Gunnera - Savill Gardens

The gunnera looked extraordinary when I took Mum to Savill Gardens yesterday. They have flowers on! I have never noticed these before and how very weird they look.

Aren't they fabulous?

My garden - spring

I observe two things this spring. One is that the tulips have had a really good year and more are blooming again than usual. Usually when they come up the second time half of them are blind (have no flowers). This year they all have flowers and many have baby flowers!

Note the baby tulips

I think my bluebells are Spanish - they are large and pale

 

The other thing is the ants are worse than usual, they have invaded my kitchen and I don't know where they are coming from. I have put down a fair amount of ant poison. They got into a pan of stewed plums - just hours after I had cooked them - I was so cross - the pan was swarming and I had to throw it all away. They also got into the biscuit tin and the cake tin - they have taken up residence in my husbands birthday cake and hollowed it out, and how they got into a tin I don't know. But clearly that tin didn't do its job and now I'm looking for new cake tins.

Which shall I get?

Cuckoo Flower

This is a flower I picked today - growing by the river -  and came home to look up the name.

The erect, hairless herb has divided leaves, the lowest forming a rosette at the base. It is common in damp pastures and by streams throughout the British isles.

The spring blooming of cuckoo flower has let to folklore associations with milkmaids, their smocks and the Virgin Mary; "milkmaid" and "lady's smock" are alternative names. ... In Austria it was thought that anyone who picked the plant would soon be bitten by an adder; and in Germany some people believed that bringing the plant indoors would cause the house to be struck by lightning.

 

 

So I await my fateful punishment because I did both of these today!

Exhibition - New Zealand Hospital Community Tapestry - Mount Felix

I walked down to the Riverside Barn Arts Centre to work on the tapestry (embroidery) in the gallery, where it is on display. There was lots going on - a few people coming in to see the exhibition and quite a few stitchers working on panels. Linda showed me how to do a nice, flat stem stitch and I got on with our third panel (the Plunket family) and Linda got on with our second (the last one showing the barn and some leaves with the names of the stitchers). Here are some pictures from the exhibition.

This is the exhibition with lots of information and photographs.
 

The designer came down from Scotland to look at our progress.

Linda and Helen working in the gallery

Rydens School is working on this panel showing a "lemon Squeezer"- shaped hat with a Kiwi dreaming of Cooktown.
 

Our finished panel: Gallipoli

Detail from our finished panel (I did this bit)

A really lovely design showing Christmas at the hospital
 

Nurses with the Old Manor House - some were billeted there

One Kiwi soldier married a local girl - Miss Rosewell of Rosewell's boatyard - they met over an ivy-clad wall.

The King and Queen came to visit Mount Felix hospital (an expert sewer did this - it's amazing).

I was working on this one today - it shows the Plunket family and their servants - Michele did this. I don't know what the flowers are.

Linda is working on this one - trying hard to make the clinkers and tiles look interesting

A community tapestry is a great idea - I feel part of a community - a Walton community rather than a Weybridge one, but never mind.

Here is a link to a site with the history of the hospital

Victoria Wood

Victoria Wood was so good that I went to see her twice. She made brilliant jokes - word play, observation, supposition - just brilliantly observed. The first time we went to see her was in an enormous shed somewhere in the West country - she called it a Carpet Warehouse - bang on. I laughed so much that evening. The second time we went to see her was at the Royal Albert Hall. She was very good in places, for example - her aerobic teachers were always brilliantly observed - but some of her monologues about being a woman were just bleak and bitter - I felt that she had reached a sour period in her life.

I loved "Dinnerladies" - the cast seemed to jell very well - it was warm and cosy and Victoria Wood, as Bren, had never looked so pretty and happy. She seemed to have no idea that her shape was not a problem - if you compare her to Sarah Millican - who seems to be comfortable with her shape and find it normal, which it is - Victoria Wood wore enormous coats as though her shape was too terrible to be known. What a paradox: she lampooned the diet cycle but internalised its values anyway.

