James Tucker in Cov

Just before I went back to Canada, I stayed with relatives in Andover, who have put me up there several times when I'm in the south of England. The day before I was to leave, my cousin Laura drove me and Laura (no relation) to Avebury, an ancient stone site relatively near to Stonehenge, and dating from (quite roughly) about the same time. The site at Avebury is a lot more extensive than Stonhenge, though not as spectacular. It's a huge area enclosed by a hand-dug ditch, inside of which are two circles formed by large standing stones. The whole thing was built thousands of years ago, and a surprising amount is still intact.
In the meantime, however, a perfectly normal little village has grown up in the middle of all of this, consisting of a dozen or so houses, a church and a couple of pubs. The roads in and out of the enclosure use the gaps created thousands of years ago, and the two roads follow the same tracks that have always been there. The ditch and rampart are handy for keeping in the sheep that graze all around the village, and occassionally eat moss off of the standing stones.
Just outside the village (down an old ceremonial route lined with rocks) is a huge artificial hill- Silbury hill. It's basically a pyramid made out of chalk, and covered with earth, and though not much to look at, gets pretty boggling once you realise the work put into it- it's 130 feet high and the largest of its kind in Europe. Unlike a lot of similar structures, it doesn't seem to have anyone buried in it.
Basically across the street is the West Kennet Long Barrow, which was used to bury people- around 50, at minimum. It's 100 meters or so long, but the 'open' area that was used as a tomb is much, much smaller. It's apparently older than Stonehenge, and was in use for thousands of years. For whatever reason, the texture of the rocks inside the tomb looked really artificial, like those you see in a museum exhibit about cavemen. Apparently, the museums are doing a decent job after all.

In the spirit of Lichfield, Warwick is a town that's remarkably close to Birmingham, pretty famous, and yet a place I've not yet been to. On previous trips to England I've visited the castle, like seemingly everyone else, and was suitably impressed. But I've never really looked around the town before, and it was pretty interesting. The main downtown is demarcated by the East and West gates, which each have a chapel built right on top of them.
The chapel at the Westgate is actually part of an ancient home for old soldiers- the Lord Leycester Hospital. A lot of it was built as the city's Guildhall in the 1400s and was converted in the 1570s as a retirement home. 8 elderly veterans still live there and manage the place. The old buildings are covered in heraldic symbols, such as the Sydney porcupines and the Warwick bears- all symbols of the family that founded the place, and still act as patrons. They are also some of the only old wood buildings left in Warwick- a fire started just east of the Hospital in 1694, and most of the city centre was clearly built in the early 1700s, including the faux-gothic church that has a smattering of classical elements up the front tower.
Below the castle, running to the river, is Mill Street, left, which was also spared from the fire. It used to be the main street in Warwick, leading up to the town from the bridge over the Avon River. When the bridge was replaced and then collapsed, Mill Street became a dead-end, and was basically preserved. By then it was getting pretty dark, though it was only 4:00- you can see the pictures getting dim.

When I take a train from Longbridge (the extreme south of Birmingham) to the city centre, the trains are bound for Lichfield, to the north of the city. Until Saturday, that was basically the sum total of what I knew about Lichfield, even though it has a cathedral and is apparently really quite old. We decided to go there, though, as it seemed foolish not have gone to see somehting so close, and accessable by local rail.
Well, Lichfield's old city centre is very nice, if a lot like most other English market towns, though it has some claims to fame- Samuel Johnson was born here (house to the right), as was Elias Ashmole, who founded Oxford's famous Ashmolean museum, the actor David Garrick, and Erasmus Darwin, Charles's father (I think). It was also the capital of Mercia in the 700's, and as Offa's capital was briefly the Archdiocese of England- taking that honour away from Canterbury for about 20 years.
There were a few nice old tudor buildings and passageways, and a great deal of Georgian ones- the 1700s were a real heyday for Lichfield- as well as the normal things you'd expect from a cathedral close, even if it is a small one. Anyways, for something so close to Birmingham (about 30 minutes from the city centre), Lichfield is really poorly-known. There's an upshot to that, though. Some cathedrals and their closes are quite ready for tourists, and need to be, and so the places where people live and work are carefully fenced off or otherwise segregated. In Lichfield, I'm pretty sure I could have walked into the Dean's garden and had a chat with him- everyone was just going about their normal business. And, yeah, being November might have influenced that.

Well, I'm back in the UK now, having caught a last-minute deal on a flight into Manchester (which is only an hour and change from Birmingham). My flight stopped in Glasgow for an hour or so, and I got to share the lounge with a few dozen Celtic fans flying out to Portugal somewhere for a Champions League game. They were all wearing Celtic jerseys (or Ireland ones) and drinking at 7 am. One guy was asleep on the floor, wearing a gorilla suit with a jersey pulled on over it. He had no luggage.
I spent about two hours in Manchester before getting on my train, and I was tired etc. so I didn't make much of an effort to do much outside of walking around most of the downtown. I was pretty impressed- like Birmingham, it has a lot of huge 19th century buildings, and some very new modernist stuff, but Manchester is light on the hideous 50's-60's brutalism in concrete that Brum has so much of. Its downtown also seemed a bit larger, even though it's a smaller city, but I think that's just because it's more unified, and not cut up by as many canals, rail lines, and expressways.

All the good weather and luck I had built up in Kingston evaporated the second I headed north to Ottawa to get my UK visa sorted out. The morning was nice, but by lunch, when I'd left the High Commission and had some time for sight-seeing, it was raining rather hard. Getting around Ottawa was an absolute nightmare, largely because the system of one-way streets really clogs when people park across the intersections, which seems to happen rather a lot. I got a look at the By-Ward market, where they charge $7 for a lunch-time pint, and at the giant spider in front of the national gallery. ( I wish that national museums would take a cue from the UK and drop admission fees, though).
I headed around to Parliament, which looked pretty good on top of its multicoloured hill, and did what little of the tour was open that day (ie. going up the Peace Tower, then back down), but that at least allowed me to dry off before making the long, long walk to the new Canadian War Museum, which is excellent, even if it is out of the way. The current exhibition on the Seven Years War is really quite something.
And then I trudged back in the rain to try and find a cab, got stuck in yet more gridlock, missed my bus home, caught another cab to the train station (dinner having been abandoned), and then got to sit on a Via rail train for an hour and change as it tried to tow another train (!) near Brockville. So, I've not got a lot of kind things to say about Ottawa, except that I'm sure it's nicer in the sunshine, and that their hockey team is finally playing to its potential (ie 5-7).