James Tucker in Cov

Solothurn has a thing about the number 11. The local beer has a large 11 on the label, there are 11 churches, 11 bells in the cathedral, and landings every 11 steps on the stairs. There are also 11 fountains scattered through the small city's squares, each depicting a saint or figure from the local mythology. They do still pump a trickle of water, though I never saw anyone other than me using them (bad idea or no, it was 30 degrees and even a slice of pizza and a coke cost about 15 quid).

The Elephant and Castle is the symbol of Coventry, though I've never really found a convincing explanation as to why. Apparently they represent, apart and together, strength and patience; for a symbol so ubiquitous (it's on lamp-posts, bollards, and anything run by the Council), it's a little non-specific. The motto camera principis - Prince's Chamber- refers to the Black Prince's history with the city, so that makes sense, but the elephant just seems to be something they picked because they liked it.

This one just looks so jolly. This guy and the one in brass at the top of the page kind of demonstrate that people didn't have a great idea of what elephants looked like in the 1500s.


These two are much more recent efforts, and thus 'better' in that they look like elephants, if I may be snobbish about 16th century anatomy.


And we also have the elephant in chair and carpet format all over the medieval guildhall, though it now has a cat sitting on top of its crest as well, to symbolise 'watchfulness'- another noted inaccuracy?

The next stop past Berkswell, towards Birmingham, is Hampton in Arden. Here you're very close to the Birmingham Airport, but Hampton seems a pretty small village still with a couple more shops than Berkswell, and a school and library. It's still very much a collection of older houses on the crest of a hill around the church and the village pub. Lower down, though, are some pretty grand Georgian or Victorian houses that look over the nearby farmland.
The church is a pretty straightforward Gothic renovation of an older Norman one, and an old ditch separates the graveyard from what seems to be an old manor house. I couldn't see much of it, but it was built up on one side by some huge stone retaining walls, and is apparently a large, half-timbered house, and with the church and the pub, takes up the very top of Hampton's hill.
On the marshy ground below Hampton is the medieval Packhorse Bridge, with the much more modern railway bridge in the background. There used to be a cross on the bridge, and on its stump has been carved the parish boundary between Hampton in Arden and Berkswell (the H/B to the right). The whole area now is part of a wetlands reserve, but if you duck under the railbridge, you'll find yourself in a field looking to Berkswell.

Berkswell's a tiny little village between Birmingham and Coventry, and can only be got to by taking a local train and then walking about a mile and a half along some pleasant country lanes. Or you could bike from Coventry, which would take well under an hour. Outside of Berkswell is Ram Hall, an old manor farm with an interesting chimney and a sideline in making sheep's cheese.
The village itself has one shop/postoffice/tea shop, one pub, and a church. About half the houses are hundreds of years old, and there is a farm on the main street, with cows staring at the pub diners across the road. The village green has a set of stocks with five leg-holes, supposedly built for the most regular offenders, who were a one-legged soldier and his two drinking companions.

The church really is the highlight of Berkswell, though. Built next to the eponymous well, which may have been used for baptisms, it was mainly built in the Norman period, though the very odd octagonal vault under the chancel apparently might indicate Saxon origins. In any case, it's had a long history of renovation and addition, with some windows and a tower from the Gothic period, a late-medieval gallery one one side, and a two-story porch outside the Norman door. The arches on one side are Gothic and on the other, Norman.

The last of the big Flemish cities we visited, we did as a day-trip last summer. The weather was pretty back-and-forth, but we saw the centre of the city without too much rain.
Like the other cities we visited in northern Belgium, Antwerp had a spectacular central square, with guild-houses like those in Brussels. In front of their town hall was a statue of the mythical founder throwing the severed hand of a giant. A fountain of water spurts from the wrist.
There weren't as many medieval buildings as in Bruges or Ghent, I don't think, but there were a few streets that can't have changed much in 600 years. Antwerp's also a much bigger city than Bruges or, I think, Ghent, and so the central area's surrounded by more modern developments from the 1700s to Europe's first proper skyscraper. In the 1500s it had taken over trade and power from Ghent and Bruges, and was one of the largest cities in Europe.
The cathedral, which was never really finished, has a tower 400 feet high, and 400 feet long, and has a couple of Reubens altarpieces inside (he's buried almost nextdoor), but I was more interested in the various pieces of medieval wall-painting which were whitewashed over (presumably during the Reformation),
and which have survived pretty well to this day. The central crossing also has a Ely- like octagon instead of a tower, which looks a lot like the spire of a Russian church from the outside (that said, I've seen a tower like that in Brussels, too).
Instead of being intercut with canals like Bruges or Ghent, Antwerp's on a very large river, and on the banks of that (and amid a pretty unseasonable storm) we saw a castle, neatly decked out with a Roman-style coat of arms, and a statue of a mischevious giant outside. Next to that was a huge brick fleishmarkt, the guildhall of the butchers, which is supposedly meant to look like a piece of bacon. We also wandered past an old printer's museum that was just closing, and through all sorts of squares with odd bars and whatnot.
The exit from Antwerp's pretty dramatic, because the station (which is next to the zoo) is one of the great old steel and stone palaces of the 19th c., but in this case, has been updated for highspeed rail, and for more platforms, by having them added in below. Someone standing in the old ticket hall can look down on three more levels of platforms, the newest and fastest trains pulling in and out of the bottom floor.

