“All Kent hath yielded; nothing there holds out / But Dover castle: London hath received, / Like a kind host, the Dauphin and his powers.” – Philip the Bastard to King John in King John (Shakespeare)

One of the great things about travel in England is that in most places we go, something important happened there. Today, that somewhere was Dover Castle. Dover Castle was built (at least the central tower was built) by King Henry II starting in the 1180s, and the castle has been added on to and used for different purposes ever since. The castle was never taken by any attackers, so the tower is still the original one that Henry II built. Shakespeare’s play deals with Henry’s son, who lost much of the huge France/England/Wales/Ireland empire that dad had inherited or conquered. King John is also famous for ticking off his barons enough that they forced the Magna Carta on him.

At any rate, Dover Castle was Henry’s showpiece. It is huge, and the number thrown at us today was it cost about seven billion of today’s pounds ($8.6 billion) to build it, although comparisons of money across such a vast amount of time are notoriously bad. Since many pilgrims came through Dover on the way to Canterbury to see the shine of Thomas Becket, Henry wanted a PR piece to help smooth over his own part in having had Becket killed. The tower clearly stated who had the money and power in the region.

Since Henry’s time, the castle and grounds have been used to prepare against possible invasion by Napoleon, as a watch post and Royal Navy harbor during WW I, as the headquarters of the Royal Navy during WW II, and as a Cold War bunker through the early 1980s. The grounds of the castle are huge; there is much to see. We spent six hours there today.

We started with a guided tour of the underground WW II tunnels, used as the navy’s headquarters. The tunnels had been carved as barracks for men during Napoleon’s time, and the navy moved into them. They called out of retirement Admiral Ramsey, who masterminded Operation Dynamo, coming up with the entre thing in about one week. Dynamo was the plan to extract 45,000 British troops (of about 140,000) who were trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk. The admiralty didn’t think it possible to get more troops out. In the end, by using even fishing ships and yachts, 338,000 men of the British Army and their allies were rescued over eight days. It was a huge and unexpected success. To follow that up, Ramsey also coordinated other navy operations in the Mediterranean and  ran all the navy operations for D-Day. He was a remarkable man. Sadly, he died in a plane crash in 1945 before the end of the war.

We took the other guided tour offered, which was to tour the underground hospital, which was ultimately used as a dressing station. We “followed” (on audio speakers) a wounded pilot though the admission process, prep, and surgery, while the lights flickered on and off during an air raid. It was a much shorter tour, but gave a good overview of the difficulties of treating wounded underground; it’s hard to operate with little or no lighting, and space was cramped.

After that, we were free to wander around. We checked out the WW 1 watch post, which included a high platform for flag signals, as well as a bunker for telegraph operators. The men here watched the Channel for any boat and identified if it was a friend or foe. Since you can see France on a clear day (like today), it would have been hard for ships to hide from binoculars. The Channel is only twenty-three miles wide here.

The castle map had numbered buildings, so I decided to follow them more or less in order. The first stop was a Roman lighthouse from the first century that is still mostly intact (a top layer was added as a bell tower for the circa 1000 church). The church right next to it is still open for services, although they have blocked up the “Saxon door” without any commentary as to why.

After that was the magnificent Great Tower and surrounding walls. When I thought of castles when I was a kid, the pictures in my head matched this castle. It is giant and blocky and intact. The Tower has been restored inside to how it probably looked, based on manuscript pictures and descriptions. The layout was fairly simple – three main levels split in two – the kitchens, the guest sleeping areas and banqueting hall, and then the king’s bedroom and chambers. You could also go up on the roof, which had great views.

After a quick lunch, we explored the medieval tunnels. I think these were to help move men around while under cover, but there was no information given. The tunnels were outside the Tower and first walls, but were inside the second set of walls overlooking the moat between the walls. It doesn’t surprised me that the castle was never taken – it was defended to the teeth.

After the tunnels, we went up on the embankment and outer walls, where there were cannons from the nineteenth century next to anti-aircraft guns from the 1940s. There were also spectacular views of the inner walls and tower.

That took up our six hours, and so we wended our way back to Canterbury. We got a light supper at a bakery, and then went to the walled part of the city, where we walked through a small park, and then ambled along the High Street further than we had yesterday. We had some happy views of the cathedral down small alleys of old shops.

And so we wrapped up this tour of southern England. We couldn’t have asked for better weather – we only had about forty-five minutes of real rain when were were trying to tour, and that was over fifteen days. England hath received, like a kind host, Meredith and her tourer. A jolly good trip for us.

Today was one of the longer drives we have had on this trip – three hours (or so) from the Cotswolds to Canterbury, near the east coast.

So (more or less) wrote Geoffrey Chaucer in his prologue to the great Canterbury Tales, written in the late 1300s. Mer has taught selections from the Tales, so it seemed I should get her here. There was also T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, an event which happened in this cathedral.

Our B and B is a fifteen-minute walk to the old gate of the walled part of the city (the gate is still intact, but the walls are mostly gone). We grabbed one last Cornish pasty from a bakery, and walked down the tourist-consumer gauntlet that is High Street here. Many of the buildings are very cool, and there were certainly tons of people trying to spend money today.

We got into the cathedral, which was open until 5:00, around 2:30. We had missed the live tours for the day, but we had a guide in Mer’s tour book, which we followed. The cathedral was built (roughly) between 1100 and 1400, but the site goes back to about 600. The bishop’s chair (which is what makes a cathedral more than a church) is from around 1300. We found some graffiti carved on the wall from the late 1600s. It’s been around for some time.

The cathedral is the headquarters (for lack of better term) of the Anglican church, so it is important in that respect. But it was put on the “pilgrimages” map by being the place where St. Thomas Becket’s body was entombed. Thomas Becket was the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he was murdered (somewhat by misunderstanding) in the church. Two years later, he was recognized as a saint, and the pilgrims started coming by the thousands.

Becket was the childhood pal of the prince who would become Henry II. Henry and Thomas liked to party, and so when Becket was made bishop, Henry thought he was going to have the run of the country with little or no church interference. But, to Henry’s shock and dismay, Becket turned out to be a faithful bishop and kept opposing things Henry wanted to do. At some point, Henry is reported to have wished something could be done about Becket, which four knights interpreted as a desire to have Becket murdered. Which they did. In a church. Nice men. The king was horrified, and walked down the streets of Canterbury barefoot to the cathedral as a sign of repentance. (So ends my recollection of the story, which may be flawed.)

