Beach time

Lindisfarne Holy Island has been a pilgrimage destination for close to  1400 years. The pilgrimage is supposed to end with a long walk across sand flats at low tide guided by these 4m high poles, often through fog. It was a little foggy in the morning when we arrived. Lucky for us, there is also a mile long causeway road to drive over, but only at low tide as it floods with the high tide. Every year or so, a driver misses the tide and gets stuck in the rising water on the causeway. Yes! The morning was foggy and cool! Very thankful for slightly cooler weather.

In 635 monks came from Iona in the far north west of Scotland, to establish a monastry on the island of Lindisfarne just off the north coast of England. They left after Viking raids in 793. The current ruins are from the 1100s when the priory was established here.

That is a lot of scaffolding on the castle. It was built in the 1500s and is having a bit of work done. We walked around it but did not go inside.

We walked over to Scotland and back, across a steel suspension bridge built in 1820 so that T could set her foot on the earth of Scotland for the first time. 

Then it was back to England. We visited a honey farm that also had a large eclectic collection of old vehicles.

Then we went to an art gallery in the once grand and still busy town of Berwick-upon-tweed. I love these three bridges. The Old Bridge made from red sandstone in 1624 with 15 arches, the New Bridge made from concrete in 1928 with 4 arches and the railway bridge made from bricks by Robert Stephenson in 1850 with 28 arches - and all still being used today!

Can this really be the same day as the first grey photo? Bamburgh Castle is about 25 minutes drive south of Berwick. The core of the castle dates back to 1095 but most of what is seen today was built during the 1700s and 1800s. You may have seen it in movies including Macbeth.

We went for a long walk on the beach at 7pm! And it was not hot! A perfect end to our last day in England for awhile. This really is the same day as the first photos.

A 73 mile long wall

The Romans were in Britain from 43 to 410. In 122 the Emperor Hadrian decided to build a wall to keep the unconquerable barbarians from the north out. These were the mysterious Picts, as Scotland as we now know it did not yet exist. Trump would have probably tried to buy it for his Mexican border.

The wall is now just inside England's northern border. We stopped off on our way north to have a look. Here is a weird accidental "out of body" photo of S and T walking on top of the almost 2,000 year old wall. We think it must have once been taller.

The Housesteads site was once covered with buildings housing 800 soldiers. Only the officers had under floor heating, painted walls and a private courtyard. The ordinary soldiers were crammed into barracks on either side of the officers' villa. This a model of what it would looked like.

 Now it looks like this with the wall stretching away quite visibly in both directions.

The toilet block. No separate stalls. Everyone sat around the edges, chatting and doing what they needed to do.

It was another hot day. I bought an icecream and a softdrink, within one hour!

Vikings and Christians

"Place is important." I believe this. Places of worship do have a spiritual presence and feeling about them. I think there is also something important about standing where your ancestors stood. I don't have any known recent ancestors from the Viking capital York, but given that the Vikings were settled here and in numerous other parts of England, Scotland, Ireland and northern France, and they did tend to pillage around quite a bit, spreading their DNA as they went, who knows. I like the idea of having a bit of Viking blood.

After enduring a day of motorway driving, we spent the next day in York. We went to the York Minster. York has been here since the 4th century, and a church has been on the York Minster site since 627. The oldest bits of the current building date back to 1220.

Each photo shows only a small part of its immensity. "If you turned York Minster into a fish tank 5 fully grown blue whales would fit inside nose to tail." It is not exactly your little village church.

It is a tourist attraction with an excellent museum down in its underground rooms and a working living church community.

Holy Communion service in one of the small side chapels.

I was standing in the middle of the church when I took this photo looking toward the end of the church.

Ah, yes...

A 1000 year old book still used today. It contains the four Gospels and a letter from King Canute dated 1019.

The altar stands almost directly beneath the central tower which is 56m high and weighs 16,000 tonnes or the weight of 40 jumbo jets.

The Kings Screen contains statues of 15 English kings from William the Conquerer to Henry VI.

We climbed the main tower, 275 steps inside a narrow stairway. Here are S and T winding their way up. It was hard work.

Halfway up.

 Part of the 360 degree view from the top.

And back inside.

Then we went learned about an even earlier peroid of York's history - Vikings! Yorvick is an immersive museum experience built over an archealogical excavation site that revealed how the Vikings lived when York was their British capital around the year 900. It has a ride that you sit in and it takes you through a full sized replication of a York street from the time. Excellently done. The automated people looked very real. I swear one of the men turned his head and looked at me.

 And numerous exhibits of items that were dug up during the excavation.

 The Shambles is a street where animals were slaughtered in medieval times and the left over bits were thrown into the open drains. Now it is part of a charming area of old buildings filled with shops and cafes.

It was another hot day. Tomorrow will be another hot day. This weather is getting monotonous and not very English, I must say.

Fit for a queen

As T was too jetlagged to entertain the Queen at Windsor Castle two days ago, we thought we would take her to see a palace fit for a queen. It is not a royal palace but it does have many royal connections historically, and one that S and I wanted to see too.

Blenheim Palace - Britain's WWII prime minister was born here, in the home of his family since the early 1700s. Yes, this has been the family home for 12 generations of the Dukes of Marlborough. This is the front door.

It looks like a huge city hall to me but it was designed as a family home. 28,000 m2, the house covers 7 acres. That is just the house. It stands in 2,000 acres of land. It is too big to fit into my photo.

This is the foyer, the entrance hall with the front door down in the centre and the painted ceiling too high to fit in the photo.

On our tour we saw 6 living rooms ie, drawing rooms and state rooms for entertaining important guests, filled with extravagant furnishings, tapestries and 300 years of family portraits. And a few other rooms - about one third of the ground floor. There were also two kr three floors above us and the servants area downstairs that you had to pay extra to see. These would have been interesting too, but there are only so many hours in a day and we spent about 6 hours here.

These photos below only show about one third of each room. You will have to use your imagination.

This is about a quarter of the salon, a huge room used for entertaining. Its walls and ceiling are completely covered by decorative painting.

Now - this is a library! It is called the Long Library, it is 55m long with a huge pipe organ at one end and a grand piano at the other.

Looking up at the plaster ceiling dome at one end. If you zoom in you will see that every flower in the design is different.

A statue of Queen Ann, who was a close friend and enemy of the first Duke's wife and contributed funds to help build the palace to reward the Duke for all the battles he won for England against France. This poor woman had at least 17 pregnancies, some miscarried, some died in infancy, one lived until 11, none survived.

 The view from the library is not too bad!

This house has so much history I cannot possibly tell it here. It has a very long Wikipedia entry if you want to know more.

Here are a few more photos of the garden.

There are two large garden ponds (lakes)

A massive bridge that is just a garden ornament.

The Victory Column, another ornament.

The temperature was 30 degrees!

And I have not shown you the walled vegie garden, hedge maze, lavender garden, waterfall with bridge, aboretum, rose garden...it just goes on and on. Oh, did I mention the butterfly and finch house?

Tomorrow we start working our way north again, to cooler climates.