Wandering around Hexham and Corbridge

A door...because I like doors.

The church ladies were setting up tables for tea.  The abbey tea shop was due to open in a couple of minutes.  There were already some expectant elderly folks milling about.

Hexham Abbey is smack dab in the middle of town with barely any room to wriggle its elbows.  It was difficult to get a picture of the entire Abbey.

It was hidden by the farmer's market at one end.  The fruits and vegetables put on quite a show, their colors vibrant against the mass of stone presented by the Abbey, ancient buildings, and walkways.

On the other side was this pile of old buildings, the heart of Hexham, navigable by these narrow alleys.  

Shops and cafes lined the alleys.  Once the day got going, these alleys were filled with tourists and regulars.

The sign gets to the point: "The Bike Shop."

Of course I went in.  I knew I wanted to get Bill Bryson's "At Home: a Short History of Private Life" while I was in England, not only because it was available in the UK before America (where it wouldn't be published until October 2010), but because I wanted the British edition.  After seeing the heft of the hardcover book (544 pages), and painfully aware of how little room there was in my duffel bag (especially with the books I had already purchased*), I decided to wait and get the book in London.

Another view of the Abbey.  It's there wherever you are in town. It seemed no matter which alley we came out of, we walked into the Abbey.

Our bus to Corbridge was delayed by this Armed Forces Display.  Most of the soldiers had guns, but this one had an axe.  Does he know how to use it?

Little old ladies at the bus stop.  

A blue door in Corbridge.

We saw these poppies while walking out to the Roman fort near Corbridge.  Once we reached the fort, we decided we were rather tired with old things for the day and turned around without touring the fort.  There would be plenty of opportunities to see Roman ruins (we would be seeing Vindolanda and Housesteads the next day), not to mention the Wall itself, as we were going to walk back to Old Repeater Station along Hadrian's Wall rather than take the bus back.

The townhomes in Corbridge are named.  Did I mention that I love doors?

*I had already purchased the British edition of the first Harry Potter book (titled "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone") at Blackwell's in Oxford, and "Memoirs of a Highland Lady" at Waterstone's in Aviemore, Scotland.

Hexham Abbey

Someone started practicing on the organ while we were walking around the Abbey.

The music swelled and filled up the church.  The organ fits this kind of space perfectly.  Elsewhere, it seems like a stout man trying to make his way down the narrow church pew without treading on anyone's toes.

These old churches take your breath away.

Effigies of dead people lay in one section of the Abbey.  Their faces were worn away.  I wish I had looked up their names (I don't recall seeing any placards), though they are dead and no longer care whether they are remembered.

That Anglo-Saxon man in the bottom of the picture is peering out at us.  You can get accustomed to being the anonymous person rambling about these grand old places that being noticed, even by an inanimate object, is a jolt.

These stairs are still used by the choir.  When they were first built, sometime in the 13th century, they led to the dormitory used by the canons who ministered to the Hexham community.  They lived according to the Rule of St. Augustine.

There was a row of these people on the outside of the Abbey, right at eye-level: the flying monks.  I'm not sure what would have been placed in the spaces above their heads.

They had pleasing faces.

The crypt beneath a church: Hexham Abbey

The next day we headed into Hexham on the very convenient Hadrian's Wall Country Bus, which passes the Old Repeater Station as it ferries visitors to various points along Hadrian's Wall.

First stop was Hexham Abbey, which has been around in some form or other for over 1300 years. An Anglo-Saxon crypt was discovered in the bowels of the Abbey while it was being renovated in the late 19th century.  The entrance to the crypt is in the middle of the church, in the nave.  If I were a child attending services, this hole in the floor would have creeped me out.

We descended the narrow stairs into the dim low-ceilinged space and bumped and shuffled our way around corners and through passageways. It was easy to imagine the shrine illuminated by flickering candlelight, standing out in the pools of darkness filling the corners.  How many pilgrims from long ago venerated the relics kept here?

The builders made free with stone from the nearby Roman fort Carla and probably Hadrian's Wall as well.  The Romans had been gone 300 years by the time this crypt was built.  Stone blocks like these, with decorative borders, were scattered throughout the crypt walls, positioned where they were for structural purposes rather than to maintain whatever design they had originally been carved for.  How would the Roman stonemasons have reacted if they had seen how their handiwork was re-used?

When a couple joined us in the crypt, the smallness of the crypt quickly became self-evident and we made our way back up the well-worn steps...

into the soaring airiness of Hexham Abbey.  The nave above was built in 1908.  Spaces were set into the wall on the right to show off various stone fragments that were uncovered along with the crypt.

