More Lower Slaughter

Houses along the River Eye in the village. The river looked like more of a stream to my unprofessional eye, but there was enough water to make it worthwhile for the Victorians to build the water wheel on the left. The brick building is also Victorian, but the adjoining stone building has been there long enough to appear in the Domesday Book.

And yes, there is an Upper Slaughter, but alas we did not visit.

Back to Lower Slaughter

Since I'm here in blogland, let's take a quick visit back to Lower Slaughter in the Cotswolds, and the picturesque church of St Mary's.

Astronomy Tuesday

It has been a long time since I posted one of these but I've been seeing many wonderful pictures from Mars taken by the Curiosity Rover and especially loved this one.

If you zoom into the upper right corner, you can see Mars' moon Phobos in crescent phase, and a point of light to the right of it that is Earth.



Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Urban poetry

The crosswalk light on the corner has received some creative editing.

I still have more pictures from the Cotswolds, plus Bath, but I'm too busy with class prep to look at them.

When you find yourself in the real life Acorn TV

After lunch in Bourton, I wandered down the side streets away from the water. The building on the left was a hotel or inn, but I preferred to think it was the manor house of some outwardly respectable characters whose dark secrets would inevitably lead to murder.

And when Inspector Morse turned up to investigate, he would be pleased to learn that there was an attractive pub just across the street.

The Discovered Cotswolds

The name of the tour I took was The Undiscovered Cotswolds, and although it was a lovely day and the places we were visiting were highly scenic, none of them were crowded. I didn't really appreciate this until we stopped for lunch in Bourton on the Water and learned where all the missing tourists had gone.

The guide apologized for this, but explained that we stopped there because there were numerous good restaurants, tearooms, and pubs to choose from.

I admit that my own lunch consisted of some scrumptious gelato, eaten in the shade under a tree, and I found I didn't mind the crowds one bit.

Urban, well, Cotswolds poetry

I do love a nice alleyway. This narrow stone passage leads off the main square in Stow on the Wold.

Classes start tomorrow, so posting will probably be sporadic over the next week or two. I went in to make copies yesterday, and forgot to bring the last document I had printed out, so today I have the choice of schlepping to the Upper East Side again, or printing 36 copies on my little home printer and manually collating and stapling them. I'm going with the second option, because the time I save by having the copy machine print, collate and staple will be more than offset by all the travel time, and I still have a lot of prep to do. Plus I can watch TV while I staple.

The Mitfords

St Mary's was the parish church of the famous Mitford sisters, four of whom are buried in the churchyard. The tombstones are so weathered they can hardly be read, but that's a closeup of the novelist (or “Authoress”) Nancy Mitford's grave on the left. The picture on the right shows the graves of Nancy, the Hitler-stalking Unity, and the vile Diana.

I had to check Wikipedia when I got home to confirm that Unity's middle name had really been Valkyrie, and that it wasn't just some affectation she had adapted after becoming obsessed with Hitler. Not only was that really her name, but she was apparently conceived in a town called Swastika, in Ontario, while her parents were investigating a local gold mine as a possible investment.

More of the Fettiplaces

The Fettiplace family

In addition to the usual memorial plaques in the floor and on the walls, there are six remarkable effigies of members of the Fettiplace family from the 17th century, each resting on one elbow and looking quite relaxed. They're stacked like bookshelves, three high, on one side of the altar. It must be fun trying to preach a sermon with these fellows staring at you.

The new(ish) window

This is the window put together from the pieces of medieval glass salvaged after the explosion.

A perfect English country church

St Mary's church in Swinbrook is quite small; it's hard to imagine more than forty or fifty parishioners being able to comfortably sit in the pews. Most of the building dates from the 12th or 13th century, except for a tower added in the 1800's. That large plain glass window is very striking, and I love how much light it lets into the interior. (The panes of glass were blown out by a land mine in 1940, but the medieval glass was collected and incorporated into another window.)

Cotswold dry stone walls

An especially pretty example of the stone walls common in the Cotswolds. They're built with no mortar, just stacking layer upon layer of flat stones horizontally, and finishing with a layer of vertical coping stones to help hold it together.

Repurposing

I love this—the traditional red phone boxes are mostly gone now, just like pay phones in the U.S., but many of them have been repurposed into mini-libraries, or, like this one, a defibrillator in case of emergency.

An animal distraction

Fortunately there was a pair of donkeys in the field next to the ruins or I might have taken another hundred pictures of archways.

Arches

More Minster Lovell Hall

Minster Lovell Hall

This was our last stop on the Cotswolds tour. After a long day of quaint cottages and village streets, who wouldn't enjoy a good ruin?

