Robyn writes: We had a great day today - as usual, we slept in until nearly 8 o'clock so a bit of a slow start to the day. Today we decided to visit Chedworth Roman Villa, a National Trust held property in Gloucestershire. It was a fair drive away - about 50 miles, so took us quite a while to get there over the winding country roads, which we did just before midday. We decided to have lunch first (lentil and vegetable soup - very nice!) to wait for the guided tour at 12.30.
Chedworth is one of the biggest Roman villas found in England - it's not far from Cirencester and the Fosse Way (one of the original Roman Roads - now an "A" road and much straighter than the usual country road because of that!). The villa's remains were rediscovered in the 1860's when a worker on the property there was hunting rabbits and discovered several tesserae (the small tiles from a mosaic, for the un-archaelogical!) It was excavated in the 1860s and luckily the landowner was quite careful in building a big barn to protect the lovely mosaics they had unearthed. In 2012 they completed a new 3 million pound building to cover them and it takes you right over them so you can see them really well. It was amazing to see the size of the villa and all of the parts of it and to try to imagine what it would have been like in its heyday. The weather was mostly good to us, but just at the end of the tour it finally began to rain. Having raincoats, umbrellas etc we had a bit more of a look around, including hunting down the huge Roman snails which inhabit the area - these were brought over by the Roman and still flourish there today. They are significantly bigger than the English or Australian snails, I must say! The Romans used to feed them on milk and when they were too fat to fit in their shells any more they would cook and eat them! Finally around 2.30 we decided to leave, even though it was pelting down with rain (we got rather damp getting to the car!)
There were fabulous mosaics in the dining area - sadly badly damaged when the floor collapsed
We headed for the little town of Lacock, which is also National Trust. It's one of the most beautiful and original little towns in England, and has been used for several movie and TV programs such as Pride and Prejudice and Harry Potter. We had a lovely afternoon tea at the National Trust cafe there, then went to visit Lacock Abbey. By this stage it was quite late, as we'd been held up by roadworks and the usual English traffic woes, so we couldn't go into the Abbey but we could go into the original cloisters, which date back to the 1200s and are in amazingly good condition. They were used in the first two Harry Potter movies which I found very exciting! Then we had a quick look around the rest of the town which is almost unspoiled by modern buildings. By this stage it was raining (again!) and everything was closing so we headed back to Bath, getting here around 6pm.
Lacock Abbey - it started as a nunnery in the 1200s and after the Dissolution became a private manor house
This is the street where the Bennet girls meet the infamous Mr Wickham!
We decided to go out for tea for a nice change, so we quickly got changed and headed down into town. We chose a French restaurant. the Café Rouge, and had a wonderful meal there - Lex had a huge bowl of moules (mussels) in a creamy wine garlic sauce which he pronounced to be wonderful and I had a crumbed chicken breast which was magnifique! We followed these with lemon sorbet and creme caramel so it was a lovely meal. Wish we could afford to eat out every night!
No comments:
Post a Comment