Some years ago she was on Desert Island Discs and revealed more about herself. She and her siblings were brought up in a house far from anywhere by a mother who was too depressed to be functional. Victoria described the mother coming home with lots of plaster board and dividing the house so all the family could have separate rooms. There were no family meals. Nobody had their friends around. The place was a mess. Victoria realised, looking back, that the reason she had been such an oddball at school was because she had been neglected. She had not had the care that other children had. She was always outside, observing, and reading. She loved reading.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b008kkcg

Even when she went to university (she did Drama at Birmingham, before my time), she felt too intimidated by the other students to be part of the mainstream group and do well, and left with a low class of degree (a third?)

I feel sad for that little girl, but enormous admiration for her. Melvyn Bragg said: "She projected herself out of loneliness" - mainly on stage. She taught herself to write in such a way that people laughed. She used her amazing talent for mimicry. She made fun of the sort of people who find life fairly easy. She used her talent for seeing the ridiculous in the way things are marketed - the sacred cows that are put up for women to worship - our domestic shibboleths. She laughed at the strange names of cosmetics, side-by-side with cleaning products, the things people won't say in so many words, women and their fakery and their weird prejudices that they make so much of: the way they construct personality. She was analytically brilliant. I wish I could write a proper appreciation of her - I think it would make a very good, serious study.

Tree trunks

I have been taking a lot of pictures of tree trunks.

 

 

They seem to be saying something to me about aging and about being individual. When they were young, all these trees were like their own type, but in age, all bent and scarred, they are themselves; they have achieved grandeur from survival, and I feel something like solidarity with them, and that their survival is an achievement to be respected. I love their shapes, but also their colours and textures, and it's a bad day when I don't notice something wonderful and new in the way of a tree trunk.

 

I do edit the photos, especially, of course, the ones that are not so good.

 

 



Oak



Yew

Beech

Spring pictures from Virginia Water: Valley Gardens

Magnolia

today

today

today

today

A God In Ruins - by Kate Atkinson

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

Ralph Waldo Emerson - Nature

 

Summary:

The life of Teddy Todd - would-be poet, heroic World War II bomber pilot, husband, father, and grandfather - as he navigates the perils and progress of the twentieth century.

In "Life after Life"  Teddy was the brother that Ursula had prioritised and so through all her attempts at life, all the outcomes were wrong if Teddy died, so she would have to live again and again to make other decisions that ensured Teddy's survival. In this book we have the "What if?" of Teddy's survival, or I suppose, one of the many.
see my entry for Life after Life http://honhumcourcom.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/kate-atkinson-life-after-life.html

A God in Ruins is a fascinating book in that it contains more than one character who is simply unbearable. Not untrue, but insensitive and selfish and these people cause children to suffer, and that is what is hard to read about. From time to time I put the book away, and usually with a Kate Atkinson that can't be done.

Another difficult thing in this book is the non-chronological episodic narrative. One gets used to a time period (pre-war, wartime, post war, 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s) and the way the characters behave at that time, and suddenly they are juxtaposed with another time period, and the different characters and behaviours. Not that these seem in any way unlikely, it is all too believable, but it is frustrating to the reader. Did it have to be written this way? I wonder.

It was discussed at book group and we all rated it highly. I know Kate Atkinson, with this novel, was genuinely paying tribute to the heroism of the RAF (and the USAF) in the war, and to all the World War II generation, and I think the old people at book group were impressed with that aspect of the book, but found the author's decision to frame the novel as a fiction within a fiction - a double-fiction - unappealing, so they rated it less highly than the critics have. So it gets 10 for cleverness, and being right-on, but less from the common reader.

But altogether, it's a brilliant book that peeks in the heads of an array of characters and makes you care about them. It looks at generations of the same family and finds traits which re-occur from generation to generation, like themes in a symphony. She also touches on the way we care for old people in nursing homes and so forth. We keep them alive, and they are bewildered, and suffer. Poor, poor old things.