Tons of these fragments were scattered throughout the Abbey, set in seemingly random places, as if they had so many Roman and Anglo-Saxon artifacts that they could afford to be careless with placement.

At the far end of the nave was the Sunday school space.  I loved the homely warmth of the children's area juxtaposed against the cold stone grandeur of the Abbey.

Plath and the North country

"...There is no life higher than the grasstops

or the hearts of sheep, and the wind

pours by like destiny, bending

everything in one direction..."

I recently discovered Sylvia Plath's poem "Wuthering Heights." Go and read it.  I'll wait.

The poem appeared during some routine work at the computer on a slow Friday afternoon.  There was no warning.  I read the first line and stepped into Northumberland.  

The wind pulled at my clothes with insistent fingers as the sheep browsed and chatted with throaty bleats around the crumbling stones of Hadrian's Wall. The horizon kept going and going, even as it faded into the distance.  And above it all was the sky, vast and unending.  I felt ridiculously small and alone, pinned to the earth beneath the weight of the sky. It was exhilarating and unnerving.

Plath captures the brooding remoteness of England's northern country perfectly.

Listen to Ted Hughes read the poem.

We encounter Hadrian's Wall

Our first good look at the wall.

No sooner did we walk into Old Repeater Station after that adventurous taxi ride than did Les shoo us off, "I suppose you want to go look at the wall."

He gave us directions, which involved a traipsing across the property of these folks to get to the public access trail that cut through their property...  

The trail ran along the back of the house.  We couldn't help but feel that we were trespassing.

This small patch of woods even had a name: Sewingshields Woods (everything in the United Kingdom has a name).  I should follow this tradition of naming and name the string of trees we have along the back of our property.

There were no fences or other obstructions to keep people away.  Just a tacit understanding to respect the remains.

Sewingshields milecastle, a typical outpost along the wall that would have housed a small group of Roman soldiers. 

The land falls away on the other side of the wall.  You can see why the Romans chose to build the wall on this particular spot at the edge of the empire.  It was a great natural defense against those crazy barbarian Scotsmen.  (I'm married to one, by the way).

Sewingshields Turret, which was once a small tower that soldiers could use for surveying the land at a distance around them.

There were sheep everywhere, rubbing their behinds against the 2000 year old remains.  What is it like to have a farm with such tangible history wrapped up in the land?

Getting to Old Repeater Station on Hadrian's Wall

We stayed at Old Repeater Station while in Hadrian's Wall country.  The proprietor was a Londoner who retired to Northumberland to run a bed and breakfast.  His name was Les and he looked just like Mike Myers, only a little more grey.  His dry British humor threw me off at first before I got used to it.  He also had that plummy aristocratic British accent that tickles us Americans to death (well, at least just me). In the evenings, when we all congregated in the common area, Les liked to pull out his whiskey bottle and offer it around: "Fancy a wee drop?"  He was a great host.

Haydon Bridge was the closest train stop to Old Repeater Station.  This was the most ordinary town we set foot in while on our trip.  It was actually rather a relief to see a working class British town--it proved that England was a real country with more faces than the typical tourist attractions of Oxford or Lacock. 

We got fish and chips made to order at the Haydon Bridge Fish & Chip Shop, which we ate on top of the bridge, attended by a group of squabbling gulls.  The number and ferocity of those birds made me feel as though I was in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

Old Repeater Station was the only place on our entire trip that we could not reach under our own steam or using public transportation.  So we called a taxi and waited at a local pub.  Every head at the bar swiveled to stare as we entered, wearing our huge duffel bags.  The lady bartender called me "dear" and served up hard cider in an ice-filled glass.  We sat in the corner, entering the companionable silence of the other gentlemen there watching the World Cup.  A family came in through a door at the back, with a little girl in a frilly dress.  They paused to chat at the bar before walking out.  A gentleman at the bar struck up a conversation with us.  It was a neat little place, as comfortable as a well broken-in shoe.

Now comes the terrifying part.  The taxi driver gave us a roller coaster of a ride to the bed and breakfast.  The narrow winding road was hemmed in by chest high grass that grew right up to the edge of the road (there were no shoulders) and reduced visibility to what was immediately in front of the car.  Combine this with the driver's apparent suicidal streak as he went 40 - 50 mph, blindly whipping around corners and over crests with nary a caution that perhaps there might be a car coming in the opposite direction.  I wanted to lay down on the seat and hum "la la" to myself, but settled for closing my eyes and praying that death would be quick. 

