twelfth night

Driving home for the holidays, we really enjoyed listening to this Royal Christmas Special from Rex Factor (previously) that examines the celebration, traditions and historical happenstance—births, coronations, etc.—from a courtly point of view. We think you’ll like this entertaining and informative episode as well, travelling or otherwise.

house-arrest ou le château d’oléron

The settlement that has grown over the centuries around Le Château d’Oléron is arguably most famous as the place where Henry II held his troublesome but otherwise irreproachable wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine captive for sixteen years for conniving to replace him as sovereign of England and outremar with their eldest son.  

Surely not the worst of places to wile away one’s sentence, but it turned out to be all the more endearing to us with the hindsight of nine hundred years that we’d visited this place (at least the Vauban fortifications and harbour) a mere five years hence and had forgotten about it—like the Wizard Gandalf said, “I have no memory of this place,” but being as function follows form for citadels, certain patterns start to emerge that tend to blur together.

Happily we had not remembered as we got to discover more, including the rows of former oyster-mongers bright water-colour shacks that had been conserved and converted to boutiques and studios—which reminded me of the laboratories and dwellings of the court alchemists of Prague whose workshops around the castle were resigned to a similar fate but didn't cost an extra entry fee to see—strongholds of Protestantism where the Huguenots had refuge given the island’s remote location, the Jesuit abbey converted into the Mairie, the city hall and chamber of commerce, and the historic square with a fountain that marked in neo-Renaissance style the inclusion of Île d’Orélon on the circuit of the Tour de France, acknowledged some ninety years after a jibe with competing publishers of a bicycle and a car magazines decided to put rubber to the road.  

Our bike trekking here, though no where near epic, took us through some really amazing landscapes of the island.

carry on, constable

There’s something remarkably indulgent about having the campus of well looked after ruins to oneself, imagining how history marched on and then by an inaccessible accord, time stopped and there was a general agreement to stave off both progress and decay. On our trip across England, we experienced this many times over, and the Restormel Castle outside of Lostwithel in Cornwall really typified the romance. This circular fortress was built in the times just after the Norman Conquest and bastions like these transformed and solidified the occupation and displacement and civilised the art of warfare, turning unsheltered carnage and plunder into something more strategic and potentially less violent.
Exchanged several times between the high sheriff of Cornwall and Simon de Montfort (of Crusade fame and infamy), eventually it was ceded to the crown, under Henry III, the residence boasted plumbing (some innovation eight hundred years ago—reaching back to Roman times) and profited off of the local tin trade. Another sight was the Old Sherborne Castle in Dorset (an intact castle is just up the road).
Queen Elizabeth I relinquished this twelfth century estate to Sir Walter Raleigh after the courtier, poet, historian and explorer became enamoured with it, whilst returning from an expedition to the New World and landing at nearby Portsmouth. Raleigh, between searching for El Dorado and the Seven Cities of Gold, was instrumental in the English colonising of North America and popularised tobacco and potatoes in the Old World. An unsanctioned marriage and political intrigues, which may have beckoned the Spanish Armada (over incursions into lands claimed by that crown), led to Raleigh’s unfortunate beheading.
His faithful wife and accomplice, according to some, kept her husband’s head in a velvet bag for nearly thirty years before expiring herself, both unable to retire to the castle that had become a rather frustrated property.

alta-vista or happy-campers

Caravaning in England and locating a place to rest and recharge for the next day’s adventures always presented surprises. On the whole, we were afforded some breathtaking views without even the need for craning one’s neck and the pricing structure—for the off-season—was fairly reasonable.

Many of the campgrounds we found were on the periphery of working farms, like the one pictured above in the rolling pastures outside of Lewes in East Sussex, which reminded me of the old Windows OS start-up screen or this other terrace near Boscastle in Cornwall. There were friendly warnings to visitors not to disturb the livestock, and brilliantly, one pitch near Glastonbury did not allow children and was incredibly peaceful.

megaliths and magic roundabouts

After leaving the port of Dover, the harbour dominated by an impressive defensive castle constructed under the reign of Henry II, and taking some time to get orientated—and the traffic gauntlet of first reacquainting oneself to driving on the other side of the road when fresh out of the ferry challenged with a lasso-like loop of a roundabout (and there were some compound traffic circles along the way) with other impatient drivers beginning their journeys, we embarked towards lands east.
Our first stop along the way was to the megalithic stone circle at Amesbury in Wiltshire County, conveniently just off the main motorway crossing the country.
Everyone is familiar with images of Stonehenge and has ideas about the enduring mystery of five millennia of this time out of mind cursus.
Many—unfairly, I think, would humbug this place as a tourists’ trap and not the best or most accessible example of this genre but the experience was pretty mystical and inspired us to learn more. We’d read the various complaints but barriers to appreciating the site had been removed, and we were lucky to visit when the place was not thronged with gawking crowds and got the full, unadulterated impression—the sort that requires one to exercise the imagination, which I don’t know if we always care to use while on holiday. What purpose do you think Stonehenge served?

shutter-speed

Sometimes on a wind-shield tour, such as this in the countryside of Devon, I got lucky with the timing and captured this idyll of cursory curious cows watching us go by, but mostly as a still aggregated from a new feature on my gadget that captures a bit of what goes on before, during and after I take the photograph (the before part of my framing intentions being a little unsettling) that’s a bit like the next generation of animation appearing in Harry Potter newspaper columns, delivers a rather disturbing middling-focus like the aside of my wrist superimposed on the base of a ceremonial gateway wall along the wayside. Click to enlarge.  Have you tried this feature yet? I wonder if 4K videos might not produce chimera like panorama failures.  When I first noticed some twitching in the preview mode, I thought that I was just losing my mind.