Stonehenge

To position ourselves not too far from Stonehenge, we stayed in an Airbnb that was the lovely annexe to what had originally been a farmhouse in Broad Chalke, Wiltshire. The place is owned by a very nice couple. It has a garden and a swimming pool and was very comfortable. It was relaxing to be in a quiet spot in the countryside at a home with off-street parking. The owners recommended a great pub down the road, where we had an excellent meal and met the entire local cricket team. They tried to explain cricket to us - very nice fellows, all of them!    

Parking and admission to Stonehenge was already part of our National Trust membership. I’d made reservations on line for the early morning, which was a smarter move than we realized. We got there by 9am, got parking without a problem and set off right away to see Stonehenge. Pretty soon, people started to swarm the place, but we were more or less one step ahead of the crowd. I find it harder and harder to appreciate a place when it’s mobbed with people.  

The National Trust stopped letting people walk among the stones in the 1970s due to physical degradation of the site (destabilization of the earth around the stones due to soil erosion) and vandalism. So now you have to keep to a 3’ wide circular path a little distance from the stones themselves. It makes perfect sense and is very necessary, but it’s a pretty touristy sort of experience. I’d love to see Stonehenge under moonlight, or snow, or at the summer or winter solstice at dawn or dusk when the stones are aligned to frame the rise or fall of the sun. THAT would be amazing.  

So here we are...   

  

As part of the exhibits, there are one or two stones you can touch and try to imagine moving into place with log rollers and ropes. Her's Jim hamming it up trying to lift a huge stone.

 And some boys trying to pull the same stone on the rollers

By the time we were ready to leave it was wall to wall tourists, including, of course, a huge line for the women's restrooms. Why do people who build all manner of buildings continue to miscalculate the number, size and placement of women's restrooms??? I assume they're guys, but I still don't understand.  It's ridiculous and maddening.

After a couple of hours at Stonehenge, we drove to nearby Avebury, a World Heritage Site which had the largest circle of Neolithic and Bronze Age stones in the world. The stones date from as early as 2,500 to 3,000 BC, they are a little smaller than those at Stonehenge and without the lintels (the horizontal cross-stones), but it’s a very impressive site. The henge and avenues include 76 excavated stones and many still-buried stones. The heaviest weigh from 40 to 60 tons each. Originally there were 3 circles of stones in fields that are now used for grazing sheep. The outer circle has a diameter of over 1,000 feet. Around the circle a 30' ditch had been dug by hand and the chalky soil from the ditch built up into a surrounding bank about 25' high. As at Stonehenge, nothing is really understood about why these stones were placed there. There’s been a lot of research and speculation, which I won't go into here!

Here are a few of the stones in the circle. They vary greatly in size and shape. 

You can walk the perimeter of the circle on the chalk bank outside the deep ditch 

 These 2 boys on a skateboard were riding down the steep embankment into the ditch

At Avebury there is also a beautiful 16^th century manor and garden, a threshing barn, a dovecote and a barn and stables converted to a museum of sorts. In 1991 Avebury manor was bought by the National Trust and thanks to a project with the BBC to refurbish the rooms for the television series "The Manor Reborn", the manor has newly recreated interiors – each room representative of a different era to reflect the times of its different owners. 

Here is the church

The dovecote where doves and pigeons were kept for food

Jim with a guy who dresses up as his 6th great grandfather, who was apparently the first person to measure and record information about the stones at Avebury in the early 1700s. 

Globe thistles, cleomes and sweet peas in the garden

 The manor house

A room recreated with assistance from the BBC to look just as it might have during one period of private ownership. 

 Sunshine through leaded glass windows

In this house, visitors are invited to sit on the chairs, play billiards, try to make scones in the kitchen, dress up in costumes, lie on the beds, whatever!

A recreated Art Deco sitting room... 

 ... with martini glasses at the ready

 Jim pointing out a fancy commode - no waiting in line here to use a bathroom! 

Our last stop before leaving for home was Windsor, where we went to see Windsor Castle. The Queen was not in. In this photo the clouds make it look like the tallest tower is a smokestack :-)

The queue to get into Windsor Castle was INSANE. But we were right there, the car was parked safely outside our Airbnb 5 minutes away, and we didn't feel like taking to the roads again to search for other things to see and do outside Windsor, so we decided to go in. Once inside about an hour later, we had to queue and pay again if we wanted audio guides. In our experience, little can really be appreciated or understood in a place like this without an audio guide, but we couldn't stomach standing in another queue for yet another hour. So we went in and jut wandered around. Big crowds, a lot of shuffling in line through many, many very ornate rooms, pretty much a waste of time.  I wasn't supposed to take any photos but couldn't resist this one. We called this "The Shoeshine Room" 

Unfortunately the rest of the city of Windsor has become one large shopping mall. There are nice pedestrian walkways full of shops and lots of pubs and restaurants, but if you're not interested in shopping, there's not much else to see or do. 

