Sunday, 31 March 2013

Fun and Fiends!

My friend Wendy has been visiting England, and we'd arranged to meet up and for her to vist me for the first 2 days of her trip, so last Sunday I met her at Heathrow, and we drove back to Wiltshire via Stonehenge and Avebury.

It was very, very cold - there was snow on the ground when I got up, and it kept trying to snow on us all day.

We had a bracing walk around some of the stones at Avebury, then visited the Manor,which has recently been done up by the National Trust, by reproducing (rather than preserving) furniture and fittings, and have arranged different rooms as they may have been at different periods, ranging from a Tudor Hall and Bedroom, to a 1939 living room (complete with zebra-skin chair, and cocktail-shakers.)

Tudor Bedroom, Avebury Manor
Because almost everything is reproduction rather than  original (things like the fireplaces, the ceilings and plasterwork etc are original), visitors are encouraged to touch and try - I didn't lie on the Tudor style four-poster because it has a feather mattress, and I am allergic to feathers, but I could have done, had I wished!

They have a tea-shop in the library, too, where Wendy was able to sample her first English cream tea :-) And we were both able to warm up enough to escape hypothermia. There were some very *bracing* breezes going on out among the stones..

And then, after visiting the Avebury museum (small; contains a lot of flint axes) back to my house, to defrost ourselves a little more.

1 comment:

Dr Henry Tegner said...

Love Avebury! We have some American cousins visiting next week and will certainly take them there. I enjoyed doing some oil paintings of the standing stones at the end of last year. I give them to Oxfam where they sell - they don't ask for much, but it's nice to think that people are benefitting.