At the end of Twelfth Night, Feste, the fool, sings a strange song with the repeated lines "With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain ... For the rain it raineth every day." Scholars have pondered the meaning of this song, but after a few days in the Cotswolds I think Shakespeare was just describing summer in Gloucestershire. It rained today, just like yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and the day before the day before yesterday....
The da y did start out on a sunny note, giving us a false sense of hope for the day. We decided to explore Winchcom be and its modest attractions. We learned a bit about the town. Winchcombe is a really old town, already well established as a Saxon borough by the time of the Domesday Book. There is not much of that ancient town left. Most of Winchcombe dates from the 18th and 19th centuries. Like Chipping Campden, the houses are all made of sandstone. But the stone here is more tan and the town lacks the glow of its more affluent northern neighbor. Here is a typical Winchcombe street.
Probably the oldest building in the town that is open to the public is - no surprise here - the Anglican parish church. John Pratt liked the somewhat kitschy Victorian stained glass above the altar.
The biggest tourist attraction in the area is Sudeley Castle, located about a mile out of town. Sudeley Castle has a lot of history. Sudeley was the place where Henry VIII and Thomas Cranmer planned the confiscation and destruction of the monasteries in England. Elizabeth I came to Sudeley to celebrate the destruction of the Spanish Armada. Katherine Parr, the sixth and final wife of Henry VIII is buried in the chapel here. This is her tomb.
Unfortunately, the close connection between Sudeley and the royal family proved disastrous when the Civil War broke out. The Parliamentary forces attacked the house and burned it to the ground. Part of the castle, the Banqueting Hall, was never rebuilt. You can even see the burn marks on some of the windows.
The castle lay in ruins for 200 years until the Dent family from Manchester who had made a fortune manufacturing gloves bought the home and set about restoring it. They did a pretty amazing job with the gardens. One of my favorites is the Elizabethan-style Knot Garden.
There are beautiful rose parterres and lovely borders. There is an exquisite "secret garden" and a Victorian vegetable garden devoted to heirloom vegetables and seed preservation. But the family also has filled the garden with sly bits of modern art. This one was called "The Face of the Earth".
Unfortunately, as we were having a coffee at the visitor center, getting ready to walk back to Winchcombe, it started to sprinkle. And then it started to drizzle. And then it started to seriously rain. We waited for a while for it to stop, but when we realized this was delusional, John convinced one of the sour females in the gift shop to part with a couple of plastic bags and he made little rain hats for us.
When the rain diminished to a drizzly mist, we got on our bikes and started to ride. Unfortunately, we were not on our bikes for more than a mile when it started to pour again. We stopped at the Winchcombe pottery facility. It created some of the most famous pots and plates and pitchers during the heyday of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Today, however, you can find something which looks pretty similar to all of their stuff at Target.
Our next stop was the ruins of Hailes Abbey. There is a good story here. Hailes had been a small monastic community until the monks claimed that they had a really important relic -- the blood of Christ which had fallen from his veins into a chalice. Moreover, this relic was miraculous. Christ's blood, the monks claimed, had never actually coagulated after all those centuries. Wow! Within years Hailes was the biggest pilgrimage site in England. The monks grew rich. But not everybody believed it. Henry VIII's commissioners investigated the claim and discovered that the relic was actually duck blood which the monks regularly changed.
There's not much left of the Abbey now. There are a few arches and the remnants of a wall. The National Trust wanted to change 3 pounds to look at this rubble, and we decided it was not worth it and rode on. But, as we were leaving, completely on a whim, we stopped at a small church across the street. I am so glad we did.
This little church was never restored and the walls show the remains of the frescoes which once covered the interior of the church. There was an image of Saint Christopher, one of Saint Michael weighing the souls of the righteous, and this one, my favorite, of a hunting scene. The little pamphlet suggested that this may have served as a warning against Sabbath violations.
As we were riding away from the church, we saw the train run by the Gloucestershire-Warwickshire Steam Railway. The picture somehow misses the mist of the scene, at least as I remember it, which made me immediately think of Turner.
Our next stop on the bike tour was the Stanway House. This is another great estate from the time of Elizabeth I. But it was not destroyed in the Civil War nor has it ever changed hands. The same family still owns it and lives in it. And that's the problem.
After all these hundreds of years, this family is flat broke. It's too bad that they did not let us take pictures inside. The place is a disaster. There are the usual rooms with pictures of dead relatives, but what strikes you is that the floors are bare unfinished wood or covered with carpets which would have looked frayed a century ago. The walls are stained by leaks. The springs in the sofa are have been broken by use. Cats have stratched the upholstery in what is not broken. Everywhere there are piles of books and papers.
The big attraction on the estate is a gravity-fed fountain which shoots water about 300 feet into the air. But by the time we left the house to take a look at the fountain more water was pouring down from the skies than shooting up from the pond.
We hid from the rain for about 30 minutes in an odd little structure overlooking the fountain. It looked somewhat like the Albert Memorial without Albert's statue. Finally, we then decided to brave the downpour and make it to the tea shop. We downed a big pot of tea and ate some sweets while the rain continued to pour. Around the time the house closed, five o'clock, we decided the further riding was pointless and we went the four miles back into Winchcombe.
The BBC says Friday will be nice. That's not reassuring since they seem to have been wrong every day since we arrived. More later... if I ever get dry again.