We headed home on August 16th and had an uneventful trip back to Annapolis. We hope you enjoyed the little glimpses shared of this trip. It was a lot of fun. Thanks for coming along for the ride and a special thanks to the who sent me comments from time to time. It's nice to stay in touch!

Exeter and Stourhead

We spent couple of days in and around Exeter after leaving the Plymouth/Dartmouth region. Exeter Cathedral is lovely but I don't need to tell you more about English cathedrals. It rained and was cold and windy in Exeter - we visited the waterfront, a museum or two, and an exhibit on film and cinema.  Although none were particularly memorable, here is Jim trying on a sea creature hat at an exhibit of marine life at the museum.

At the waterfront were several boats badly in need of repairs. This one had been painted bright blue on the side facing away from the quay, but it was full of gaping holes...

Despite the very chilly weather and spitting rain, three guys were having fun climbing on and falling off a paddle board. The green craft on the right is a pedestrian ferry that runs across the narrow harbor on a cable pulled by the fellow in blue.

 Climbing on...

 Falling off. They did this over and over again - must've been freezing but they didn't seem to mind!

After leaving Exeter, we drove to our next lodging in Broad Chalke, near Stonehenge. On the way, we stopped at Stourhead. It's a 2,600 acre estate in the Wiltshire countryside that was owned and maintained by the Hoare family until 1946 when The National Trust received half the estate as a gift. There is a large mansion and extensive pathways through landscaped gardens and woodland, with a small lake at the center.

I don't know what kind of coniferous trees these are but they are massive, and when they move gently in a breeze, the sound is very calming.

Inside the little Gothic Cottage by the lake.

Jim is standing under the largest rhododendrons I've ever seen.

The mansion. The Hoares must have rattled around in it. They had only one son who died in his twenties in WWI. Very shortly before the estate was gifted to the National Trust, both elderly Henry and Alda Hoare died within hours of each other on the same day.

The entry arch

Next stop - Stonehenge!

Lovely, lovely Dartmouth!

We spent a day in Dartmouth, a beautiful place I remembered sailing into in 1984 at dawn on my 35' sailboat. It was only the second time I'd ever cruised through the night and it was an impressive way to greet the new day.

Dartmouth is an important harbor - the Pilgrims left here in 1620 for the New World on the Mayflower and the Speedwell.  In much, much more recent history, the river was a staging area for hundreds of vessels that invaded the Normandy beaches on D-Day in 1944.

Here are some photos, unfortunately in not very sequential order :-)
The castle at the mouth of the River Dart

 The coast along the narrow entrance from the English Channel is quite rocky and steep

Pretty cottages and lanes with colors reminiscent of places with much warmer climates. This part of England has a different microclimate - warmer weather, more tropical vegetation, greener water.

 A woman in a bookstore there makes objects out of old books - each opens like a fan. Very clever.

Fish and chips - lunch sitting on the wall overlooking the harbor and a little beach

This is Dittisham, upriver from Dartmouth. It is opposite the summer home and gardens of Agatha Christy, a place that we visited by ferry.

 The waterfront in Dartmouth near the ferry quay.

We also took a little boat to the mouth of the Dart River where the castle overlooks the harbor entrance. Along the shore there were lots of beautiful boats and homes. 

 

This is Julian who ferried us in his little open boat from the quayside to the castle.

 The church near the castle - see how the water is a different color?

 A little cove we passed while walking back from the castle

 The ferries that transport vehicles from one side of the river to the other - Dartmouth to Kingswear.

 Across the harbor from Dartmouth are many pretty homes in pastel colors in Kingswear.

 Small boats in an inner harbor that dries out completely at low tide

 People playing croquet on Agatha Christie's lawn at Greenway, her summer home on the River Dart.

More views from the water...

 Castle with a sailboat headed out to the English Channel.

 Palm-like and tropical vegetation in Dartmouth

 Further up river near Agatha Christie's home the green fields slope gently down to the water

On her property, dogs are very welcome (as they are in most places in England). And there are chairs to lounge in on a sunny summer day.

 So there you have it - Dartmouth!