I think I found a couple of grammar errors in it which annoyed me. I don't mean errors of style, I mean errors of tense, for example, neglecting to use the past perfect.

We have a new Old Boy at the book group, who also likes the sound of his own voice, but he's not as arrogant as the other one, he just likes to hold the floor. (He said he really likes P.G. Wodehouse, and who doesn't? He compared Kate Atkinson with P.G. Wodehouse, which is like comparing a soufflé with a wedding cake.) Tom was back, - he's the intelligent one - grey hair with a fringe - he pointed out that you can't compare the two - and a new smart woman of my own age, I think,  who always says interesting things. What I'm waiting for is when the Irritating and Arrogant Old Boy (still on the cruise) meets the new Old Boy. Surely they will be rivals? I can imagine many interestingly abrasive confrontations. Hehe. The next book is Dr Thorne, by Trollope.



Start the Week with Yanis Varoufakis, etc, discussing Greek matters and Europe.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b075pb4r

Yanis Varoufakis:  What is the Minotaur? The US jettisoned Europe from the dollar zone in 1971 when the Bretton Woods system collapsed.  This was a system that was created in 1944 and heralded the golden age of Capitalism: a period of sustainability, reduced inequality, of low inflation and low unemployment.  In Y’s view the reason why that period ended in 1971 (the sudden change was referred to as "the Nixon shock") was because the Americans had had a fixed exchange rate regime created with a lot of “surplus recycling”: (where surplus was produced they were recycled to a lot of other areas stabilising the system: one part of the world exports more than another part of the world and if the profit created is not passed back to the part of the world that is the debtor then you get huge imbalances which become destructive. such was the situation in the 1930's).

The reason why it broke apart was because the Americans lost their surplus. The system could no longer be sustained. Since it could no longer be sustained the US started recycling everybody else’s surpluses. How did they do this? By sucking into their territory (this is the vacuum cleaner) the net exports of Germany, Japan and later of China AND the profits that those countries were making, through Wall St. So instead of using the metaphor of the vacuum cleaner YV thought of the Minotaur. The dark secret in the guts of the palace was that there was this beast that needed to be nurtured by tributes from the weaker parts of that world and in exchange King Minos was providing the stability and the recycling that was necessary. The dark secret of the 1980s and 90’s was that the US deficits were doing all the recycling. [What about our deficits?]

Y V was once on a plane with a German banker who told him: Once I was powerful and now I’m not. Usually you associate bankers with money and power. Before the Euro, he could set the rules and pass judgment on proposed loans and debts. And then the Euro expanded the borders of the Deutschmark to the rest of the Eurozone and effectively the Deutschmark was available to the Greeks and the Portuguese. Suddenly the bankers in Frankfurt realised that the capacity of a Greek to pay a debt has now been enhanced – he now has Deutschmarks – the Greeks and Italians weren’t in debt before – they owned houses so they had collateral. These were ideal customers and he had quotas imposed by the head office – he had to lend millions every month. The banker was no longer capable of practising the protestant ethic when it came to selecting the debtor.

The Greeks accumulated a lot of debt, but when they were given huge bailouts (in return for harsh austerity measures) where did the money go? It didn’t really go to Greece. In 2009 when the banking system of the world imploded the banks went to the government and begged for bailouts. Frau Merkel gave 500 billion. A year later she was told Greece was going under: they had borrowed too much (and so had Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Italy, etc.) She didn’t want to repeat the gift. Instead of a bailout what happened was a cynical transfer of the losses of the banks (Deutschebank, Societe General) to the Greek taxpayers – even though they knew those shoulders were too weak to bear them. 90% of the bailouts went to the banks that had lent too much to Greece, Spain, Ireland, Portugal etc. The costs were spread throughout the Eurozone – even the poor Slovaks ended up subsidising the German banks.

Yanis Varoufakis says that the Greek government was insolvent, and the imposition of the bailout  - a huge new loan and austerity measures – cutting Greek welfare payments and pensions –amounts to fiscal waterboarding – this is going on today.