The cathedral is also the burial place of Henry IV and his queen – I have no idea why they aren’t in Westminster, but they are here. Since Shakespeare has Henry IV as a character in a couple of his plays, Mer was interested in the tomb. They also have the grave of the Black Prince Edward. I have no idea why he is the Black Prince, but he was feared in battle, so that may have much to do with it. Amazingly, the church still has some parts of his armor, including a fabric shirt that went under the armor.

We were both moved by the Martyrs’ Chapel at the end of the church. It had a book listing multiple martyrs over the last 150 years. One group of whom we had not heard was a group of seven men in Melanesia (the Pacific islands toward Australia). They were in an area of hostilities, and they ignored the fronts to bring food and help to people trapped by rebels. When their leader was killed, the other six went to ask for his body. Three more were shot immediately and the other three were killed the next day after being tortured. Thousands of people came to the memorial service, and the leader of the rebels gave himself up to the authorities. It was a moving story among about twenty such.

There was a small chapel that had stained glass from after World War II, to replace broken windows. It was done by a Hungarian artist, and the windows were bright and modern and moving. One window showed Jesus welcoming a prisoner set free, and the other window showed an old Jesus (aged by the world ignoring him) welcoming people from all races. They were thought-provoking, and I really liked the prisoner one especially.

The crypt was open, and as we explored it, we heard an organ playing the contempory (2003) song “Here I Am to Worship.” It was a Christian pop song played on an organ in the crypt of a major cathedral, and it was for a French Huguenot service. There has been a French-language service in the church crypt for three hundred years, ever since French Huguenot Protestants fled France for religious reasons. They ended up here. And the confluence of so many things made us smile. Back up in the main part of the church, we heard the organist practicing “Pomp and Circumstance” – which Mer recognized even before the famous part; however, when the organist did get to that famous part, the first chord was so powerful that it drew Mer out of her seat.

We explored a few streets around the cathedral, but went back for the 5:30 evensong service. It was a special service, held in the nave (the big part of the church). They were celebrating the one hundred years of service of a group called the Royal British Legion, whose mission is to serve veterans and the families of those who have served in the British armed forces. It was a moving service, with flags of the different military branches being marched in and being lowered during two minutes of silence toward the end of the service. Our Aunt Mary would have loved it – they opened with a hymn she loves, “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” which asks God to protect those on the sea, something about which England has typically cared. The service lasted for a full hour, and we felt it a good worship experience, although we did pass on the singing of “God Save the Queen.” It’s hard for an American to sing about the joys of monarchy. We respectfully stood for the anthem.

That was our day, more or less. We checked in to our B and B, and then had savory pies in a restaurant in a Tudor building next to a stream. But we were in literary company – the Frankeleyn (freeman) from the Tales:

One of the real joys in travel is experiencing serendipity, the unexpected, when the encounter is unplanned and a happy one. I had no real plans today other than to explore some cute Cotswolds towns. Add in one closed door and one open one, and things got interesting.

We got a bit of a late start because of our late night last night, so we didn’t get to our first town of the day, Chipping Campden, until a little before noon. After driving several one-lane roads, navigating the park-where-you-want-to busy and crowded High Street was stressful, but we found the local school parking lot, which allows public parking on the weekends.

Chipping Campden is known for its High Street, which is long and made up of uniformly designed row buildings, constructed between the 1300s to the 1600s. The buildings are all made of a local yellow stone that is so associated with the area that all new construction in the Cotswolds must use it to maintain the harmonious look. Campden made its money in the wool trade, and when that market collapsed, the town (along with much of the Cotswolds) sort of hit the pause button while the rest of the world went along. That is why the area is packed with tourists now – the old villages are cute and quaint.

We did a Rick Steves recommended walk down High Street, where we noticed lots of fancy-dressed people around. We had seen signs for a wedding, so we assumed they were guests. We later found out there were two weddings in the local church that day, so it seems the Cotswolds make for a good wedding destination.

My one disappointment on the walk was that the silversmith’s shop was closed. I like silver, and I like skilled tradespeople, so I had wanted to see the shop; it closed at noon, and we got there about 12:30. We did go into a shop that was run by the son and daughter of a famous designer in metal housewares. It was beautiful stuff, but very expensive (a salt and pepper mill ran over a hundred dollars). Money can’t buy happiness, but it sure can buy elegance and class.

The walk ended at the village church, where the wedding was. We thought it was over because we had seen guests in town, and there was no indication it was still going on. When I slowly tried to open the main door (the one with a sign that said, “Turn handle and push”), I got a frowning woman appearing in the crack in the door, indicating that the church was in use. That was fine as it went, but a sign would have worked well to prevent our attempted intrusion from happening.

On the way out, we swung by the side of the church to look at a headstone for the church cat who had passed away in 1986, when I saw an open door with a spiral staircase beyond. Of course I had to go look. We went up very quietly in case sound would transmit into the church, and we came to an open door and a platform where four retirement-aged people were sitting around talking. I asked if we could come in, and they said yes.

Thus began a delightful and happy hour or so. The people there were bell ringers. The church has eight bells, and they were there to ring them in specific patterns before and after the wedding. They had eight people to ring the bells, but since the wedding was going to take about an hour, four members had popped down to the pub for a drink. We chatted about bells and why the British are deeply honoring of WW I monuments (the theory put forward by one man was because towns sent their young men to fight in the same units, so many towns lost many of their young men all at once). We talked about real estate prices (very high in England – we rarely have seen stand-alone houses for under $500,000), and how young people don’t seem to be interested in learning about bell ringing.

Bell ringing is an art, it seems. You need to pull on the rope with the right force and with the right rhythm to get the bell swinging; the bells start upside down and rotate to a standard position (ringing once), then reverse in the other direction (ringing again). We learned that for funerals, one side of the clapper is muted, which means you get a muted ring every other ring. When a monarch dies, both sides of the clapper are muted. At least in theory – it hasn’t been done in seventy years. Oh, and when the bells are going full blast, we could feel the tower moving slightly; we had been warned that would happen and were told it was okay.