The hall was built by William, Baron Lovell, in the 1430's. Unfortunately it didn't remain in the family for long; William's grandson Francis was a supporter of Richard III and after Richard's defeat at Bosworth, the property was seized by the Crown. It was abandoned and dismantled for building stone in the 1700's, and has been a ruin ever since.

Saturday reflections

From the day in the Cotswolds: houses by the water in a village called Lower Slaughter, a name straight out of Agatha Christie.

Here's a flower

For someone who lives in an uber-urban environment, without access to a yard, being able to wander through the gardens in the early morning was wonderful. Going to Central Park, much as I love it, isn't quite the same thing when you have to schlep there and back.

While I am on the subject of flowers, I do want to brag that I have an orchid, given to me by a student almost a year ago, and IT'S STILL ALIVE. I have no idea how I have managed this, but it feels like quite the accomplishment.

I wish I could have bottled the smell here

 

This path runs along the side of the garden opposite the city wall. It leads to the back gate, and the T.S. Eliot Theatre where we had lectures and various orientations (T.S. Eliot was indeed a Fellow at Merton, but he hated Oxford, spent all his time in London, and quit after one year. But I suppose if you can brag about a connection to a Nobel Laureate you do.)

The scent of flowers was so strong at the end of this path that sometimes I would just stop and close my eyes and breathe it in.

Evening in the Fellows Garden

Most of the garden is actually a huge lawn—this picture shows maybe a third of it—with a few trees, and beds of flowers on the perimeters. The walkway by the city wall (where the J.R.R. Tolkien table is) has beds of lavender that you can smell on the other side of the garden.

From one college to another

The south side of Merton—this is the view you get approaching the college through the Christ Church grounds. The path between the field and the wall is called Dead Man's Walk, and is reportedly haunted by a Royalist soldier who was executed there during the English Civil War. The wall contains part of the original Oxford city wall, and the section on the right hand side of the picture encloses the Fellows Garden.

Gardens at Merton

In addition to the Fellows Garden, there are several smaller garden spots at Merton, with benches and trees and flowers. During the term, there is probably not a lot of solitude to be found there—the grounds aren't nearly as extensive as, say, Christ Church. But I spent time sitting on all of these benches, and never had to share.

The garden on the right was my favorite; it's hidden behind a hedge and has apple and pear trees. It's conveniently close to the laundry room and was a nice place to read and wait for the wash cycle to finish.

Back to gardens

I've been busy the past couple of days, but will be finishing up with Merton's gardens this week. In the meantime, here's one of my morning walk flowers.

My rooms

Two more pictures, taken on an afternoon when I probably should have been doing something else. (That window seat was fortunately not that comfortable, or I might have wasted even more time just sitting there looking out at the quad.)

Mysteries of Mob Quad

At first glance, this picture probably looks like something you get when you press the shutter by accident. But I took it on purpose, standing outside my room in Mob Quad, looking down the stairs at the door that leads out to the quad.

But it's the other door that interests me, the one in the wall over the staircase. Like, what the hell?

I never found anyone I could ask about why that door is there. The doorknob looks modern, so I am assuming that it is—somehow—used for something. The best theory I can come up with is that they have some kind of ramp they can extend from the door to the top of the stairs where I was standing and use that to move furniture or maybe trolleys of books for the library. Or just hoist them up with a rope. (Mob Quad buildings do not of course have elevators.)

(While I'm on the subject of Mob Quad, I must admit that every time I talk or write about it, the theme from the TV show The Mod Squad starts playing in my head.)

Magpie Lane

Posting a few odds and ends until I have time to process the next batch of pictures.

This charmingly named street leads from the High Street to Merton, so I usually walked it at least twice a day, avoiding those cobblestones whenever possible.

That's not possible on the street that runs in front of the college, which is still all cobblestones, no asphalt. Fortunately there are sidewalks.

Sunday bird blogging

A pair of crows in the Fellows Quad at Merton.

Saturday reflections

Here's some extreme color after all that black and white: a store window on Cornmarket Street in Oxford.

Finishing off in color

Finally, here are a couple of pictures in color, so you can see how green the cemetery is. The sections that are still overgrown are positively jungly.

Write your own adventure

I love the way this photo seems to inspire a story. Who are these men? Why are they meeting in a crypt? What is the man on the left carrying?

(Spoiler alert: It's a bag lunch, courtesy of the kitchen crew at Merton.)

The residents

Coffins in the catacombs, in the light from the guide's flashlight.

The Terrace Catacombs

The view of the city from the terrace outside the church in Highgate made it one of the most popular places to see and be seen in Victorian London. Underneath that terrace though are some truly creepy catacombs, which can only be visited with a guide—who locks the gate behind you before the tour begins. (Not sinister at all!)

There are a few skylights, and windows at either end of the 320 foot passage, but most of it is actually darker than it appears in this photo.

Two angels