Why didn't the Greeks leave the EU?  – If the Greeks had their own currency pegged to the Euro – as the Scots do – they would have left the EU. It takes 12 months to create a new currency. Changing the currency is a cause of economic crisis.

He doesn’t blame the German institutions but all the European ruling elites: French, Italians etc. Erik Berglof (Swedish) believes that the recent institution of a European banking union will start to control the flows of money in the EU.

The bankers move to defend their and their friends’ interests – and bankers belong to the same power elites.

Gerard Lyons – adviser to Boris Johnson – thinks technology can spread out power but the EU s reacting to its problems by centralising power (and so is the UK government). This he says, makes it unfit for purpose.

Yanis Varoufakis says the EU is disintegrating under the weight of its hubris and its terrible political structure, but fears Europe will fall into a repeat of the 1930’s. Huge rifts – fault lines across the Rhine and the Alps. E.g. Austrian troops closing the Brenner pass. There will be a vortex in the heart of Europe and a terrible decline.

G.L. says the EU has a lack of demand, a lack of lending, so that the UK could do well in the global economy outside Europe. But if the EU is to survive it must address the fundamental centralising issues at its core.

Paul Cartledge: Ancient Greeks – there was a constant struggle between the demos and the oligarchs. Only 15% of the Greeks were educated and objected strongly to being ruled by those who were not smart and not educated. He also fears that the EU will fall apart and that we are going to unleash the most unpleasant forms of mass populism and they won’t be controlled.

YV – in ancient Athens a large minority of the citizens who controlled the democratic process were the working poor. But the charter that our government is modelled on now is Magna Carta which kept the hoi polloi out. The equivalent of the barons now are the large corporations and banks. The German economic minister told Yanis Varoufakis: “Elections cannot be allowed to change the economic policy in Greece.”  So YV concludes that elections now are just a form that contain no content.

Paul Cartledge: money corrupts – creeping oligarchy – whichever side spends the most money tends to win. GL says there is a democratic deficit because in Europe we cannot move the levers of economic power – we cannot change the leaders easily.

YV – Brexit is not going to return you to sovereignty as long as you want to stay in the single market.

Gerald Brenan - South from Grenada

This is an extraordinary book which tells about the culture of southern Spain in the early 19th century, just after World War 1. The writer goes to live in Spain because it is cheap and he wants to be a writer. I think, after the horror of the war (he went through the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele) , he feels that the world owes him a living, and is quite frank about writing hopefully to various uncles and asking them for money. Sometimes he gets money, not always.

Carrington painted him

Carrington painted him more than once. This should be in the NPG.

He plays host to Lytton Strachey and Carrington, and he narrates their visit amusingly - he was in love with Carrington for a very long time. Later Virginia and Leonard Woolf also pay a visit and are very struck with this part of Spain - which has a character like something from the Middle Ages. The Spanish are great at keeping their festivals and culture alive today but they are nothing like they were, simply because the belief in the efficacy of the rites has been lost. Here is an account of a village Easter.

The Easter ceremonies had a peculiar vividness. From the morning of Palm Sunday a silence fell on the village and lasted till the end of the week. During this time no one shouted or sang, and the sound of the pestle and mortar, that gay prelude to every Andalusian meal, ceased to be heard. Then on the night of Holy Thursday the figure of the Crucified Christ was borne in slow procession with torches and candles as far as the stone Calvary that stands among the olive trees a little below the village. At every halt a low, sad copla was sung. On the following evening there was a yet more lugubrious procession, when his dead body was carried in silence in a glass coffin to the same place and then brought back to the church to be interred....

The fast was now ended, but the final scene of the drama had yet to be played. At daybreak on Easter Sunday the young men got the church key from the sacristan, took out the figure of the Risen Christ, and carried it to the square at the lower end of the village, He was represented as a young man in a green dress and, as if to associate him with Adonis and Osiris and all the man-gods who had died in order that the corn might spring again and the sap rise yet once more in the stems, he was crowned with leaves; a bunch of flowers was placed in his right hand and a sheaf of barley in his left. He was set up on a platform in the humble square with its low unplastered houses, and the villagers - especially the poorer families - collected round with cries of Viva, viva el Senor

.