We were joined at some point by the other four ringers (one of whom turned out to be the eighty-four-year-old silversmith we had missed at the shop), and they let us stay to watch them ring after the wedding. One woman called out the various changes in the ringing patterns, and the others followed along. They rang two sets, each lasting four or five minutes. They then took a break since they had another wedding coming up in an hour. Meanwhile, one of the ringers offered to take us up to see the bells, to which we eagerly agreed.

We were shown the carillon that was built in 1789 and still works. It is designed to strike the bells when they are in the down position, so when the bells are up to be rung by ringers, the carillon can’t strike anything. The ringers leave the bells up if there are weddings coming up since it takes a lot of work to build up to slowly getting the bell into the upside-down position. We then got to stick our heads up a ladder to see the bells themselves, and then went up another level to see the old wooden bell frame. It was deemed unsafe for the bells in 1990, and a steel frame was constructed below. Because the wooden frame is so old, the law stated it had to be left untouched. The same went for one of the bells that cracked – it sits unused in the tower because it can’t be melted down and recast.

We were deeply touched at the kindness of these people who took so much time to talk to us about what they do. It’s one of the reasons I love nerds of all kinds – anyone who is passionate about something usually is pretty interesting. We thanked them profusely and went back into town for a late lunch.

After lunch, we drove forty minutes to the southern part of the Cotswolds, to the tiny village of Bibury. Everything I had read said it was cute, and it was. Nothing I had read mentioned it is four streets that can be seen in about fifteen minutes. But we did catch the church open, and happened to see the bell ringers at work in there, since these bell ropes came all the way to the ground floor.

Since I knew we would want supper, I decided we should eat it in a cute place that was a sure thing. So I drove back to Bouton-on-the-Water through a quick rain shower. By the time we got to the town thirty minutes later, the sun had come out. The town was fairly quiet at 5:00 in the evening, and even more so by 6:00 as we came out from supper. We strolled around, enjoying the evening sun hitting the water – we both think evening light is magical, and it is a pretty magical place to be on top of that. We finally headed back to the inn around 7:30.

Tomorrow we are off to Canterbury. Things may go according to plan, and I hope they do. But I will always try to be flexible to let blessings strike whenever they want to. What a good day.

In Shakespeare’s Richard III, when Richard cries out, “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” I suspect he may have been familiar with some of England’s narrow back lanes and the challenges of getting a car down them in one piece. But that is a little later on.

I had no urgent time demands today, so Mer and I slept in, getting a rather needed ten hours of sleep. I wanted to go to the Cotswolds, an area of cute little villages west of London. We’re staying two days in the area, with a goal of just leisurely wandering around mellow little towns.

On our drive through a couple of these towns on the way to our first destination of the day, Mer declared that a single town must be “a Cotswold,” since the region name is plural. So, we got to out first Cotswold of the trip, Bourton-on-the-Water. I wanted to get to Bourton especially since it has a very shallow river running through it with a bunch of small pedestrian bridges over the river – it seemed like a mini English Venice. I wasn’t disappointed.

Being in a cute English village, the car park was on the edge of the town, which is fine, given how small the village is. But, given how there are stone walls and hedges and houses everywhere and no high landmarks, it was surprisingly hard to navigate our way into the town. What isn’t surprising is that I led us almost exactly the wrong way. The happy part of the detour is that we got to see a Cotswold kitty, who started flopping around in a look-at-me sort of way while her human kept trying to call her inside. Good kitty.

Bourton is mostly one street that parallels the river, although there are a few back lanes with shops and paths. The private homes do go back a few blocks, as our little scenic wander had already shown us. The village along the river was about four or five city blocks long, and we took our time. We ate some pastries on a bench looking at the water. And, since I am the son of a water-loving mother, I had to wade in the river. It was cold. Make-your-feet-ache cold. But Mom will be proud, cementing my status as Favorite Child.

We walked the river down and back, taking time on the way back to sit on a bench again. We poked down one back lane and took a footpath a couple hundred yards until it left the houses. Finally, we checked out the tourist-gauntlet main street, before going back to the car by a pedestrian direct route.

One of the challenges of driving in England is that the English rarely use street numbers for addresses. That can make programming a GPS challenging. I put in the town name for our B and B, and figured we would just see it. The GPS took us to Cheltenham, a small city of almost 120,000 people. These are not the Cotswolds I am looking for. Somehow, some city planner thought it was a good thing to erect a twenty-story building in a city that otherwise has no tall buildings. It is a bit of an eyesore in an otherwise decent, if overly busy, town. Our B and B wasn’t to be seen.

Starting with our March Ireland trip, I started carrying a smart phone on trips for situations like this. The phone showed us that there was a chain hotel near our B and B, and my GPS had that in it, so we got that far. On a whim, I tried typing our inn’s name in the GPS. It was in there, and I hadn’t bothered to check. That little detour cost us about a half hour. Happily, the inn is back in the Costwold area, and so it is quite pretty.

Having dumped the bags, we got back in the car and headed north to Stratford-upon-Avon, birthplace and home of Shakespeare. You have to know how to kiss up to your English-loving wife. I had never been there before, and Mer hadn’t been since she was seven, so it was a good place to go and see. Except we made the mistake of ordering calzones for supper. We had two hours to see the town, and dinner took an hour and a half. Oops. We had seen the site of Shakespeare’s later-in-life home (which now seems to be a gated park which was closed), and had seen some cool timbered houses as well before supper. Afterwards, we just had time to walk down to the river next to the home of the RSC’s theater.

Oh – our welcome to the highbrow home of the Bard? A group of thirteen-year-old boys rode by on their bikes, and we overheard in a delightful accent, “‘Ee’s a looky maan – she ‘as some buns.” We held off laughing for as long as we could to lessen the chance they heard us.

We were tight on time because, as a surprise to Mer, I had 7:15 tickets to see Richard III. Mer knows my obsession with being on time so well that she was confused at supper. I kept checking my watch, and Mer thought it was odd because if I had to be somewhere at 7:00, she knew I’d be freaking out. If we had to be there at 7:30, she thought I’d be mellower. She said she should have known it was actually 7:15.

