Big Trip Part 4

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The next morning we woke up early to get the days drive out of the way. We drove into Ambelside to get some Beatrix Potter related presents for people, it is a sweet little town much ruined by the tourist hoards that we saw queuing up for miles to get on on our way out. We felt very relieved for having missed them. That day we drove down to Stratford upon Avon in the Cotswolds, arriving in Warwick mid afternoon. The town was busy, things seem to heat up along with the weather at around 2-3pm in England and so tourists and locals were crawling all over the streets by the time we arrived. We parked a short way out of town in a field and walked over a bridge offering a splendid view of Warwick Castle. We decided to look into the castle first, before going into town but were rudely prevented from doing so by a sixteen pound entry fee. This equates to about forty Australian dollars for a single entry, and for reasons previously given I refused to pay that money to view a castle with medieval attractions.

We walked away rather upset and so on finding an antique shop I consoled myself by buying an old book on the heroic tales of Imperialism. We attempted to find some lunch but everything was shutting up for the day but after walking further down the road and on the outskirts of the old town, we found a few pubs where we sat out in the sunshine for a while having a drink. On the way back to the car we walked through a lovely park where the flowers were just starting to bloom and had a kip in the afternoon sunshine, ahhhh.
Our destination for the night was Whitfield farm, a B&B in between Stratford-upon Avon and Warwick which turned out to be a lovely farm with chooks, horses and the wonderful farm smells that follow along. After doing some washing in the bathroom sink and hanging it all over the numerous radiators throughout the room, we drove into Stratford-upon-Avon to see what all the fuss was about.

Most people search for the birthplace of William Shakespeare when going to Stratford, or perhaps the theatre where Shakespearean plays are often on show. We searched for a Thai restaurant. After an extended period of eating dense and hearty English fare, I longed for the lightness of soy, ginger and lemongrass and the freshness of crisp green vegetables so our tour of Stratford was a wandering one, crossing back on ourselves regularly but constantly in search of our dinner. The twilight made the town pretty, the spring flowers in the park set a wonderful scene for the crowds of people enjoying the unseasonable weather well into the dark. We ended up settling on a totally unsatisfactory Chinese restaurant right near where we had parked the car after walking past countless ghost tours, Shakespeare’s house and one memorable building offering the ultimate “Shakesperiance”. Standing on the shoulders of giants indeed. We drove back to Whitfield farm in the dark and on the outskirts of town passed a solitary restaurant with small Thai wooden figures flanking the doorway beckoning patrons in to enjoy the silk tablecloths and lovingly prepared food.

The next morning we got up to a very traditional English breakfast, I think I can hear my arteries give out a little gasp when I think of the fried bread and butter drenched mushrooms. We planned to spend the day looking around the National Trust properties which were densely located throughout the Cotswolds, an area seen as a sort of cultural example of Britain. The day was so beautiful, the sun was warm, the sky was a clear blue, the fields were a vivid yellow and the air was clear. Thus it was the perfect day to visit Hidcote Gardens, a series of planned gardens rooms set on a vast estate. On our way there we drove through the much visited Stow-on-the-Wold, a quaint Costwolds village now cleansed by tourism of any charm it had originally held. The honey coloured stone common of the area was very pretty but the town was fair too sterile and ordered to allow the imagination anything to work on. We kept driving to the gardens and by the time we got there, the crowds were starting to arrive but we had beaten the main rush so we enjoyed the gardens in relative peace for a short while.

The gardens were stunning, holding the most carefully thought out series of open air rooms with various themes and designs and an amazing array of unique and perfect plants. From the topiary bushes sculptured into the shape of birds, the symmetry of the bordering hedges, the clean lines of the open rectangular field and the gentle orderly plan of the garden opening up to green grazing fields with sheep dotted over the hills. This garden offered so many contrasts and yet was combined so well to create the feeling of always being within smaller garden walls only to be gently reminded every so often of the scale of the place with huge ornamental trees and long symmetrical avenues viewed through garden housed. We spent a while absorbing the sun in this place, sitting on a log in one corner of the garden with a view of the tiny meandering stream with its quirky aquatic flowers in front of us and the expanse of the farmlands paddocks behind, peeking through the dense green boughs of a voluminous fir tree. While I could have kept looking through similar gardens all day long, Stu had been quietly looking at maps in the NT book and decided that heading down to Oxford wouldn’t be that far fetched an idea after all. Thus I was reluctantly dragged away from that blissful place and I suspect that Stu didn’t feel quite as enamoured with it as I did.