I have chosen a picture of Easter in a Colombian village because
the pictures I can find of Easter in Spain are so stagey, grand and impressive
and show people dressed up like the Ku Klux Klan, which Brenan
never mentioned.

.... at nine o'clock when the Virgin was carried out in her green, star-spangled dress they fell into line behind her and formed a procession. This was the dramatic moment of the Easter ceremonies, which even the simplest of the shepherd boys understood, for the Virgin had found the grave open and missed her son, and was sallying out to seek for him. ... As soon as the figure of the Virgin arrived in front of that of the Christ, she curtsied to him three times: the priest stepped forward to sprinkle him with holy water and incense him, and she was brought up tottering to the edge of the platform on which he stood. Then, when she was only a couple of feet away, his arms, which moved on strings, were raised in a jerky movement to touch her shoulders. This was the signal for the silence to break.

This is from the introduction (by Chris Stewart) to the Penguin Modern Classic edition:

"And it is precisely in this amateur and eclectic approach, embellished with meticulously crafted discourses on subjects as diverse as toxicology and Sufism, Mediterranean agriculture and prehistoric archaeology, that the pleasure of South from Granada lies."

"There are those who would criticise the book for a certain lack of organisation, and it is true that there is an element of rambling to it, but for me rambling is in the very nature of a discursive book; it is redeemed though, and its sometimes tangled threads given cohesion, by the illuminating and all-pervading presence of it author. This is achieved by the wit and warmth as well as the penetrating intelligence he brings to bear on any subject he approaches, and its couching in what seems like effortlessly graceful prose, although in fact he spared no pains in honing and polishing his writing - two and a half years in the case of this book."

"He read French, German and Spanish, as well as Latin and Greek, and during the writing of The Literature of the Spanish People read no fewer than two hundred and fifty books in two and a half years... He was as happy, or perhaps happier, striding high in the mountains with shepherds as he was in earnest discussion with the luminaries of Bloomsbury. He was also a brilliant and generous conversationalist."

(I don't think I have ever met a brilliant and generous conversationalist.)

The extract below is translated by Google and copied from a webpage on Gerald Brenan Spanish course here- this is the kind of English I correct. Sometimes the misuse of words is quite funny. My Spanish students actually write better English than this so it is easy to tell when they try to cheat by using Google translate.

The April 23 was chosen by UNESCO as World Book Day, since it coincides with the death of Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare. On this day we remember Gerald Brenan, specialist writer on issues of Spain.

Gerald Brenan (1894) was the eldest son of a British soldier who was destined to continue the family tradition by desire of his father, when he began to have use of reason, he discovered he did not like the games in which he had to show his strength but he preferred the quiet of reading a book. Brenan studied up to 18 years in England to enter the military academy. At this age, he realized that he was being prepared for a profession that was not attractive way of life as to what he rebelled and fled with a friend. The First World War forced him to fight and was decorated. He got a pension with the help of his family, allowed him to find a place in Spain (Yegen) where he could devote himself to what he liked: study of literature, botany, philosophy, arts in general, etc .. since did not go to college like most of his friends (Circle Bloomsbory). his passion was poetry, but he knew he could not make a living as a poet. His father demanded to live a useful profession. For this reason, he decided to write novels and married an American novelist Gamel Woolsey; she corrected and typed his works. They had no children, Brenan adopted a daughter who was the result of a love affair with a young Spanish. Brenan realized that the dwelling place was idyllic but was held incommunicado to continue his career. They moved to a place of great beauty, strategically located. Churriana (Málaga), next to the airport and relatively close to Gibraltar This is where your dream comes true. Brenan is on site and at the right time when exploding Spanish civil war. England was very interested in this confrontation, he would report through their stories about what happened and later wrote a book about the causes of the Spanish war. Brenan that had gone unnoticed, began to be heard and recognized internationally, especially in Spain where his book "The Spanish Labyrinth" was banned, becoming a symbol of freedom for dissidents dictator Franco.Tras this book, wrote others about Spain:  "the History of Spanish Literature" and "the Face of Spain", the result of a trip in 1950. the war had given him the epithet of specialist Spain writer but he was forced to leave his house with a lovely garden in Churriana, where he left the service staff (cook, gardener). on his return to Malaga (1953), he returned to his beloved Brenan lifestyle in which he wrote for the morning and walking in the evenings; he enjoyed the climate, diet and people. He wore an intense social life, made ​​contact with writers like Hemingway or Caro Baroja, etc. Here wrote one of his most famous stories "South of Granada" A Life of one's Own (autobiography) and The Lighthouse Always Says Yes they came to light in 1962 and in 1966. in 1968, killed his wife and collaborator, though he was shocked, he joined his fate to a young woman (Linda Nicholson-Price) that helped to continue its vital objective: writing. They felt they had to start in a new place within the province so they decided to sell the house and fire service. At this stage he published Personal Memory, John of the Cross, The Best Moments: Poems; Thoughts in a Dry Season. Aphorisms In 1987, died at 92 years old. His body was donated to the Faculty of Medicine, some nerve cells were taken for the study of longevity. In 2001 he was cremated and buried in the English Cemetery in Malaga with his wife.