Last Saturday Laura and I walked from Kenilworth Castle to Warwick (which has a castle we didn't look at). Kenilworth's about a mile from the University, just south of the edge of Coventry, and is one of the prettiest towns I've seen. There's a long main street, lined with very old houses and a couple pubs. At one end is the church and some shops, at the other end is the castle, and some more pubs.
The castle's obviously seen better days (it was 'reduced' during the Civil War), but was one of the biggest, and hosted all sorts of Kings and Queens in its history. The picture above doesn't really do it justice for sheer size until you realise that the wall around the base is 12 to 15 feet high.
From there the walk's a pretty simple one across farm fields and a small woods, until you hit the suburban outskirts of Warwick. That said, it was a six-mile walk, and a pretty windy day, so it wasn't the easiest going in the world.
Once we hit Warwick, we were reminded that this was the Mop Fair weekend. This started as an employment fair for domestic help, apparently, and is now just a big carnival.
Brilliantly, they set up the rides right in the main square, near the church and inside the city gates. We could see edges of the castle from here and there in the streets, but were much more concerned with having some dinner than in walking down to the walls again- we've been to Warwick before, and it's pretty easy to get to from Coventry, so we can go again.

After our trip to St Andrew's, Laura and I went to Edinburgh, my second trip there in a year- I saw in the New Year with Tyler on the edges of a wind-blown Castle Street. This time the weather was much nicer, a crisp sort of autumn day that was still a little too early in the year to be that cool.
As always, the castle was the centrepiece of the town, which we visited this time around. Along with all of the other phases of the building- the old chapel, the practical defences and the Victorian nationalism of the museum buildings, are touches of the community of soldiers who were based here. A small corner of a lower bastion is a graveyard for the dogs of the regiments, including one for a dog named Scamp, which might be visible below. Tom the Gun, the soldier who's fired the one o'clock cannon for some years, now has his own brand of whisky, and his face on all of the signs explaining the whole custom. We left the castle with enough time for Laura to be terrified on Prince's Street when the gun went off.
In the museum quarter was this Andy Warhol exhibit we missed in favour of a locally famous picture of a skating clergyman, and spent a surprising amount of time in the (rather good) park-level expansion's gift shop.
As for me, I was especially struck by how tall the old buildings could be, and how dense the old town must have been. At times there must have been eight or ten floors above, which I think does qualify as a skyscraper.

Windsor Castle is conveniently close to London, and apparently such a draw that there are two separate rail lines terminating there. Choosing the option that avoided going through Slough, which is distressingly close, we headed to Windsor along the southern route, passing through Kew instead. Windsor's also really quite close to Heathrow, and I'd think you could see the castle pretty clearly from the left windows of a plane taking off- it can only be a couple of miles. Despite all that, Windsor is a pretty small and quiet sort of place, still totally dominated by the castle. It rises considerably above the river, and sits beside the 650 acre Home Park and the 5000 acre Great Park, which includes the castle's 3 mile driveway.
The castle's divided into lower and upper wards, and is probably close to a mile long in total. At the dead centre is a circular tower on a mount (right in the picture above), a development of the original fort built by William the Conquerer. The Lower Ward, closer to the town, contains St George's Chapel, the home of the Knights of the Garter, and probably one of the best late-medieval churches I've ever seen. The carving and vaulting are of the flashiest possible sort, and the tombs and statuary from both monarchs and famous knights are fantastic. There's also a collection of Tudor cottages for some of the staff, and a circular group of houses for the choir of the Chapel.
The Upper Ward, nearer the Park, is the bit you can't visit directly. The state apartments, dining rooms and exhibitions are all here, but so are the actual Royal Residences. This bit most clearly shows that most of the castle has been rebuilt in the 17th and 19th Centuries to a sort of story-book ideal. The exhibition of drawings we caught included Michaelangelo, da Vinci, Reubens sketches, and that was a tiny bit of the whole collection. There is also the tour through the great dining halls and so forth, which are impressive, but I liked the drawing rooms and breakfast areas, with their views over Eton (and, alas, Slough) for absolutely miles.

London was done up nicely for Christmas this year- I thought Oxford Street pretty tacky, especially as it was essentially a disney film advert, and Regent Street was abstract atomium shapes. However, down towards Marble Arch were these angel shapes, and Debenhams was brilliant. The toy window had hundreds of stuffed animals on strings, being moved like puppets, doing things like decorating the tree and handing out gifts.
The whole thing was set to a weird, hooting and mechanical sort of soundtrack that made it sound like a slightly creepy toy factory. At the other end of the town was Bow Lane, a small shopping area in the shadow of St Paul's, who I think did the best job of doing simple decoration, though it's slightly odd, because there are very few people around there at night. I was certainly the only one.