A walk along the Kennet and Avon canal

It was a bit warmer this afternoon, with little wind and lots of sunshine, so I went out into the garden to see if anything was getting ready to bloom.  I asked Daisy Mae to come along, but she decided to stay by the fire.

Only the evergreen trees have leaves yet, none on the other trees or the vines.

There are buds everywhere, though.  Here's a bud on the big apple tree.

Some flowers are blooming -- some daffodils, and scylla.

More buds, even blooms, on shrubs and trees.

Some plants in planters are blooming now.

Still, it's not really spring yet.  The big tree is a yew, hence the cottage's name.

Inside, Ros was making a hare by hand-felting wool of various colors.

I think the hare turned out nicely.

Tony and I went to the grocery store and to take Daisy Mae for a walk along the Kennet and Avon Canal, which runs through Hungerford.

We passed a pair of swans, a coot, and numerous mallards.

The female mallards were outnumbered, and each had multiple suitors.

The canals were built for commercial "narrowboat" traffic, as were the canals in the Eastern US.  The canals' heydays lasted only a few years, until the railways made them mostly irrelevant.  Now the narrowboats still cruise the canals, but they're almost all houseboats or pleasure boats now.  A TV report said that there are 15,000 Britons living on canal boats today across the country.

This boat has an unusual name; we wondered if it's New Zealand (Māori).  Note the clothes line on the stern, with the drying laundry.

This man was fishing but not catching. He said the sun was too bright.  There's always some excuse.

We climbed up to see the lock mechanism.  Operating the locks seems to be a do-it-yourself affair.

More boats were moored past the lock.  No idea what Old Guys Rule is about.

This boat was really two boats, with the rear one pushing the front one.  The rear vessel is a houseboat, and the front one is a blacksmith's workshop.

The blacksmith had some of his wares on display.

We reached the Parish Church of St Lawrence and turned away from the canal.

An interesting form of Celtic cross carved into (and through) a grave stone.

The interior of the church.

We left the church yard, and headed back to Ham.

Daisy Mae had a good walk, as did we.

Malmesbury Abbey

Lunch at the Three Crowns

We went over to the medieval town of Malmesbury to see the Abbey, and stopped in the village of Brinkworth ("England's Longest Village") for lunch at the Three Crowns. From the outside, it looks much like any other traditional English pub.

The rear entrance is a bit more modern, and inside we decided that the decor was more like California than England.

Still, the food and the beer were very good.  A very nice lunch.

Malmesbury

Malmesbury is a very old town, and to Ros and Tony it still looks old today.  Not just old buildings, but old-style shops.  This street was up near the city museum, which we visited.

In the museum, a three-dimensional model of the medieval town.  Top left is the abbey church.  The market square, with its market cross, is just to the left of and a little below the center.  The empty space at bottom right is today a car park, and the building at the empty space's upper end houses the museum.

A visitor to the museum (dogs go almost everywhere here), the top-most part of the market cross, and the title page of one of Thomas Hobbes' books.  We saw the complete market cross after leaving the museum, and it didn't seem to be missing its top.  In Ireland, I saw an ancient cross that had been brought into a museum to protect it from further weather and acid rain damage, while a resin copy replaced it outdoors.  Perhaps something like that has been done here.

Around the top of the wall in the museum's main gallery was a time line, including some distinctly odd events on the line (1681 - Dodo becomes extinct).

This one wasn't odd at all, but very significant.  This town suffered much during the English Civil War.  The abbey church is covered in pock-marks where bullets hit the stone.

Poor Hannah Twynnoy was killed by a tiger in 1703, only to have an inane ditty as her epitaph.  The second picture is of hand-made lace in progress.  The city was (and still is) a center of lace production.

Here's the market cross.  Most towns with markets had such crosses to mark the location of the market and as a religious symbol.  This one was built as a shelter so that the common people had somewhere to get out of the rain.

Malmesbury Abbey

Beyond the market cross was the passage into Malmesbury Abbey close.  The church has suffered considerable damage over the centuries.  Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries resulted in the destruction of its cloisters and other buildings, and the Civil War battles resulted in damage from gunfire (see below) and from Cromwell's troops.  The biggest damage of all was the collapse of the church's spire, which was 431 feet high, taller than the spire on Salisbury Cathedral.  Then one of the towers fell, with end result being that only about half of the original church still stands.

This drawing, from the Wikipedia article on Malmesbury Abbey, shows what the church probably looked like with its spire and west tower intact.  The part that remains is the lighter part; all the rest is now gone.

Drawing from Wikimedia Commons

A still-standing tower, and orphan walls.

Civil war battle damage: pock-marks in the walls, clearly visible in the enlarged image on the right.

The entrance to the church, which is still a functioning house of worship.

Flowers (and a dog) at the entrance.

The vaulted ceiling is still very impressive.  The plain wall (no windows) at the far end was erected to keep out the weather after the spire collapsed.  The church used to be considerably longer, but now the transepts ("arms" of the cross) are gone, as is everything beyond that.

Views of the vaulted ceiling.

At the intersections of the arches that form the vaulting are fancy carved stones called "roof bosses".  These are present in virtually all vaulted ceilings, including Salisbury and St Giles Cathedrals.  Here are some of the ones in Malmesbury Abbey.

The main floor.  Tony is looking into a mirror that's set flat on a table to make it easy to see the vaulted ceiling.

Arches, and a carved screen.

I took this photo of a stained glass window because I found it impressive.  Later, I learned that it was produced in 1901 by the William Morris workshops.  It's not his work (he died in 1896), but he did work in stained glass and this window was done by his company's designers and workmen.

The spire of another church, next to the abbey.  That church was condemned as unsafe at about the time of the dissolution of the monasteries.  The church building was subsequently pulled down (or fell down), leaving only the spire and bell tower.  The abbey's spire had collapsed, and a tower as well. The church moved into the vacated abbey, thus joining the spire-without-a-church to the church-without-a-spire.

Cobbs Farm Shop

On our way back to Ham, we stopped at Cobbs Farm Shop on the outskirts of Hungerford.

Onions, packaged the old-fashioned way by braiding the tops together.  Anyone need a lot of onions?

This is all tea, but it's not all the tea.  There's more, and coffee too.

Some things we don't see much in US supermarkets.  Duck eggs and quail eggs (from "happy quail", according to the package).

I doubt these are on too many American breakfast tables.

There's been an on-going scandal in the UK and on the continent about horse meat being sold as beef to unsuspecting customers.  The farm shop assures us that their fish don't have a similar problem.

Finally, I spotted this sign as we left -- a counter to the ubiquitous "Keep Calm and Carry On" posters from World War II.

A very interesting day today.