Bath, Cotswolds, and Stratford-Upon-Avon

A new experience – blogging in the car. We’ve just stopped for afternoon tea in our second of “Great Britain’s Top 100 Tearooms” This was Harriet’s in Woodstock, Oxfordshire. Unfortunately the Cornish pastie was heated in the microwave and Mark got a teabag!!!! He was very unimpressed and told the owner so. We’re on the road now to Stratford-Upon-Avon. We’ve had busy day today. We had a cooked breakfast for 4.50 at the YHA hostel before going into Bath. We went to the Roman Baths. There have been baths in Bath since prehistoric times but the Romans built their version of a health spa both for their own use and to appease the locals who they conquered around 50 AD. The baths fell into ruin and the in 1800s they were partially restored and turned into a tourist attraction and so now they are a mixture of both ruin and the new Victorian architecture. There was no swimming because the water was green with algae and apparently not good for you. In one of the hot baths a pigeon was dying so this might be true. We alerted our guide to the pigeon but he thought it was just swimming. We had a personalised tour as we were there so early. The ticket entitled us to a free glass of spa water which tasted disgusting.

Bath Abbey was an impressive building with a high vaulted ceiling and a new Klais Organ (Mark wrote this)

We left to drive through the Cotswolds. We visited a number of little villages – Tetbury, Bibury, Burford, Uppington, and Woodstock. Bibury has the most photographed street in England – a collection of medieval houses that are heritage sites. Uppington has another White Horse chalk drawing much older than the one we saw yesterday and much more stylised – couldn’t really take a picture to do it justice. In front of the horse drawing is a hill called Dragon Hill which is where St George is said to have slain the Dragon.

The weather is still cold. A high of 5 degrees today but when the wind gets up it feels much colder. The day has been clear and sunny and right now I’m looking out of the car window at a golden sunset over the Cotswolds. The days are very short and it’s dark by 4:30 most days. It encourages us to make an early start to make the most of the daylight. We think we’ll try a B+B tonight. We might spend the day in Stratford tomorrow.