Woodland covers just 12% of the UK

Lucy Siegle (Ethical Living) in the Guardian magazine :

It is hard to overestimate the value of trees. They are carbon sinks that keep us alive. They suck up pollution and soak up water.....

Yet, although we may profess to love trees, the UK is one of the least-wooded countries in Europe. Woodland covers just 12% of the land. What's good about trees is that you can always plant more, but we are not too good at that, either. The planting of broadleaved species (as opposed to mineral leaching fast-growing conifers) has halved over the last six years.

In the last decade 100 ancient UK woodlands have been sacrificed to development and agriculture. The Woodland Trust says we need to double our planting rate....

...While some species might be [? I think there's no doubt here] threatened by disease, the biggest threat to most trees is us. Large urban trees are particularly under siege. Too many have been felled by councils and developers, and they can take years to replace (the charity treesforcities.org helps with this).

I think about this every time I come home, as we live on a wide avenue of turkey oaks and chestnuts and the usual Surrey oaks, all over 100 years old and whenever one sickens it is cut down and not replaced. In fact, in these suburbs, trees are often regarded as a nuisance to developers, but "leafy" is used as a positive adjective for house-buyers. But a man a few doors down, angry with finding bird poo on the motor bike parked outside his house, lobbied for cutting down the mature hollyoak  that harboured the offending birds.

Aspirin is good for plants, and so is cinnamon

James Wong writes in the Guardian:

Simply take a teaspoon of cinnamon from your spice rack and pop it into a litre of lukewarm water. Drop in half a 300 mg soluble aspirin tablet, give the mixture a good stir, let it cool to room temperature, and you are done. When it comes to planting time, soak your seeds and cuttings for an hour or two beforehand. This will potentially give you higher germination rates, lower risks of infections and improve the plants' overall vigour. In fact, just watering newly sown seeds or cuttings with this bit of kitchen chemistry may be enough to trigger these benefits. It's like having green fingers in a bottle.

(explains science - aspirin can turn on the genes that express the plant's defence system, helping them stave off infections (ie rotting), while also boosting the growth of roots... Cinnamon is the bark of a tropical tree that has evolved a range of potent natural antifungal and antibacterial chemicals to stave off the rampant growth of pathogens in the tropical rainforest. ...it can work wonders for damping off ... and prevent new cuttings from rotting in the cool conditions and low light levels at this time of year (February).)

The Cotswold Way

For some reason I thought that this was an old historical trail, and I was somewhat disappointed to discover that it was only recently, in 2007, designated the name National Trail.  It follows the limestone escarpment on the western edge of the Cotswolds, and goes for 102 miles (164 km) from Chipping Campden to Bath. Of course, you can go the other way (north) if you want to.