We got to the theater early. The theater wasn’t open yet.

We did spend some time happily browsing the gift shop. It was Shakespeare-nerd heaven., but we managed to get out with the credit card unscathed.

The RSC theater was renovated in 2011, and the seating is very intimate. We had seats in the front row of the first balcony, but there are no seats more than about fifty feet away from some part of the stage. The stage set was very minimal – there was one large stone monolith (like a memorial) toward the back of the stage, and that was it. While the actors would bring a few set pieces on (like a bed or table or such), it was a minimalist production.

The play was excellent, especially seeing how difficult Shakespeare can be – the Regional Stratford Community theater really nailed it. That was my best guess for what RSC stood for.

Richard was brilliant, but I’m a bit ashamed to say he was distracting for the first few minutes. The actor is a qualified actor with a solid career in movies and TV, but he is also disabled in that his right arm is missing a radius bone and so is shortened, and his hand is bent and smaller, missing the thumb. It was a great choice to cast a man with a withered hand to play Richard (who was humpbacked and had a withered arm), but both Mer and I spent a little time trying to figure out if the arm was prosthetic, made by the costume department. It wasn’t, and our confusion only lasted a few minutes.

The play was mostly cast as traditional, with armor and swords and such, but oddly the director chose to broadcast the rally-the-troops speeches given by Richard and Richmond at the end of the play, using an on-stage camera to project a larger-than-life image on the monument block. Modern technology in a traditional play felt jarring.

Right before the final battle, Richard has a dream in which all his victims come on stage to curse him. They physically interacted with him, then later formed the troops against whom Richard had to fight (by himself), and lastly formed his “horse” that dumps him to the ground, where he is finally killed by Richmond. That all worked very well.

So I scored huge wife-points today. The downside was we got back close to midnight. Oddly, on the way TO the theater, my GPS picked every dinky one-lane road it could find. On the way back, it got me on major highways for all but the last four or five miles. I guess I don’t need to trade out my kingdom quite yet.

We stuck with water-feature towns today as we left Wells and came to Bath. Bath has England’s only hot water thermal spring, where rainwater in the nearby hills takes thousands of years to seep down into the earth, where it gets heated up, and the hot water, which is now under pressure, finds a fault here in Bath and comes up to the surface here in three very close-to-each-other springs. The water varies from spring to spring, but sounds as if it ranges from about 120 degrees to about 145 degrees.

Mer had gotten us 10:00 tickets to the Roman baths here. Rome invaded and settled this area around 40 AD, and the Romans were very impressed at finding this hot spring. They set up a Roman bath, one of the largest outside of Rome, and built a temple to the goddess Minerva, whom the Romans merged with the local Celtic goddess of the spring, Sulis, to make Sulis Minerva. Eventually the bath complex became huge, with the spring, the bath, several smaller pools, several saunas and cold pools, exercise areas, changing rooms, and other rooms that could have been used for massage. Then, around 400 AD, Rome had some Goth trouble, and the Roman settlement was abandoned, and the baths were forgotten and lost until the 1700s. The great bath itself wasn’t found until the 1800s when water started seeping into the basements of the houses built over it.

Anyway, the Roman bath was returned to as close as we can get it to original shape. The Victorians added a terrace overlooking the bath and added statues of Roman emperors and generals. But the bath itself is original, and much of the floor around it is original. Some of the larger complex has been excavated, and the museum does an excellent job of presenting the finds. Foundations are where they were found, and other bits have been remounted on the walls of the museum in the best-guess position of where they should be, and the missing parts are drawn in or, more commonly, projected in by a computer projector so that the extra filled-in stuff can cycle on and off.

There are several multimedia film clips showing actors playing people who actually existed, which is known through dedications of altars or on tombstones. You can follow the people around and see them interact with each other. One of them paid a scribe to write out a curse on a sheet of lead so he could get the goddess to get revenge on a thief. It seems it was the practice to write out a curse on lead sheets, fold it up, and throw it into the spring for the goddess to read. The museum said that these curses are our main source for seeing the way that common Latin was used by ordinary people.

The two major finds in the museum are the head of a “gorgon” and Minerva’s head. The gorgon is a male face that is intact, and was probably the central figure of the decorations on top of the facade of the temple. One possibility is that it is actually Neptune, and therefore the snakes in his hair are actually sea serpents. The head is mounted with other fragments of the facade, and a projector fills in the missing bits as well as adding possible colors.

Minerva’s head would have been from her statue in the temple. In what can only be described as a good day at work, a man unearthed the head while digging a sewer line back in the late 1800s. The gilded bronze head is in excellent condition.

Touring the baths took us a little over two hours, which took us to lunch. After lunch, we made our way down to the train station, only to be greeted by a sign proclaiming a train strike. Mer had wanted to go to Bristol, but we decided we didn’t want to risk possibly getting stuck in a city away from our hotel and car. So, Mer came up with a quick plan B – we walked back to the square where the baths are and the cathedral is, and there we picked up a 2:30 guided tour of the city.

It was just the guide and eight of us in all, so a nice-sized group. We started by the cathedral and baths, and she covered much about the baths we had already learned. The cathedral is one of the latest and last of the Gothic cathedrals, getting started in the late 1400s. The good part of that was that the builders knew how to maximize windows, so the glass in the church is huge and impressive. The bad part was that the church wasn’t finished by the time Henry VIII came along, so the formerly Catholic church wasn’t finished, and it sat slowly decaying for about one hundred years. Then, Elizabeth I came to town and saw that the cathedral was in poor shape, so she made the local officials organize a lottery to help pay for finishing the building. It turned out well, at least from the outside.

We proceeded to go see the locations of the other two springs; spas are located there, and both are swanky and expensive. We walked up to Queen’s Square to see one of the first buildings to have a beautiful block-long unified facade. It was actually many homes behind the facade, but it looked like a single palace. It seems this is a common thing in Bath – much of the town was rebuilt in the 1700s using similar Georgian architecture, and the fronts were always beautiful. The backs could be a jumble.

