Since I've mentioned Aaron and Susan, over the last couple days, here is a picture the waiter took of all of us at the Indian restaurant Tuesday night. On the left you can see Aaron, on the right is Susan. It's not a the best picture of her, but she had just spent a day riding 30 miles on a bike, changing a couple flat tires along the way.
It was still raining Wednesday morning, so we decided to do a little tour of Chipping Campden itself. The town is quite compact, and most of the houses are on either side of the High Street. Since it was a market town, and it was not uncommon to drive large herds of sheep to and from the market, the street was unusually wide by medieval standards. The High Street curves gently following the contours of the hills. The houses in the village date from various centuries and a built in a variety of styles. But because they are all made of the handsome yellow Cotswold sandstone, and because they are uniformly two or three stories high, the building present a stunning harmony.
The most important building historically is the parish church. It is one of the "wool churches". These are unusually large village churches which rich wool farmers and merchants built as monuments to their success. I took a few pictures, but, frankly, after a while most of these places start to look alike. There were some odd little things we found along the way. One was "Ernest Wilson's Garden", a monument to a local man who spent most of his life plant hunting in Asia. It is just a quiet little place behind a low wall and gate. John Pratt had a little problem even getting in!
By eleven o'clock the rain had stopped, so we got on our bikes and began our ride to Winchcombe. Julia picked up our luggage at the hotel and transported it to Winchcombe for us. The ride began with another brutal hill. But when we reached the top, we were rewarded with vistas stretching from Gloucester to Stratford. The picture does not quite do justice to the sheer breadth of the view. Nor does it really capture the fact that this meadow was absolutely covered in sheep dung. The sheep look so peaceful when they are eating grass that we forget that it has to go somewhere afterwards. We walked carefully back to our bicycles.
The next stop was the Broadway Tower, seen below. This was built in 1798 at the beginning of the "Pre-Romantic" movement in English arts and letters. Wealthy landowners suddenly developed an appreciation for the medieval ruins on their properties, and, if the ruin was not good enough, they happily built fake ones. This landowner built this as if it were all that were left of some ancient Saxon castle. The practical Saxons would never have put huge windows in their towers, but the builder wanted to take advantage of a site which provides an opportunity to see twelve counties when it is clear.
We decided that the view from the base of the tower was good enough, and decided not to spend the four pounds on walking to the top. We got on our bikes and pushed on towards Snowshill. Along the way, we stopped at a lavender farm.
The village of Snowshill is so cute you are sure that it had to be a creation of the Walt Disney Company. The highlight of the town, however, is Snowshill Manor and garden. You can see a picture of the house below taken artfully by John from the orchard.
We did not actually tour the house. It is one of the more popular places for the National Trust, and we would have had to waited a couple hours for the next tour. It did seem like an odd place. Snowshill Manor is not really one of those "great houses of England." The place was in ruins when it was bought by Charles Paget Wade. Wade had been trained as an architect, but had the good fortune to inherit sugar plantations in the Caribbean around 1910. Suddenly rich, he spent the rest of his life traveling around the world collecting things. He bought the house and restored it to house his collections. He and his wife lived in separate bedrooms in a small cottage behind the Manor. Wade's bedroom - which we did see - was decorated to look like a Russian Orthodox monastery chapel. I have a feeling it was an unusual marriage. There were no children, and when he died he gave the house and grounds to the National Trust.
The sun came out and "England's green and pleasant land" never looked better. Everywhere we looked there were sheep.
We detoured a bit from Julia's recommended route because we wanted to see the village of Temple Guiting. Another one of those Cotswold murder mysteries - I haven't finished listening to this one yet, though John did - is set there. Part of the plot seems to involve the village church which was built originally by the Knights Templar of DaVinci Code fame. But it was a really charming little village church, and they had placed water and orange drink on a table in the church for "trekkers and visitors".
We continued on the road until we came to the village of Guiting Power. It is a bit larger than some of the other villages. It even has a post office and a dog park! But the two pubs in town were completely deserted in the late afternoon, so John and I bought some soggy pastries from a grocery and a couple of pints of milk and had a late lunch in the village green, right next to the inevitable World War I memorial. We had decided to skip the church, but on a whim went in anyhow. It proved interesting. Parts of the building still preserve some of the original Norman decoration. They had on display a sarcophagus for a child which dated from the Saxon period. This had apparently been discovered when doing some routing work on the floor of the church. And we loved the placement of the font at the base of te tower below the bell ropes. It looks like the ancient custom of change ringing has not been forgotten in Guiting Power.
Another four miles on the bike took us into the small city of Winchcombe. We are staying at the White Hart. Again, the room is not all that nice though it appears that some of the rooms here may be a bit more posh. We walked around the town towards dusk, but we have not taken any pictures here yet.
