A Circle of Stones, a Giant Bath, and some Wizards

Wednesday the group went to Stonehenge, Bath, and Lacock. Everything had a little element of magic involved! I love excursions with Philippa – our main tour guide and the art history professor. She makes even really boring things come to life.

I really wasn’t all that jazzed about Stonehenge – it’s cool, but not really my thing. Holy Cow – much cooler in person than in photos. I never learned much about it in school – perhaps because the whole thing is an unsolved mystery.

You can’t get very close to the monument because people used to chip little pieces of the stone off. It’s a little bit annoying that you have to pay to walk a giant circle around the thing. It’s stood for over 5,000 years – I don’t think it’s going anywhere any time soon!

I’ve posted a few pictures, but you can’t see some of the really cool things in the pictures. First, the tall standing stones all have little knobs on the top, the ones that lay across in the circle have notches that fit onto the knobs. What’s so cool about that is that the knobs and notches would have been carved with tools made out of bone or wood and maybe bronze towards the end of construction.

No one really knows why it was built. It is perfectly circular and is on a raised patch of grass. The sun rises and sets over one stone. It may have been a seasonal calendar based on the rising and setting of the sun or it may have been a religious site. There are graves scattered all around it on the hillsides. It was pretty neat.

I loved Bath. It’s a big city, but it’s not overwhelming. We didn’t stay long unfortunately so I only got – yet again – a taste. I’ll be going back in my lifetime for sure. We popped into Bath Abbey where the very first coronation of a King took place. Edward the First – maybe. Our main stop was in the Roman Bath. Very cool! Again, I learned nothing of this bath in history, but it was a huge deal. Julius Cesar took baths there. I must say, I find it a touch creepy that people all took Baths together.

You can still see the steam as it rising up from the Baths today – although you can’t get in. The Romans were some of the first people to really value bathing. They even valued massage and oil treatments. Very spa like! 

Bath kind of fell apart over the years and then in the 18^th century had a revival of sorts. All the rich people from London would travel there to relax and unwind in the spas. Jane Austen was a frequent visitor to Bath. There are homes in Bath that are still maintained by the rich and famous and go for about 4 – 5 million pounds….a row house for 4-5 million pounds. I’d at least like my own garden for that kind of money! 

30 row houses - about 4 to 5 million pounds each!

On the way home we stopped in Lacock. It’s a cute little historical town. We didn’t learn much about it other than it was the site of filming for many of the scenes in the first two Harry Potter movies. I had some yummy ice cream and window shopped!