We kept going up the hill, with a quick swing into a restored 1700s garden to see what that would have looked like. We got up to the top to the Royal Crescent, which  is a long, sweeping building facade that features in almost every Jane Austen film. In fact, there were lots of people setting things up to shoot for something tomorrow; the crew is tight-lipped about what they’re filming. It seems as if the residents of the Royal Crescent cooperate with films because the films pay them for the use and it helps to defray the cost of maintaining the building and grounds.

We proceeded back toward the main part of town, stopping at the Circus, a group of homes that form a circle with the same Georgian facade. Mer and I both agreed we liked the Crescent better, but these were nice homes, and perhaps slightly more affordable – especially since the last Crescent home that came up for sale went for 5.75 million pounds (7 million dollars).

After a brief swing by the Assembly Rooms, where balls were held, we finished the ninety-minute tour down by the very cool Pulteney Bridge, which is a bridge over the river that has shops all along it. From the topside, it looks like a street – you can’t tell that the bridge is there at all apart from the shops all being very shallow. The bridge leads to a uniformly house-lined street and ends in a mansion that stands at the front of a large public garden. The river was very pretty here as well, so it made for a good ending.

We checked into our hotel finally, and then went back to the bridge. Our guide had recommended walking down the street to the park, so we did that. It was a pleasant place to walk, but we did turn back a little into the park to go get supper back near the hotel.

That wrapped up our Bath exploration for the day. After multiple days of busy touring, it was good to get a fairly early evening back in the room. Since tomorrow is my day, and I had planned for a mellow-wandering kind of day, I think we’ll sleep in. Which is what we should do in a spa town.

Since Jesus talks about believers becoming “a spring of water welling up to eternal life,” it makes perfect sense that the city of Wells became home to a cathedral, back to at least 900. Wells is home to multiple “wells,” which are areas where an underground river found fissures in rock and so water is forced up to the surface. There is endlessly flowing water right next to the cathedral, which flows in small gutters down the main street of the old part of town.

It seems that to be classified as a city, the town needs to have a cathedral. Since Wells has one, it is a city, and is the smallest city in England at about twelve thousand people. Our tour of Wells consisted of the cathedral, the Bishop’s Palace next door, and a street next to the church where people have lived continuously since the 1300s. And we took about eleven hours just exploring those three areas. We’re thorough people, and the cathedral has much to see.

We started with the morning prayer and communion service in the small Lady Chapel at 8:00 am. I think there were about six of us (not counting the dog – England has gone nuts for dogs in a way I hadn’t remembered – they are allowed everywhere now). The service was Church of England, and thus highly liturgical, and that fit the grand surroundings well. It was a pretty service and a nice break from hard-core tourism. We chatted with the priest for about ten minuets afterward, and he kindly pointed out a few things to us and invited us to evensong later in the day.

Happily, after the service, we were told the cathedral was open already for visitors, and so we ended up having the entire enormous space completely to ourselves for forty-five minutes (other than running into Basil, a kitty who visits the cathedral every day – very cute and friendly). That was a new experience to us – usually cathedrals are crowded with tourists taking photos and taking tours. Even after one or two people showed up, it was only a few people. We felt like important guests.

We did the walking tour out of Mer’s guide book, which took us around the place. My favorite object was the interior clock, which has a clock face dating back to the 1300s. It tells the time and the phase of the moon, and has a little clockwork display at the top where four horsemen joust with each other. The same poor guy gets whacked down every time. Meanwhile, the clock also activates a full-sized “man” sitting next to the clock, and he kicks the bells at his feet every fifteen minutes, and he hits a main bell every hour. Clever stuff from seven hundred years ago.

Next door to the church is the Bishop’s Palace, which is where the bishop lived. Over time, the various bishops built a fortified residence, complete with moat. The main dining hall fell into ruin a couple of hundred years ago after the roof started leaking, and a garden has been planted there. One of the main wells springs up on the grounds, and so there are small streams around the property, along with more gardens. Our ticket to the palace is good for a year, so we cut our tour short to go back to the cathedral because Mer had booked us for the “High Places” tour.

This is very technical, but in simple terms, the High Places tour takes you upstairs in the cathedral to the high places around the church where people aren’t usually allowed to go. I’m terrible with heights, so it was a bit of a risk, but I love engineering stuff about what holds up big buildings, so that was good. It turned out to be okay – just one terrifyingly high place from which I hung back. The rest was high up, but well protected.

Wells has a lot of water. Cathedrals weigh quite a lot. The original cathedral had a stumpy little main tower. A hundred years later, the bishop decided that this wasn’t good enough, and got people to build a much higher, and heavier, tower. Well and good. Until the stone columns under the tower started to deform – you can see the straight lines of decorative features bend near the tower. The front of the tower sank six inches, and the back sank four. So the cathedral added hidden buttresses to shore up the tower, and added four beautiful scissor arches visible in the main part of the church. These are rare anywhere, and Wells pulled them off superbly. The cathedral is known for the feature now. Our guide said there is some debate as to if they are even needed for the structure anymore, but no one cares. They’re staying put.

We clambered around in back spaces and on top of ceilings and such. It was great. We got to see the guts of the clock working, and we saw rough-worked stone that isn’t public-facing. We saw seven-hundred-year-old oak timbers that get stronger as they age (as long as the bugs leave them alone). We got to see a demonstration of choir holes in the front of the church where choir members would sing, making it sound as if the angel statues in front of the church were singing. We got to see the eight trumpet holes at the very top of the façade, where trumpets would be thrust through and played on processional days. I had a ball. Good stuff.

Back on the main floor, we thanked our guide and went to get lunch. We finished with that just in time to catch a free guided tour of the cathedral. For those keeping count, this was our third tour of some kind for the day. The guide shored up some of our newfound knowledge, as well as added a few new bits of information: for instance, no one knows how or why the main thirteenth-century stained glass window survived the Reformation and the English Civil War, when most of the glass in the church was destroyed. We finished the tour in the spectacular Chapter House, which is held up by a central pillar that fans out across the whole ceiling. It is a “wow” moment when you see it.

We thanked our guide, but we weren’t quite done with church yet. The library is only open from 2:00 to 4:00, so we popped in there to look around. We couldn’t get back to the oldest section, but we could see it, and it still had multiple books with chains attached, which is when books were so valuable they were chained down.

