The Rasmusens in Oxford

Thursday we went from Oxford on the A40 west to past Gloucester and then southwest to Bristol to cross on the beautiful Second Crossing suspension bridge across the Severn Inlet. We went to Caerleon to the Roman Legionary Museum, to St. Fagan’s village museum of the history of living in Wales, and had relatively cheap big suppers at the Fairwater Pub in Cardiff, where Dad got to try Brains ale. We arrived after dark at the B+B in Peterchurch back in Herefordshire. Sandy and Pat Gilmore, our hosts, welcomed us in and after the children were in bed offered us drinks and explained how they were restoring the old house, which had black exposed beams everywhere, low doorways, and bedroom doors with big locks. We forgot our camera, though! It would have been good to have had a photo of the kids at the Roman ampitheatre, or of Benjamin with a Roman helmet on his head. I’ll see if I can link to some commercial photos.

The Caerleon Roman Ampitheatre

Friday we went to the Children’s Bookstore in Hay on Wye and to Booth’s Bookshop, the most famous one (which indeed was quite a store). We bought books at both, including a Jennings book, some Shirley Hughes, and 1967 boy’s annual that Benjamin liked.

(click the picture to enlarge it)

We went up Hay Bluff . Mama stayed at the car with Faith, who was asleep. Dad carried Lily up most of the way on his shoulders. There was a strong wind, but the walkers became very warm very soon. Dad didn’t think they’d make it up all the way, but they did, Benjamin, Elizabeth, and Amelia doing even better than Dad. Lily fussed on the way up, but she was better on the way down. We saw sheep below us on the hill, and tiny mushrooms near us. We really missed having the camera, since Mama could have taken a picture of the tiny figures halfway up the hill. The hill was covered with grass in portions and brown half-dead bracken in others. It was very steep. Coming down, we went very fast, with Benjamin running carefully.

Hay Bluff

We went to Llanthony Priory. It was suitably gaunt and isolated in the hills. Part of it is a pub now, but it was closed during the hour we were there. We ate a chilly supper at the picnic table, of Red Leicester cheese, chicken drumsticks, bread, and potato chips.

Llanthony Priory

On this trip, our GPS satellite mapper was very unreliable. It lost the satellite signal frequently in Wales, it became confused about routes, and it couldn’t locate turns quite on spot. Also, it had poor judgement on the size of roads, something very important when so many of them are single-lane country roads going through hedges. Something we realized was that in England the big motorways might be the best way to see the countryside. The smaller roads have high hawthorn edges on each side, usually obscuring the view entirely. The smallest ones are the worst of all.

Saturday we went to
Raglan Castle and Tintern Abbey. We went on a fruitless search for the opening Hunt of the season, which the Gilmore’s told us about, at a fancy estate. We did turn into two different estate drives, going past gatehouses and lines of big trees, but they were the wrong estates.

Tintern Abbey

Raglan Castle

Here are some notes from the children about Caerleon:

Ben, Amelia, and Lizzy write: First we went and saw the ampitheatre. The ampitheatre was awesome. It had really big hills that you could climb on, with stone in them. It had a staircase that led up and you could go on the grass, but Dad didn’t let us. We played that we were people in a Roman ampitheatre, and that we were archeologists.

Elizabeth writes: First of all, Amelia shouted, “We present the gymnast”, and I came out doing lots of cartwheels and roundoffs. Then Amelia shouted out, “We present the bull,” and I came out pretending to be the bull and Amelia and Ben ran away. And then we did some marching with Dad.

Amelia and Benjamin: In the archeologist game we played that we were archeologists and we stepped on grass that took us back through time. There was a slave who found us hiding and tried to send us to the back room because he thought we were in the next part, except we ran away and went back through time. The slave said we were barbarians, and then he said we were Christians *and* barbarians and that we were going to get eaten up by lions. Then he tried to put us in, but Benjamin tried to fight him with his rock hammer. (This was all pretend. It was Dad acting as the slave.)

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

While Mama was off with Amelia, we put on Peter Rabbit and Friends, and the other four children all danced, each in their own charming way.

    

On our Welsh trip last weekend we went to Hay-on-Wye, right on the border. That small town has specialized in used book stores, of which it has dozens.  It’s *much* better than Charing Cross Road in London.  The photo has our purchases. Ben bought the Malaga book for 30p, and Trouble on Tracy Island.  He and I both noticed Tank Killing, by a very good author, Ian Hogg.  Elizabeth bought the book about a schizophrenic sister and the maths workbook.  Amelia found American Adventures, and a book for Faith that I didn’t put in the picture, at the self-service “honesty bookstore” on the main castle hill (there are two of them, far apart, for some reason). I pointed out Ben Hur to Amelia.  Hereward the Wake, Hypatia, Spencer’s Social Statics, and  Paley’s Works are mine. Life of Pi I found for Helen, and the two Kipling books for the kids.  Social Statics was something I couldn’t find at Oxford except in the Bodleian, which doesn’t check out books. Why?   They’ve discarded their copies– the one I bought is a Pembroke College discard.

At the Castle shop, I inquired at the desk as to whether they had the Church  of England Books of Homilies recommended in the 39 Articles. They didn’t. When I came back to make my purchase, the girl said, “This is rather different from your earlier inquiry.” I’d come to buy Tank Killing.  

We went on a trip to Wales that wokred out splendidly, but in a highly contrary way. I mentioned going to Wales at lunch at Nuffield, and BN told me he had stayed at an old farm bed and breakfast called Tan House Farm. I googled it and made a reservation for Friday night. Then he kindly emailed me with the web address, and it turned out there was another Tan House Farm bed ban breakfast on the Welsh border. I googled again, and found there were also, quite separate, the Tan House Farm Cottages. It seems that sheep farming country needed a lot of tanneries. Anyway, our Tan House Farm, run by the Powell family for 3 generations, was an exceptionally homey place to stay. Glynis provided the rooms with chocolate, biscuits, tea, coffee, and cocoa, as well as an impressively tasteful selection of children and adult books, and games. The house was very old– 1600s or 1700s probably, but they don’t have good records– with black beams showing and doorways barely above my hair. It is a working farm, and Glynis and her eldest daughter, living in the village but spending a lot of time in a “den” in one of the farm buildings, told me about how they raise sheep for mutton but are hindered by the late foot-and-mouth disease scare and chronic TB fears, about how they do grazing on army land as well as their own, about the profitability of potato farming for some people in the area, and about how Mrs. Powell grew up on a farm with her 6 sisters and one brother.

Their farm is adjacent to Dore Abbey, a monastery whose chapel became the village church. The church was unusually impressive because it is huge for a village church, with cathedral-height gothic arches and stained glass, but is not decorated and “used” like a cathedral would be. Only one chapel is used for local church services. It had a good book of stories about WW I veterans, including a survivor whose plane crashed, who was well treated and consoled by some Reichstag members, and who became the village doctor for 40 years after the war,known to everyone. He sounds like my Uncle Fred Scheppler, a WW I vet who was gassed in the trenches and became the Somonauk village doctor for 40 years. But what really impressed me was having the stories of the war dead, not just their names. Also, there were many lines of verse on the tombstones in the cemetery, and many Christian sentiments there. They have a concert series at the abbey too, which included a a recent recital by John Lill, an old pianist who was on staff at the Royal College of Music while Helen was there in the 80s.

My three major goals of the trip were the Roman Legion Museum in Caerleon, the Big Pit coal mine in Blanevon, and Tintern Abbey. We didn’t make it to any of them. But that was because we came across plenty to do as we went along. We ate peanut butter and honey sandwiches in a field in the Cotswolds…perhaps more later.