The drive down to Oxford offered us our first introduction to the most curious of English road signs we had seen so far, the “Adverse Camber” sign. Crazy eccentric English. We arrived in Oxford rather late due to my stalling at leaving Hidcote so by the time we got there the crowds from London had well and truly arrived and finding a car park proved a bit difficult, but we ended up finding one right on the outskirts of the city and walking our way back in, it didn’t matter, the day was glorious. Oxford was immediately different to anywhere else we had been, the stones of the building were warmed from the afternoon sun and it had the feeling that everyone had just gone on a siesta. It was far removed from the cold frigidity of Cambridge (I don’t believe that anyone looked down their nose at me the whole time) which could have had more to do with Uni being out of term then anything else, I think it is undeniable that to go to Oxford one must either be incredibly intelligent or hold a vast sum of money, or both. But this town was far more exciting to Stu then any other as so many scientific and mathematical discoveries had taken place within the university colleges and houses. After eating a pasty for lunch we decided to check out New College.

Whilst New College is the most recent built of the Oxford colleges, the name is deceiving as to its actual age. The courtyard of the college was warmed by the beautiful sun, surrounded by tulips and the ground covered in the fallen blooms of the Magnolia tree. The grounds were beautiful, a mound in the centre where the dead were supposedly buried during the plague and a section of the old city walls originally dating back to King Alfred the Great in his infamous defences against the Vikings. The garden was a beautiful place to sit in peace and absorb, the fact that this college was far less popular then the other more famous ones in Oxford and that it was Easter Sunday meant that we nearly had the place to ourselves. The grass had been freshly mowed into neat lines and the spring flowers were all more then happy to be blowing about in the warm breeze. We wandered in this garden for a long while until the sun was leaving and we ventured once more out into the city. Walking to a pub we passed a side alley called Logic Lane and not long after saw a sign on a house façade that proclaimed:

“In a house on this site
between 1655 and 1668 lived
ROBERT BOYLE
Here he discovered BOYLE’S LAW
and made experiments with an
AIR PUMP designed by his assistant
ROBERT HOOKE,
Inventor, Scientist and Architect
who made a MICROSCOPE
and thereby first identified
the LIVING CELL.”


Sitting in the pub having a drink before setting back onto the road we saw the walls covered in signatures of famous people and photos of all the scholars who had sat in this dimly lit pub to brood over their dark thoughts and pen their famous treatises and theorems. We left Oxford pleasantly surprised at our unexpected day in the sunshine and amongst beautiful gardens and ancient buildings. That night we returned to Stratford, hopeful at finding something light for dinner and settled on an Italian restaurant. After dinner we sat lazily in the park by the river and spent the dusk laughing at fighting swans and deranged children and anything else that set us off until we got tired and went back to Whitfield farm for sleep.

The next morning was another full English breakfast before setting out to our next destination, Bath. On our way down through the countryside to the great Georgian city of Bath we stopped into Chedworth Villa, an uncovered Roman household run by the National Trust. The drive to get there off the main road was beautiful, the hedges high, the road winding and the tiny hamlets sleepy and cold in the morning. The Villa was small and not the most exciting place but it was wonderful to see the baths with their beautiful tiles and was easy to imagine a family living here during the Roman occupation. One of the most impressive features in the mosaics was the figure of Winter, a wonderful example of local religion combining with the Roman state gods, a clever method used throughout the Roman world to make their presence more palatable and understandable to the locals.

We had stayed at Chedworth Villa a bit long and Stu was anxious to get to Bath to secure a park before the ravaging hoards overran the city. That’s how we saw it anyway. Entering Bath was a long process of dodging traffic and once again having Stu trump my navigational skills. We parked a long way away from our hostel so decided to head out without our packs and to have lunch on the way at Wagamama where Stu was understandably upset by the price of everything, especially the bottled water. I think he was really just upset by the fact that I had gotten the good choice for lunch while his was average, he stared at my plate and salivated. Our hostel for the night was the YMCA (where you could indeed get yourself clean and get a good meal) which was situated in a little courtyard shaded by a pink apple blossom tree.