Having finally seen all of the cathedral we could see, we went back to the Bishop’s Palace to finish off the gardens and the house. The house is pretty small, actually – two floors and maybe eight rooms. I think some of the grandeur of the place fell in with the collapse of the great hall.

We walked around the cathedral to get to Vicars’ Close, the street where the staff of the church used to live. It still is largely used that way, although now it houses families instead of single men. The street is very uniform and is in excellent repair.

Not quite done with the church, we went back in for evensong. The cathedral school attached to the church is one of only three special music schools in England. As the priest told us in the morning, once you see a thirteen-year-old playing Rachmaninoff, it makes you want to give up playing the piano. There is serious talent. Tonight, the evensong was sung by a men’s choir (with one woman), and the harmonies were beautiful. They sang in both English and some old dead language, and it all took place in the choir stalls of the church, so the service felt intimate. It was, as the English are fond of saying, lovely.

That finally ended our touring day, other than having to go to four restaurants to find one open on a Wednesday. It seems a bit odd to me to have spent nearly eleven hours mostly exploring one building, but as I told Mer, I don’t know what I would have cut out. We got to taste a little bit of the living water today in Wells.

Sometimes the moon, stars, and planets all align. Because of how the trip scheduling worked out, Mer ended up taking us to Glastonbury today. For those, like me, who may not be familiar with the town, Glastonbury is the supposed burial place of King Arthur and Guinevere. In recent decades it has become a New Age pilgrimage place, and is also home to a Woodstock-style farm-field music festival. Mer decided to go to Glastonbury today. Two days before the festival starts. On the summer solstice. It was an interesting place to people watch today.

The people in town today were perfectly behaved and pleasant. Every third man seemed to have lost his shirt, which may have been the same place every third woman lost her bra. Every fourth man and woman were barefoot, but they made up for lack of footwear with the presence of numerous walking staffs. Hair was worn one of three ways – long, colored an unusual color (blue was popular), or long and colored. Every fifth person was carrying a guitar or drum. One man was happy in just his loincloth. Many people seemed to be smoking … something. As I said, it was an interesting place to people watch today.

We were there to see the remains of the ruined abbey in town. Love me a good ruined abbey. I haven’t seen any since March in Ireland. Glastonbury Abbey is so ancient that no one knows when it was founded, but it is attributed to Joseph of Arimathea (of Bible fame). Legend has it that Joseph came to Britain to trade for tin or lead. He brought eleven followers and the Holy Grail with him, and he founded a church where the abbey is located. Archaeology has found the remains of buildings on the site from at least 400, so any way you look at it, the church is old.

The king paid to have the church rebuilt, but the pilgrim connection to Joseph seems to have been damaged, and the abbey struggled. Enter King Arthur, or at least his body. The abbey claimed to have found Arthur and Guinevere together in a tomb buried on the grounds, and they made a grand tomb for him in a huge new church that was built onto the smaller previous church. That did the trick – pilgrims came in hordes, and the abbey was either the wealthiest or second wealthiest (after Westminster), depending on the year.

Enter Henry VIII. When the abbot of Glastonbury Abbey refused to close down the monastery and give it to Henry, and instead just continued on, Henry sent three officials to find something wrong. The tried to get the abbot on treason, but it wasn’t treasonous to run an abbey, so they eventually got him on trumped-up charges of theft. And they promptly executed him as a traitor (making the eighty-year-old carry his own scaffold up the nearby five-hundred-foot Tor hill), hanged him, then had him drawn and quartered, and then put his head over the abbey gate. Henry has much for which to answer.

The abbey was looted for anything valuable, and that included the lead roof and the lead in the windows. Therefore, the abbey fell into ruin and eventually passed into private hands, when it was “mined” for stone. So, much of the abbey is gone. What still remains is impressive – the church walls still give an idea of the space, and the church built around 1200 was the biggest building in all of England at the time.

We read up on the abbey in the small museum on site, and then had an excellent guided tour of the grounds. We wandered around a little on our own as well, but Mer had more plans in town. Or, more accurately, slightly outside of town.

We took the mile-plus walk out to and up the Glastonbury Tor, the obviously towering hill right on the edge of town. We had some trouble finding the access path, and met two friendly guys from Liverpool. I understood most of every other sentence, but they seemed to indicate we should follow them. Which we did, and thus found the way up the back (steep) side of the Tor. We passed by four tents set up next to the “no camping” sign, and huffed our way up to the top of the hill. The views are magnificent in all directions. There were a ton of people up at the top, and it was a little distracting in that most seemed to be ingesting something from a bottle or a pipe, while one man treated the old church tower as his personal amplifier for his music. Again, everyone seemed well behaved, but it was hard finding a quiet and smoke-free place to sit. We did manage, and enjoyed twenty minutes just looking over the fields and hills of the area.

The walk down was easier and faster, and we went back into town for supper. After that, we drove to our B and B in the close-by town of Wells, which we will explore tomorrow. If we can get some sleep on the longest day of the year.

Today was very much about cliffs and gardens and the sea, and how they interact in spectacular ways. We stared the day off driving the short distance to a parking lot across from St. Michael’s Mount, home of the St. Aubyn castle and gardens. There is a causeway that connects the island to the mainland, but it is only accessible at low tide. In a country with twenty-foot high tides, it is only above water nine hours (or fewer) per day. But, as bonus, we got out on the sea in a boat Cornwall, even if for only about five minutes.

St. Michael’s Mount is  like the little brother version of the more famous Mont St. Michel in France, which is huge monastery on a tidal island. St. Michael’s Mount actually started as a very small monastery founded by the abbot of the French one. It was an “are-you-tough-enough” training school for graduating to Mont St. Michel, and stayed that way for over three hundred years until Henry VIII grabbed all the monasteries. It then became a fortress until the English Civil War, when Parliamentarians got it after surrounding it. When the monarchy was restored, the St. Aubyn family, who had gotten used to living there, paid the former owner eight hundred pounds for the place, and it is still in the family, now the twelfth-generation owners of the castle that sits on the island.

The house/castle is open to visitors to help with the cost of upkeep, and much of the island and the causeway were gifted to the National Trust so that they could keep those up. At any rate, it is a beautiful castle in a stunning location, and the inside feels like a luxurious, but livable, home. It was good to tour it.

