Holiday Photos #6

Wow, three posts in one day. You guys really scored! Oh, and another one over on Laumes Studio, so make that four. Listen to me - so humble. So unassuming. So let's upload those photos....

Here are some large views of the ruins of the Glastonbury Abbey. I put some closer shots of the ruins up today on my studio blog, as well as discussing the history for a sentence or two. What I didn't take a shot of was the wider sweeping lawns that stretched out beyond the main ruins. It would have been a nice place to simply wander and picnic and enjoy. William was restless (and much happier later in the day when we were doing something active) so we didn't stay as long as I would have liked.


Catch the building with the octagonal roof in the background in the photo below. That was the kitchen, and there's a photo of me further down inside it. The few little figures you can also see in the background were a school group, about William's age, playing football. That is, soccer. It made me wish the kids were 7 instead of 14 so I could have asked if William could join their game. Although they spoke French, so that might have been a problem. Nah, not if they had been 7.


Here I am by a marker that says that this spot is said to be the grave of King Arthur. Gueneviere is also said to be buried somewhere nearby. Since the Arthurian Legends are legends, I found it interesting that they would lay claim to it, mixing history and myth without much concern for which was which in some cases. I liked the historians better for the feeling that they wanted it to be true. And I suspect, there is probably history, the real details lost but the truth of the story remembered, back at the beginning somewhere.

Here I am inside the old kitchen. Sort of a dark image. You can click on it to make it bigger. I was pretending to stir the cauldron. All I managed to do was lose my balance and fall over a few seconds after William snapped this picture. To the left, you can just get the teensiest glimpse of it, there was a large table on which was spread examples of foods that were prepared and eaten in days gone by. Someone had added a candy bar, still in it's bright paper wrapper, to one of the bowls.

In England, there are "walls" everywhere. I snapped this photo to remind me of the three types of walls or fences - the wattle fence, the stone wall, and the hedgerow. Later in our trip we were visiting the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London. There was another crown there, the result of a recent contest amongst school children to come up with a new crown that exemplified all that was unique and good about the UK. The young girl who won the contest is shown in a photo of herself wearing a crown of "weeds", to represent the English hedgerow. Under glass was a metal crown sculpted of the various plants found growing there. I'm not English but it was so touching, it brought tears to my eyes.