We have had a week motoring around Herefordshire with Grandma exploring England's' richly eccentric countryside. The tempo of life is not too exacting as the photo of the fisherman shows. He took himself and all his goodies into the river and sat in the water to ...keep his feet cool? to pacify the fish?
Churches are one of the main features to visit and this one was very pleasing. Very unusually it has a thatched roof. It turned out to be built about 1902 to the spec of a Prof of design (not architecture) and he was obviously a follower of the Arts and Crafts movement. It included some very very elegant arches, pyramid shaped lights and and an altar piece designed by Burne Jones and made by William Morris' firm.
There were plenty of black and white houses around - half timbered if you prefer - and one of the nicest was the Old House in Hereford. It is the sole remaining part of a medieval terrace known as Butchers' Row and apparently was owned by an upcoming butcher. This was in the days when a dog might be taken to bed for warmth on cold nights and when folks like his family were unwittingly poisoning themselves with the lead of their pewter eating vessels. Modern preferences are, of course, for nicotine, alcohol and non-medicinal drugs - but these are conscious choices.
The most beautiful ruin we saw was of Tintern Abbey, a name I know well but without previously knowing where it is.
It was first built by Cistercian monks in about 1200 in a then isolated valley and was run on a self supporting basis. The Cistercians did this to cut themselves off from the dissolute monks that preceded them. Four hundred years later Henry VIII had the place smashed up as part of the Dissolution, the same as he did to Chertsey Abbey and, also Cistercian, Waverley Abbey (remember it Gordon and Diana?). Tintern is very tall and weathered light grey in parts giving it an air of faded nobility and elegance.
On the way back home we called in on the Avebury Ring which is apparently 5,000 years sold. The scale of the site and the relative precision of the layout indicates that its pre-historic makers knew a lot about geometry and were organised enough to work as a team to dig a moat, lay out huge boulders etc at much the same time (if my memory serves) as the ancient Egyptians started their monumental buildings. I guess that there were Kings, slaves and taxes to help things along.And now for the kinky bit.
Whilst we were there we saw this group of people in a circle, performing a ritual. They are looking at a prostrate red-haired woman dressed in purple. She had previously been holding a long knife and muttering over and over again "Shall I do it? Shall I..." as she crept up to a crude straw cross shape that was lying on the ground. She then shrieked and repeatedly stabbed the shape. The woman in blue who is reaching down to her, then circled around her brandishing a sickle before she too stabbed it in to the straw shape. The spectators were silent during this mumbo jumbo and it was not clear what the straw represented. These are the sort of people who also perform rituals at Stonehenge, which was built about the same time as Avebury. They could have been druids, wicca, heathens or pagans according to Wikipedia.
The weather was very hot at the beginning of the week and then cooled rapidly before bursting into a continuous downpour after we arrived home. Perhaps there is a hidden message there from Herefordshire.