The chapel of the castle is where the old monastic church was, but that original structure was probably made of wood and is long gone. The chapel is small, but looks as if  it can hold about fifty people, and they have services (public invited) every Sunday in summer. It is a pretty space.

My favorite part of the castle was the south courtyard, which is actually on the roof of the dining room of the private family part of the castle. I looked in a window in the access tower, and saw two skateboards hanging there – we were told that one of the sons liked to skateboard in the courtyard. The space was open to the sea on three sides, and the views of the ocean and the gardens below were grand.

My favorite part of the tour was unexpected. I was looking at the last room on the tour – the weapons collection. It was small, and didn’t take long to see. I glanced at a small description about a beret worn by the Lord St. Aubyn’s brother and walked a couple of steps on before doing a double-take. I went back and confirmed that it was the beret that Lt. St. Aubyn had worn as part of a parachute brigade that had fought in Arnhem, made famous by the book and movie A Bridge Too Far. It’s amazing history, but the end of it is that Lt. St. Aubyn and his men held out unsupplied and unsupported for several days while holding one end of a strategic bridge over the Rhine. When they were finally evacuated, only three officers and thirty men (out of over five hundred) made it out unscathed. It was very cool to make a personal connection like that after having spent a fair chunk of time reading the book.

One of my disappointments yesterday was that I didn’t get to eat a Cornish pasty at a mine (since it was a traditional mine food); the mine cafeteria didn’t serve pasties. Happily, the cafe on the island did, so we happily ate them sitting on the sea wall, looking back at the mainland. Good ambiance.

We then went on to tour the castle gardens, which are terraced since there is little flat land. They were designed to be seen from both ground level and from above from the castle, and the terraces are all different heights and have different flowers. They all have great seas views.

Although I really wanted to walk over the causeway, it was going to be underwater for thirty more minutes, so we took the boat back across. I drove us a short distance to the nearby Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens. Mer and I both like sculpture gardens, and these spread out over twenty-two acres of sloping land, with many views of the sea and St. Michael’s Mount.

I was astonished at the growth of the gardens. Cornwall has a mild climate because of the Gulf Stream, and the gardens were in a protected valley as well. So there were many subtropical and even some tropical plants. There were palm trees everywhere, some growing next to cacti. We saw some plants with individual leaves six feet across. There were ferns taller than our heads. It felt like being in Jurassic Park. Not bad for a place that is five latitudinal degrees north of Maine.

The sculpture was a mixed bag for me. Some of it didn’t really pass the Matt test (by looking like art that I could have made), and some of it I simply didn’t find pleasing. But about half the pieces were interesting, and I really loved one that seemed to be a ruined Greek temple, but the pieces of the temple swayed in the wind. It was funky and very cool.

From the gardens, we went home for a short while before heading back to the Minack Theatre, which is the theater built on a cliffside. We found our seats and then realized we had to go three quarters of the way back to the top to use the bathroom and buy some pasties for supper. Mer said she had never worked so hard to get to a bathroom in a theater before.

We got to see a one-man show of The Odyssey. The main actor played six or eight major roles, and added several more minor ones as well. It was fun to see him use a simple sash to create quick costume changes, or to hear him alter his voice for different characters. The play followed the major stories of the source fairly well, until the end, when it broke and made Odysseus become a shepherd while Penelope ruled as queen. There had been some seeds planted early in the play for that to happen, so it wasn’t totally out of the blue. It was a good time in a truly amazing place.

So we wrap up our time in Cornwall. I could have easily spent another day or two here; I had to skip several things on my “to see” list I prepared before coming. The driving can be very difficult, but the payoffs were always worth it. Thumbs up to Cornwall.

The rain held off for us until very late afternoon, so we managed a full day of touring while remaining largely dry. The wind out here was pretty intense at times, but we can manage that.

Tin has been mined in Cornwall for about four thousand years (or more), and mines played a very important role in the show Poldark that introduced me and Meredith to Cornwall, so it seemed right that we pay a visit to a mine. The Geevor tin mine ran from about 1920 to 1991, and was a huge mine with a main shaft going sixteen hundred feet underground and had tunnels up to one mile long extending from it. The mine was turned into a museum a few years after it closed, and large industrial areas are sort of my thing, so I was excited to go.

But first, a walk. We got to the mine around 10:00, and our ticket was good for all day, so I wanted to take advantage of the rain-free time and hike out ten minutes to an older mine from the nineteenth century. It was closed for some reason today, but you could still wander the grounds looking at the crumbling buildings. The walk and the mine ruins are on the coast, so it is a pretty place for a walk. We did learn that the investors in the mine who bought a share for twenty pounds ended up being paid total dividends of over twelve thousand pounds. That is a solid investment.

We walked back to Geevor and started the tour. We spent about four hours wandering around the buildings of the mine and learned a ton of things about tin mining.  For example….
1. Mining is hot and hard work. Temperatures go up about a degree for every one hundred feet of depth.
2. Extracting tin is such a mind-numbingly difficult process, it makes me wonder how people four thousand years ago ever figured it out.
3. Tin is only located in a few places on Earth, and at one point, Cornwall supplied two thirds of the world’s supply of it.

Tin, to my eye, looks like quartz flecks imbedded in other rock. To get it out, it had to be mined and brought to the surface. Then it had to be pulverized and sorted and pulverized and sorted and pulverized and sorted. Then it got sorted again. Then it got washed by chemicals to pull out sulfides (in earlier times, people used a furnace, exposing them to arsenic). Then it gets run under a strong magnet to pull out iron bits from the tin sand. Finally, the tin that is seventy percent pure is bagged up to be sent to smelters. When running well, the mill could grab eighty percent of the tin ore from the rock that was mined. At the height of the mine, it employed 400 people, about 120 of whom were miners underground. The rest processed the ore or did other support jobs.

Miners worked one shift, and if they weren’t ready to blast the rock away at the end of the shift (when blasting was scheduled), then they couldn’t set off the explosives and didn’t get paid for the day, since they were paid on how much rock they moved. People in the processing mill worked three shifts to keep up.

