May 11, 2008

May 12, 2008 9:50 a.m. en route to Avebury

It is exceedingly difficult to sleep in a rental van when you have nowhere to rest your head.
Brooke and I left Robert and Ann this morning, and I, at least, will miss the pleasant chats we’ve been having! But tonight we will get to cross into Wales to spend the night with seminary friends of Fr. B.
Last night I was too tired to write an entry, so I will record now the events of yesterday. After the early Morning Prayer and Holy Communion at St. Paul’s-by-the-Racecourse, we walked down a few streets to the leper church. This is a tiny chapel with a simple line, and has long been in disuse. The windows are boarded up and it is situated on the edge of a vacant, ill-kempt lot that has a for-sale sign in it. I suppose the property to be rather useless, because no one wants to destroy this church, yet the land can be used for little unless it is cleared. The history of the church is that it is the place the lepers from the nearby Lord Leicester Hospital were allowed to worship, since they were banned from close association with other people.
After a few moments looking at the church against the rising sun and listening to some history from Fr. Boonzaaijer, we continued our walk through the beautiful town of Warwick (which, by the bye, is pronounced “Warrick”), to Warwick Castle. On the way we passed St. Mary’s cathedral where Holy Communion service was still in progress, and could hear the organ and choir from outside (so glorious were the strains that I would have entered to listen had not propriety prevented!). Warwick Castle proved one of the most “touristy” spots we visited, but nonetheless was a fun bit of ground to cover. We watched a man shoot a longbow. I wished he had shot arrows over the wall, just to add a touch more drama, but he said there were people on the other side.
Then we walked around the premises some more, up to one of the towers and along a wall, where we got great views of the town and countryside, through the castle house, down into the dungeon, up to another tower or two and through some gardens. The castle used to be owned by Madam Toussad’s Waxworks, so lots of wax figures demonstrated throughout the house what people might have done in the various rooms. The dungeon sent a chill down my spine, the realities of the tortures that happened there being so easy to imagine. An iron cage hung from the ceiling, in which live men would be suspended indefinitely, as well as a pillory high on the wall. No doubt, after many years of habitation by prisoners and rats, this damp stone chamber would have been a terrible place to be incarcerated.
We enjoyed the gardens, though the roses were not fully blooming yet. They kept a peacock garden, so peacocks roamed the grounds in stately, gorgeous featheriness.
Next we drove to Cirencester (pronounced variously by natives; I prefer “Sē-rən-chester”), stopping on the way outside Stratford-upon-Avon to see Anne Hathaway’s (who was Shakespeare’s mistress) cottage and the beautiful surrounding gardens. After a restful stroll through the park-like orchard, we popped over to an ice cream joint where each of us got a uniquely shaped cone with a unique flavor of ice cream. Each cone had a pointy cone shape, but the top accommodated two scoops of ice cream side-by-side (kind of like a double-barreled gun).
As we continued toward Cirencester after passing Stratford, we passed more delightful countryside—it is so green there, with the green of the fields broken by the white dots of sheep, and alternating with squares of solid gold, the rapeseed fields in bloom. Some distance up in the hills we stopped for about 40 minutes at Chedworth Roman Villa, an ancient Roman villa that has been unearthed outside Cirencester. In the town itself we were able to stop for a half hour or so also at a Roman amphitheater, which is still covered by grass and buttercups. One can still see the stairway and some of the other features of an amphitheater, however, and perhaps one day they will unearth the stone structure.
Because it was Sunday, we had some trouble finding an inexpensive place to eat and ended up getting pizza at a nice Italian restaurant (Subway and Tesco were both closed). It made for an enjoyable meal, although we probably overspent the budget a little. After dinner we wound back into the hills to a public footpath in a sheep pasture for evensong. Some of us ventured over the stile, and I, who was barefoot, stepped in stinging nettle. We sang most of the way back to Warwick.
This is all a record of what happened May 11, though I did not begin the entry until May 12.