Instead we pulled up in front of Old Repeater Station with Les walking out the door to greet us.  I managed to get out without going weak-kneed.  Seeing Hadrian's Wall just across the road may have helped.  Thus ends another day.

On to Hadrian's Wall

We made it to England in time for dinner.  I still can't get over how small the United Kingdom is.  The distance between the Cairngorms in northern Scotland and Haydon Bridge, England is roughly 230 miles.  The distance between our home in Kentucky and Indianapolis, which is about the half-way point of a trip up north to my folks outside Chicago, is a little less than that.  And we still have a ways to go...

Anyway, here we are taking a walk along Sewingshields milecastle, which is part of Hadrian's Wall.  We were a little frayed at the edges by this point, so a quiet walk along the lonely edge of a former empire was the perfect way to unwind.

Bath, England

Today was our last morning in Lacock.  We bid the sheep a fond farewell as we trekked through their field one last time.  They ignored us.  Mostly.

We decided, sort of last minute, to go to Bath for the day before heading into London to catch the sleeper up to Scotland.  The Bath train station did not have a left luggage facility, but we gambled that there would be a backpacker hostel that would store our bags for cheap while we took the sights in.  Our gamble paid off and we left our bags with a mohawked, tattooed, albeit extremely polite and soft-spoken young man at the Bath Bathpacker hostel.

Bath is a beautiful city. The heart of the city is crammed with Georgian buildings and homes made with local honey-colored Bath Stone.

I wish our street signs could look like this

On a bright sunny day, the stone is imbued with a warmth (doesn't "honey-colored" make you feel warm inside just reading it?) that infects you with good spirits, so you stroll around Bath with a grin plastered on your face and a feeling that all is right with the world.

Georgian architecture is very pleasing to the eye.  Influenced by the classical architecture of Greece and Rome, it's all about clean lines, proportion, and elegant details*.  This devotion to order makes for handsome buildings that you just want to sit and stare at for a long time.  It's almost like meditation, letting your eyes roam over the perfect proportions of the buildings, unsnarling the kinks of your mind in the process.

We walked to the Royal Crescent and admired the half-circle of stately townhomes.  I couldn't help but think of the 2007 Persuasion, in which Anne is depicted running along the front of the Royal Crescent, desperate to get to Captain Wentworth and declare her love for him, or whatever it was that she had to do.  These are not buildings that you just start running in front of.  These buildings would frown upon such an act, such is the weight of awe you get just from looking at them from afar.  What better way could there be to show the risk Anne took with the simple act of running than to have her run in front of the Royal Crescent?

We stumbled upon the Jane Austen Center on our way back into the heart of Bath.  It was a nicely put together museum, with scenes of typical life in Bath during Jane Austen's time, complete with dummies wearing the fashions of the time.

J. and I snickered at the poster-sized reproductions of the portrait of Mr. Darcy as portrayed by Colin Firth in the giftshop.  We snickered even more when we saw the door to the men's restroom. 

We visited the Roman Baths.  The water really is that green.  And warm.  You could feel the heat if you sat down at the water's edge.

The museum was full of ancient artifacts, such as this mosaic floor. As Americans, it was a little breathtaking to be in the presence of such ancient history.

After a snack of black coffee and pain au chocolat at a hole-in-the-wall cafe, we explored Bath Abbey.  We were struck dumb.  The Abbey was an art form composed of light and air**. 

We went up the bell tower, climbing 212 steps. 

This is the ceiling we stood on

In addition to getting a bird's eye view of Bath, we got to stand on top of the vaulted ceiling.  Our tour guide pointed at the keystone, which was about 6 inches long and a hand's span wide, saying, "If you pull that out, the ceiling will collapse."  There was also a peephole through which we could see people milling about the abbey floor far below.  The peephole revealed the thickness of the stone we were standing on to be about 6 inches thick.  It was a little spooky.  Nonetheless, the workmanship of craftsmen from 600 years ago held and I am here writing the latest post in our British adventures. 

*Travellers with backpacks and worn tennis shoes will feel a little out of place inside such structures.

**Art is as much as about the "lack" of something as it is about substance.  Dancers will sometimes interject moments of stillness into their routines.  This lack of motion is as necessary to the dance as any leap or wave of the arm.  So, too, with magnificent buildings.  I notice the intricately vaulted ceiling, soaring columns, details of stone, but the space of light and air they encompass is the ever more powerful. As if the act of trying to contain the uncontainable illustrates for us the bittersweet futility of reaching for the unattainable in the here and now. We are all trying to touch God.