bothy, which houses a small museum, and on the other side of the road some of the farm buildings which would have supported the main house, including the Great Barn which wasn’t open when I first arrived as the previous days wedding party were still clearing up, but after looking round the main site it was all fully open when I got back.

A quick look on google maps revealed a 25 minute wait for the next bus, or just a 40 minute walk back into town on a pretty flat looking route, so I decided to take the walk, arriving back into the centre of Basingstoke about the same time I would have done if I’d gone for the bus.

I had a quick lunch in one of the restaurants in the shopping centre before heading back up towards the hotel and visiting the Willis Museum up in the old market place in the centre of the historic part of the current town. The museum tells the history of Basingstoke, which is pretty uneventful up until the village started to expand in the 18th century and grew into the large town that it is today.

Having taken in the museum I had a quick look online to see what else there was to do in town, but at this point noticed that there were several alerts popping up that the trains through Basingstoke back to London were facing disruption from a line closure further back down the line near Bournemouth. A quick check on the National Rail app confirmed that I had two choices – grab my things and head down to the station soon where there were still a couple of trains on time heading towards London that were already past the disrupted area, or hang around longer and possibly face several hours delays. It wasn’t a particularly difficult decision to quickly walk back to the hotel, grab my bag and head back to the station for the train home.

A quick check a little later in the evening, once I was safely back home, showed I would have ended up either stuck on a very slow stopping train which would almost certainly have been packed, or stranded at Basingstoke for well over an hour, so in the end it turned out to have been the right call.