Once again, we woke up early. Our friend from the previous morning was not outside our kitchen window to greet us today. So we had a quick cup of coffee and set out for an early morning hike. This was the last full day of our vacation and we were determined to enjoy each moment of it.
We did see quite a few sheep on our ramble but we were able to determine if any of them was our sheep. They look remarkable similar! But this one did seem to have less fear of us.
We bid a quick farewell to the lovely village of Llangollen.
On our way out of town, I set up the route so that we would go by the aqueduct and I could get a better look at it. It is an amazing accomplishment for its time.
It is a manmade river suspended about one hundred feet above a real river.
I wanted to walk along the edge of it, but John and Vicki preferred a little less vertigo and stayed on a less impressive bridge.
Our path took us next through the lovely Shropshire countryside. Our next destination was Hawkstone Park, one of England’s most historic - and peculiar - gardens. In the late eighteenth century, Sir Rowland Hill, whose Protestant family had been granted the lands of three enormous abbeys after Henry VIII confiscated the lands of the religious orders, decided to create a large garden on their extensive lands. One of the odd features of this property were a group of sandstone outcroppings. In the American West, we would call these buttes. In the medieval period, the outcroppings were ideal for fortifications. But after the gradual decline of feudalism, castles were unnecessary and the rocks were more or less just land unsuited for farming or grazing. But the movement we call “pre-Romanticism” gave the Hills a new appreciation for this useless land.
Oxford Reference defines pre-Romanticism as
A general term applied by modern literary historians to a number of developments in late 18th-century culture that are thought to have prepared the ground for Romanticism in its full sense. In various ways, these are all departures from the orderly framework of neoclassicism and its authorized genres. The most important constituents of preromanticism are the Sturm und Drang phase of German literature; the primitivism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and of Ossianism; the cult of sensibility in the sentimental novel; the taste for the sublime and the picturesque in landscape; the sensationalism of the early Gothic novels; the melancholy of English graveyard poetry; and the revival of interest in old ballads and romances. These developments seem to have helped to give a new importance to subjective and spontaneous individual feeling.
The sandstone cliffs of the estate seemed both sublime and picturesque to Richard Hill, and he decided to turn this area into one of the largest gardens in Europe. The garden would not be geometric like those of continental Europe, but in the English style would be an enhancement of natural features. He decided to lay out a path among the cliffs and to install features like caves, grottos, and fake ruins. In the parlance of the day, these little attractions in the landscape were called “follies.” The arch in the picture below is not the remains of an old building, but it is made to look as if it were.
Looking upon such sights, particularly in set amide the stunning natural countryside, was suppose to arouse a sense of awe or melancholy or rapture in the viewer.
The pre-Romantics were not particularly obsessed with the accuracy of their historical details. Nobody seemed to ask whythere were Greek funerary urns on the border of Wales.
All that mattered was the feeling you had when you saw such sights. The Hills even installed a fake hermitage on the property and hired a local man to be the “monk” who would greet visitors who came through the garden.
However, the Hills could never forget that the family fortune depended on their embrace of Protestantism and there is a large red sandstone tower on the highest point as a monument to an earlier Rowland Hill, the first Protestant Lord Mayor of London.
The “follies” were one of the most famous attractions in England at the end of the Georgian period, and people traveled there from all over the country and from Europe as well to have profound feelings as they looked at this sublime and melancholy landscape. But when tastes in literature and art changed, the garden fell into disrepair. It was more or less allowed to decay for about two hundred years. But in the 1980’s, English Heritage designated it as a priority for restoration and after a decade of work and a great deal of money it was finally reopened to the public. There were some advantages to all this neglect. The Hills had planted exotic trees throughout the park and they had been allowed to grow undisturbed. So today Hawkstone is one of the few places in the United Kingdom where you can redwood trees. They appear to like the climate there.
Our next stop was the market town of Shrewsbury. If was early afternoon at this point, and all of us were a little hungry. We stopped at a French bistro there and had a surprisingly good - and inexpensive - meal. After that, we set about exploring the town for a bit. The center of the town is nicely preserved.
At the center of the old town is Quarry Park, a large open area on the river.
Saint Chad’s Church, in the background, is one of the few round churches in England. Supposedly the design was approved by the local council without actually looking at blueprints and they were outraged when they discovered its unconventional shape. We found it fascinating.
Our final stop on the way back to London was another famous church, Coventry Cathedral. The Germans firebombed Coventry, a small industrial city near Birmingham, and the old cathedral burned to the ground in 1940.
But when the war was over the people of Coventry decided to build a new cathedral in the ruins of the old one. They felt that keeping the burned shell of the old building would help them remember the horrors of war. They also preserved the remnants of a charred cross found amid the ruins.
The new building looks out on the old cathedral.
Not everybody appreciated the modern style of the cathedral.
The striking tapestry behind the altar, with images taken from the Book of Revelation, still is not universally loved.
But the modern stained glass is striking
and the statue of Saint Michael on on outside of the building is certainly iconic.
Other than the Cathedral, Coventry appears to have no other attractions. I had always seem pictures of bleak Midland towns in modern British films, and Coventry looked exactly as depressed and depressing as any of them.
It took us a little over an hour to get back to London as traffic was light on the M40. Tomorrow, we have to get up early to catch a flight from Heathrow back to Los Angeles. It has been a good trip and I will remember it fondly.
