Saturday reflections

The tower of Bath Abbey reflected in the main pool at the Roman Baths.

More of the emperors

A very battered Claudius, from the array of emperors at the baths, and another look at JC in profile.

Julius Caesar

The terrace around the main pool in the Roman Baths has statues of some of the emperors and governors. They're not Roman; they were added by the Victorians before the grand opening of the complex in 1897.

This statue of Julius Caasar is even more recent; the original Victorian statue was pushed into the pool by vandals in the late 1980's. It made me laugh because it looks so much like Ciaran Hinds, who played Caesar in the HBO series Rome.

Saturday reflections

In Bath, coins sparkling in a pool in the Roman Baths.

Great Tew

Winding up the Cotswolds (at least for now) in Great Tew. We took a country lane out of town and circled back through a field, where a pair of curious horses checked us out for potential treats and then wandered off, disappointed.

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.)