Monday, May 10, 2010

May 10 side trip to Chipping Norton

I spent most of a pretty cool and rainy weekend working on a couple pieces of the empathy project; with a forecast of better weather for today I set out early on a bus for Chipping Norton, in the Cotswolds between Oxford and Stratford-upon-Avon. It remains quite cool - there was heavy frost on the grass near the canal this morning - but it really was a nice day.
Chipping Norton is a pretty little town to stroll through and the Cotswolds, a country of rolling hills and broad vistas, are quite beautiful, although not in a way that photographs very well. The path I followed went throug several lush fields, along a narrow paved road, and along some gravel roads. There were a few other people out walking the same path but we were so widely separated that they did not interfere at all with the solitude. I chose this walk because it has an interesting destination, a set of 4500 year old stones moved into a circle, a single standing stone, and one remaining burial chamber, fallen in. The legends surrounding these stones are on placards I photographed and uploaded onto the photo blog - they're mostly fanciful nonsense so I won't repeat them here. Near the stones is a 500 year old church made of Cotswold stone, which I photographed and uploaded.
I arrived at the stone circle just behind a 40ish woman, who proceeded to walk in a circle just inside the stones twice, hardly looking at the stones as she did. There is a path worn so apparently that is the thing to do, although two seems an odd number - seven, twelve, or one hundred are more common. People go kind of nuts over the druid related stuff - none of the hotels near Stonehenge will rent rooms at all during the three days surrounding the summer solstice.
I walked back through more fields, got into town pretty hungry so stopped in at an old hotel pub to get lunch. I had one of their specials, liver and onions in a sauce that looked like it might have been made with a little porter, very good. Then I had a rhubarb dessert - rhubarb ginger pie. It was more like a cobbler, with a bread-like crust on top, shortbread I guess. It was delicious with the thin slices of fresh ginger in it - I would never have thought of that but it worked! They suggested custard (runny, in England) on top of it; I'm glad I didn't have it, because the rhubarb was more delicately flavored than you might expect, and custard might have overwhelmed it.

It was a very pleasant outing, and left me nicely tired.

No comments:

Post a Comment