We're on the road again. Both of us are ready to be back home, but since we have a few days until the flight home on Friday, we're seeing more of England's green and pleasant land. So Monday morning we headed off toward Kent in the Southeast. We drove through this area fast the other day when we were returning from France, so now we are back to take a closer look.
England has towns which would be the names of tacky suburban housing developments in America. We stopped first in the village of Sevenoaks. The attraction here is the great manor house of Knole. Alas, we did not check carefully and the house and gardens are shut on Monday. But the enormous deer park which surrounds this 365 room Tudor mansion was open. And there were lots of very, very tame deer. This one just seemed to want someone to give him a nice scratch.
From Sevenoaks we continued on to Canterbury. Our first impressions of this ancient city were not too positive. The modern post-war development is pretty ugly. But the closer you come to the heart of the town the cleaner and more charming it becomes.
The tourist office offered an inexpensive walking tour of the town, so we went on it. Our guide was quite informative and delightful. For much of the year her speciality was escorting school groups, and she had some good stories about some of them! One of our stops - one which the kids invariably like - was the "crooked house". It was not built this way, but started leaning after some unfortunate remodeling of the interior in the nineteenth century. The underlying medieval structure was so strong it did not fall down, and the current owners have used modern construction techniques to keep it in this quaint state of apparent disrepair.
The big attraction, of course, is the Cathedral with its tomb of Thomas a Becket. Much of the east end is under scaffolding to repair crumbling stone work The west end is most still visible as you can see below. We are staying at the Cathedral Lodge which is within the cathedral grounds. We can see the towers from our window. It's nice because we can wander around the grounds at night and in the early morning when the general public cannot.
We attended Evensong at 5:30. The resident choir of men and boys are off on term break, so visiting choirs are filling in to do the daily services. Yesterday we were listening to some Dutch choir which specializes in English music. John pretended to be just moving his camera when he took this picture during the service. They were not that great - the Americans we heard in Southwark on Sunday were way, way better.
After Evensong, we wandered around the town for a bit, taking pictures and taking in the ambience.
Tomorrow we are off to Sissinghurst, one of the most famous English gardens of all time, and then back to London.
