Monday the 14th…

After waking from a luxurious sleep and experiencing a wonderful breakfast at Fishmore Hall in Ludlow, we spent some time in Ludlow town. A wonderful old town center with a great old castle, where they were showing Othello in the castle grounds that night, and an OLD church with wool merchants buried in the aisles from the 1200s. Had lunch at “deGrey’s” bakery. De Grey is the titular French branch of the family with our ancestor leading a branch of the army who came over in the Norman invasion with William the conqueror. Guess they settled near here? Will need to look that up when we come home. Next, we drove east to Warwick Castle. This wonderful castle is a mix of Disneyland (without the rides) and a historical tour. Built in approximately 1080, after the Norman invasion, it was added to and remodeled over the years. The Earl of Warwick through history played a large role in protecting whatever King or Queen he felt was appropriate. By the Victorian era, though, the Earldom had descended into frivolity and sex, lots of sex…this was apparently fostered by the Prince of Wales. One portion of the tour was devoted to wax statues in various rooms with bits of gossip displayed as if in a note from the Daisy the Duchess, married to the Earl; it was all bed hopping and leaves you wondering about from where the Kings of England really descended! There was a princess tower for the young ladies touring (some got to sleep in the special bed for a prince to awaken), a catapult for the young men to wind and launch, and many other educational displays and interactions for kids.
The English, on this very small island, are very in to sustainability and the 4 “rs”: Reduce, recycle, reuse, and the fourth, which I can’t remember but has to do with minimizing packaging. This educational push for history and sustainability is everywhere we have visited. At Warwick Castle, it was incorporated into almost every display.
Next, we headed to Stratford Upon Avon. What a ticky tacky mess. Shakespeare’s birth home is in the middle of a large pedestrian mall surrounded by gift shops, junky jewelry, Subway and McDonald’s…not even worth a quick drive by but if we hadn’t tried, we would have thought we missed something. The books say Anne Hathaway’s cottage (his wife) is worth a visit, slightly out of town, but we bailed out on Stratford…
Next stop, the lovely little Cotswold towns. Think hobbits and you get the picture. The Cotswolds are, in this area, small valleys with lovely gentle round topped hills. They remind me of the Tualitan Valley in Oregon but flatter. On the tops of hills are often watch towers or other structures dating from Norman times, often updated. The villages with narrow winding paths/roads are nestled in the valleys or the sides of the hills, surrounded by pastures full of horses and sheep. Between the villages and around each pasture are miles of “dry walls,” built from stacking slate flat along the bottom and then upright on the top. Each village here, though slightly different, is constructed from golden, buttery yellow limestone or brick with each home or building topped with old moss covered slate shingles or a reed roof. Both last about 500 years and many were built and roofed in the 1600s. The term “Cotswolds” seems to come from one of two places…beds in the woods or stacks of wool from the sheep. The initial wealth of the area certainly came from sheep and their wool. When cotton and the industrial revolution hit, the area died, which is why it sat for centuries relatively unchanged and therefore preserved. We next drove south to our Cranbourne Hall B&B in Bourton on the Water and had a marvelous pub dinner before falling into bed. Bourton on the Water is a lovely town with well groomed greens next to the Windrush “river” which ambles gently and musically through town and has 3-4 lovely stone bridges over it. A well tended town. The owner of our B&B says it has had a “checkered past,” having been a home, ENT medical clinic, Catholic sisters’ living quarters, etc. It and four others nearby owned by “Sue” are being sold as she is purchasing and remodeling a 17 room mansion in the Lake District, to open next summer, she hopes. She has 8 serious buyers so real estate sales are okay for B&Bs in the Cotswolds.