We ventured out into the city and firstly checked out the baths that Bath is famous for. There was a lot of activity within the inner city and once we got to the front of line and payed the charming man behind the counter we were presented with the dilemma of whether to audio guide, or not. The man urged us to take an audio wand which we had resisted throughout the public sites we had visited and even mocked on various occasions. We felt a bit silly with these hanging around our chest but they offered a fair bit of amusement along the way. The baths are a wonderful example of Roman architecture but the place left me feeling wanting for something, perhaps it was the scores of people that prevented any close inspection of mosaics, all of which were behind perspex or perhaps it was the was that I felt we had been pumped into a production line and spat out the other end. Overall it just felt like the cheap, easily consumable history that I had come to expect from Britains main attractions, left devoid of any meaning or mystery from their exposure. I’m not sure what the solution is, perhaps I just wasn’t in the spirit of the place which was undoubtedly a beautiful example of Roman culture, power and art. From the baths we ventured into the Abbey, a magnificent example of Christian wealth, politics and mystery with its high vaulted ceilings and intricate stonework constructed in the name of some power, I am undecided in my own mind whether that power is god or the church.

We were greeted by a jolly church warden who spent a considerable amount of time explaining the intricacies of the abbey and of Bath itself to us despite the growing queue behind us and was the one who explained the origin behind the Sally Lunn buns that are a popular attraction in Bath. These buns are said to have come from a French women escaping the tyranny of the guillotine in France during the Revolution who settled in Bath and established a bakery where these unique plain brioche style buns were produced and gained fame. Yet the warden told us it was far more likely that the buns had an ancient pagan link with the name Sally Lunn a derivative of Solar and Lunar, representative of a rite offered to the symbols of the sun and moon still seen on the flags and crests of Bath today. It made sense to me but I haven’t verified it factually yet. We had entered the church on the hour which meant that, as customary in all open churches in England, a short prayer would be offered by a minister and all inside the church would have to stand still and be silent. We took advantage of this opportune moment to sit in the pews and bask in the serenity and majesty of the place with the highly ornate ceilings and the vast amounts of stained glass.

After wandering around and deciding that it was after all just another church we headed down into the vaults and check out the display about the construction of the abbey and the graves underneath the church. We wandered outside in search of a Sally Lunn bun, passing a glockenspiel player flanked by admirers and money from donations who on closer inspection was just lightly touching keys with the sound coming from a tape player hidden near his feet. Sneaky man.

The streets were very pretty and we ended up finding ourselves right near the bridge covered in shops (whose name I forget). Underneath this bridge is a beautiful river streaming over a series of manmade steps into the riverbed creating a beautiful and typically Georgian symmetry even to the waterway. It was verging towards the afternoon and we hadn’t eaten so we searched for a café that would still serve us. We found the official Sally Lunn café but were turned off by the high price for a bread roll and so proceeded to another café where we had a lovely sit down to scones and tea. It was here that I discovered Stu's astute abilities in distinguishing between tea varieties as he claimed “I think that my Assam in far more like a Darjeeling than yours”. Indeed.

After resting our feet from walking around the streets all day we finally dragged ourselves to the famous collection of houses the Circus and the Crescent. If you think of Bath, then most likely you will be able to picture these collection of buildings, wonderful testaments to the wealth and architecture of the Georgian era, one shaped in a circle and one in a crescent shape. They are exclusively priced so that only the very wealthy can afford them but offer a sort of comforting or regal monotonous style to the cities overall look. Whilst here, we fought off the chavs and found our way back to the car park where our car was and proceeding to get our bags to trudge back to the hostel. Once back, it was near dinner time so we decided to venture not too far and had dinner at the St Christopher’s backpackers inn as a lot of the other places were either exorbitantly priced or closed due to it being Easter Monday. We passed a happy night sitting watching the cricket, eating cheap food, drinking cheap drinks and having cheap conversation until it was time for bed. That night was a bad sleep, some sort of Christian punishment in the form of very pronounced bed springs in our pokey single beds and the constant bloodcurdling screech of the huge Pacific Gulls…miles away from the ocean.

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