It is an area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, in fact, the largest in the country. It says in the guide book: "the Cotswold Way is steeped in history, passing Neolithic burial chambers, ancient hill forts, Bronze Age round barrows, Roman villas, historic houses, churches and abbeys." You feel as you trudge along, up and down the sheep fields, quite annoyed that the route goes round in a big loop here and there to take in the odd iron age burial mound, but so be it. We have done just short of 30 miles and that in 2 days, which was pushing it, rather. But I am so glad we pushed ourselves. Even though the last 3 miles of each day were painful for the feet and all the muscles of forward propulsion seemed to have been exhausted. After a bath, or a shower, we went on to have very enjoyable evenings.

I wish I had some good photos to put up but they are nearly all awful, because it seems that I was shaking like a malaria victim whenever I stopped, so they are very blurred.



Chipping Campden, Graham Green lived here.

On the first day our first task was to climb very high, to Broadway Tower, and that was quite hard, and we also stopped for a beer in the village of Broadway which was probably a mistake as that was only a third of the way along.

Not my photo - obviously, but you can see it is a fab tower, built by Lady Coventry to
impress the neighbours. The Pre-Raphaelites used to stay here.

The village of Broadway is insanely pretty.

Very old orchard with an overplanting of daffodils - lovely primroses. This was in Stanton
- a village with neither tea shop nor loo. We were cross!



Gateway to Stanway House designed by Christopher Wren.



First day - many vistas and fields.

On the first night we walked a little way off the trail to stop at this farmhouse Bed and Breakfast. it was a genuine farm with 300 acres and 300 sheep, which were being fed as we arrived - our host told us that the grass had stopped growing. I recommend this place. Out host, David, drove us to the pub for dinner and then picked us up and drove us back. Fantastic: as we could not have walked another step, and the dinner at the pub was very good.


Our B&B - it was worth finding - it was lovely.

 There was a tiny Anglo Saxon church just next to it.

Humble but very beautiful inside.

North Farmcote is very close to the ruins of Hailes Abbey, but more interesting than ruins is the Old Church at Hailes, which has medieval wall paintings of St Christopher, and St Catherine (I thought it was Mary Magdalene). I thought these were the most interesting things we saw.

The Wall paintings were added during this period of Abbey ownership. Opposite the entrance is a painting of St Christopher. On the south wall (shown on our third photograph) is a secular scene of a huntsman, with three dogs racing towards a hare crouching underneath the branches of a spindly tree.

Other paintings on the walls of the nave are less distinct, but those on the chancel walls give a taste of what must have been their original splendour. In the recesses of half-blocked windows on either side of the altar are paintings representing two female saints. On the left, north side is St Catherine of Alexandria (the best preserved, shown on our seventh photograph) and on the opposite wall, St Margaret of Antioch. Elsewhere the walls are painted with a mixture of roses and heraldic arms, interspersed with figures from medieval bestiary

http://churchdb.gukutils.org.uk/GLS608.php#prettyPhoto

On the second day we stopped in Winchcombe for coffee and that was a very lively and pretty small town with a lovely (expensive) deli.

lovely Winchcombe - we didn't really explore it - hadn't time.



Second day - incredible weather. Outside the entrance to Belas Knap Iron Age long barrow (restored). This means Beacon mound. This is one of the entrances and they lead to four small burial chambers, which were found
to contain at least 30 skeletons.


The remains showed that fourteen people inside, including a child, had died of fatal head injuries.

 

 


Beech woods on hillside.

We walked past farm buildings and being townies, took photos of the young animals.



Cleeve Hill: This is the highest point on the National Trail and you can have a cup of tea
on the veranda of the golf club and enjoy the most wonderful view and hear the larks singing.



I could have taken thousands of bad pictures of lambs.
Rest assured, meat lovers, there are plenty
 of lambs this spring, although ewes are hopeless mothers.

Topiary garden not on the Cotswolds Way, but not far away.