Another fabulous sunny day in the UK š¬š§. Walked to meet our Robbie Tour at a nearby hotel.
Matt was our guide, a local mate with years of experience driving and tour guiding and telling the local tales of Bristol.
There was a famous pirate from Bristol, born in 1680 and his birth name was Edward āTeddyā Teach. Turns out you canāt be a bad ass pirate with a name like Teddy. So he changed his name to Blackbeard.
Matt had fun with non British speaking pronunciation of many words. It was funny to play along since we are the ones with the accent.
He told us of David from Bristol who played Darth Vadar in the Star Wars movies. But his accent was way too West Country British for the darkness, so his voice was dubbed by James Earl Jones.
Sadly, the Blue Glass factory of Bristol has been closed and they no longer make it.
Peter Gabriel has a recording studio outside of Bath
Went through Saltford nothing there nothing but a pass through on the way to Bath. A why bother village.
Cotswold is the 3rd largest and has the most protected lands in the UK, a total of 800 square miles with farms everywhere and fields of gold getting harvested. It was a lovely drive in the countryside.
Matt loved explaining the true meaning of sayings like āitās cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.ā Turns out a āBrass monkeyā is the device that held the cannon balls on old warships and if it froze it would cause the cannon balls to roll off. Who knew š¤Ŗ
Weāre off to Stonehenge, and are excited to see the prehistoric megalithic structures. It consists of an outer ring of vertical sarsen standing stones, each around 13 feet (4.0 m) high, seven feet (2.1 m) wide, and weighing around 25 tons, topped by connecting horizontal stones which are held in place with mortise and tenon joints āa feature unique among contemporary monuments. Inside is a ring of smaller bluestones. Inside these are free-standing trilitones: two bulkier vertical sarsens joined by a single lintel. The whole monument, now in ruins, is aligned towards the sunrise on the summer solstice and sunset on the winter solstice . The stones are set within earthworks in the middle of the densest complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in England, including several hundred burial mounds.
They are thought to be 1,600 years old and where they came from and who brought them has many tales. Theyāre incredible to seeā¦
We had lots of fun walking the circle. You cannot get close enough to touch them but posing is still fun.
While you canāt get right up next to them, there are plenty of touristy things to do:)
Glad we were on a tour and not in the queue
The gift shop was overflowing with fun Stone Hedge highlights below
You could spend days looking at these amazing stones but weāre off to our next stop, Avebury with fields and fields of standing stones.
Avebury is a Neolithichenge monument containing three stone circles, around the village in Wiltshire, in south-west England. One of the best-known prehistoric sites in Britain, it contains the largest megalithic stone circle in the world. It is both a tourist attraction and a place of religious importance to contemporary pagans.
Originally, as you approached the town, you would travel along the avenue of stones as you entered. Iām not sure how long it is, but itās at least a half mile! They supposedly pulled up one and found a skeleton with a satchel containing a pair of scissors, whom they named āthe barberā! Cute. I would guess they were pretty much all grave markers for the āformerā residents.
A herd of sheep came by
Looking for shade and to scratch the itch
The stones were quite a site to see, standing in these big fields. The town isnāt very big and we didnāt get any detailed history. Just one of the many small villages that dot the Cotswolds which contain remnants of the past.
Out guide also pointed out an interesting site in one of the fields as we passed. Theyāre call āchalk horsesā because they used natural chalk when making them. There are evidently several around the countryside but no one seems to know what they were for.
A couple towns later, we saw another
We continued our tour of the countryside, stopping in cute little towns that all seemed to have some connection to the Harry Potter movies or other British shows. By little I mean one town only had about 300 residents, although there were probably 5x that many tourists in town while we were there.
One of the towns, Castle Combe, didnāt have a castle; it fell down several hundred years ago and they never rebuilt it. It did, however, have some great old houses with some great old doors.
Inside one of the town churches was an old mechanical clock they think was built in the 1,400s.
There was even a tree growing out of a wall along a stream by the bridge. It was beautiful.
Alas, our exquisite day had to come to an end, and we were soon back in Bristol, with just a short walk back to our hotel. Still, spotted some more street art in the way back š
Tomorrow is Bath day. Stay tuned š