The price of tin fell in the mid 1980s to one third of what it had been worth, and while the mine struggled on for a few years, it finally closed down in 1991.

The modern mine did also have an old hand-hewn mine on site, which dated back a couple hundred years or more; no one knows the exact age, since the mine isn’t on any maps anywhere. But it is safe to tour, so we got to go underground in a tiny tin tunnel. I only hit my head four or five times. Thank goodness you are required to wear a hard hat.

We also read that two kitties named Basil and Scraggs made the mine home right after it opened as a tourist attraction, and they lived to be fourteen and sixteen, which is impressively long for outdoor cats. They now appear as mascots in several parts of the museum.

We grabbed a convenient lunch/supper at the cafe around 4:00, and then headed back to the room to regroup for the evening. I took advantage of the time by shaving for the first time in eight days, since my poison ivy rash has finally cleared up off my face. I was as close to being bearded as I have ever been. But now I was ready for church.

We went back into Penzance and parked by the harbor and walked up the hill into town to the Penzance Baptist Church for a 6:30 evening service. The people were very kind (kindness seems a Cornish specialty), and the service was soothing. We sang familiar hymns, and we got to hear a sermon on lessons learned from Paul in 2 Corinthians where Paul talks about his thorn in his flesh and his boasting in his weakness. We were invited to stay after and eat cookies/biscuits, which is not a hard sell. We chatted with more kind Cornish people and stayed for about thirty minutes.

So we got in a good day of touring. In light of the hardships of mining or in light of eternal matters, a little late afternoon rain doesn’t seem so bad.

We certainly felt blessed today by the surprisingly tour-able weather. The forecast had called for high winds and rain all day, and while there were some pretty intense winds, we had almost no rain until 5:00, and then only for an hour, and that was when we were in the car.

Mer was in charge today, and she wanted to follow a recommended drive in her tour book. So we set off on a day of broad skies and narrow roads. Our first stop was the postcard village of Mousehole. It is a small fishing village west of Penzance, and I loved it. It is a walkable town, with narrow streets (as I found out later trying to leave) that invite wandering. It has a small artificial harbor with the village huddled around the sea. It’s full of cute shops and great views, and even a Victorian rock pool which traps sea life in it once the tide goes out (for viewing – they can leave again next high tide). We wandered the town for about an hour, ducking into one shop and swinging by an ice cream shop. I have to say that adding clotted cream to ice cream is a fabulous idea.

We then drove (and prayed) down to Lamorna Cove. One Cornish man we met told me even the Cornish folks try not to drive down to the cove. But, like Mousehole, it was a beautiful spot, but with only half a dozen houses and a cafe. It also has access to the South West Coast Path, England’s longest hiking trail. We set off in one direction, looking to hike a short ways. We got to some sign that said more or less, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” We turned around. We went the other way, which was past the half-dozen cute houses and had a stream we crossed. We made our way up a moderately steep trail, and as we started to make some real distance, we heard thunder. There was no rain, but it seemed like climbing up to the top of an exposed cliff with lightning around was a bad idea. We turned around. We went to the cafe, where we got pastry bars. We sat down.

We skipped down another narrow lane to the small cluster of homes and six boats that make up Penberth Cove. All the boats were tied way up on the boat launch – this part of England has twenty foot tides. It was another spot to admire natural beauty while being off the beaten path. After sitting on a rock and listening to the ocean (and one occasionally baring dog), we headed on.

We spent the bulk of the afternoon in the village of Porthcurno. It is home to perhaps the most improbable and the most dramatically situated outdoor theater in the world. The Minack Theatre is carved into the cliffside overlooking the ocean and more cliffs. Despite the challenges of performing on the Cornish coast, the stage and all the seating are outdoors. Sets often have to be anchored down, and the sound system has a “loud ocean” setting for the soundbooth. Plays are changed out every week during the six-month season.

The theater is largely the work of one woman, with the help of three men. Rowena Cade came from a wealthy family and moved to Cornwall with her mother. When she was in her thirties, a friend got her involved in making costumes for local theater productions. When her friend wanted to stage The Tempest, Rowena offered her cliff garden as a setting. She, with the help of her one gardener, spent six months clearing the ground on the cliff, cutting rough terraces for seating, and filling in a level area for the stage. The play was a huge success, not the least for the setting. Thus the Minack Theatre was born, and Rowena continued to work on the theater with her gardener (and two others after he passed away in the 1960s) for fifty years. Now, the theater can seat seven hundred people and is run by a non-profit. It’s amazing what one determined woman can do, and it’s a pretty great legacy. We’ll be seeing The Odyssey there on Monday – it should be special. Today, we toured the place and learned about it.

Porthcurno has also been a communications hub. At one point, the village had fourteen international telegraph lines coming into it. It was so important that in World War II, all the telegraph operations were moved into two bunkers carved into the mountain specifically to protect communications. Three hundred men guarded the place, and automated flame throwers were installed on the beach. Nowadays, Porthcurno still has multiple fiber optic lines come ashore here. We learned all of this at the Telegrah Museum, which presents the history of the telegraph and how that evolved into modern communications. The museum includes the two bunkers, and it has examples of all of the equipment used for telegraphs, dating back to the 1860s. We spent an hour and a half in the museum, and could have spent another hour or so, but we closed the space out.

As a little quirk, there is a huge squid made of PVC flexible piping outside the museum. If you talk into one of the tentacles, the sound will come out for a listener who sticks her head in the eye of the squid. Meredith said it worked well.

About at this point was when the hard rain started, continuing while we were seeking, and eventually finding, Cape Cornwall (after one missed road detour). It looked lovely, with a high cliff rising above both the sea and the parking lot. It looked like a great place to hike up, but the heavy rain and howling winds kept us in the car. We sat and watched the waves for several minutes, and then made our way back to Penzance for supper.

Mer’s first choice for a restaurant no longer existed (a new place had opened there instead), so she let me pick a place. I chose Admiral Benbow, a pirate/smuggler-themed restaurant. It was rambling inside, and as we tried to find a table that wasn’t reserved, we made our way all the way to the back, which was a full replica of the inside of a ship. I loved it.

So ended our shipshape touring day. We may or may not get so lucky tomorrow with the weather, but today was a good day.