Bath Countryside

Friday, October 15, 2010

Today’s wanders began in Castle Combe, another village that is almost too perfect to be real.  This tiny town has yet another lovely church, St. Andrew’s, an ancient market hall in the center of The Street (the only road in town), a low bridge over a running river, and a few houses and inns apparently lifted from a toy store window.  A bit off and below the beaten path, wherein lies Upper Castle Combe, it was a lovely find, indeed.

Then, it was back to prehistoric times in Avebury.  The stone circles here, which literally encircle this tiny town, are 500 years older than those of nearby Stonehenge.  Unlike its more famous neighbor, here it’s possible to walk in, among, and through the stones, to touch them, sit on them, and really get up close and personal with them.  We (alone!) took a guided tour through this fascinating site, and learned about its history and twentieth-century unearthing by the wealthy marmalade king, Alexander Keiller.  We also stopped to walk to the burial mound at West Kennet Long Barrow, high on a nearby ridge and to see Silbury, the largest man-made mound in Europe.  Its purpose is unknown, but it rivals the contemporaneous pyramids in size. This part of England is full of stone circles, henges, mounds, and other evidence of thousands of years of human presence.

En route back to Bath, we stopped at another pretty town, Lacock, home to Lacock Abbey, a manor house that was the location for some of the Hogwarts scenes in the Harry Potter films.  So, our feeling that so much of what we’ve seen is like a fantasy is not without foundation!