The Church Photography Workout

After a stormy and cloudy weekend, Monday turned out to be remarkably sunny. Motivated by the ever-present fear that the sun is about to go away any second (which is quite justified in England), I just had to go out and enjoy it.

So I took my camera for a walk through Great Milton to Great Haseley, a village about 2 miles southeast of us. Having things to take pictures of seems to be the best motivator for me to exercise these days, so thank goodness there are some old churches around here!

And boy, did my trip ever turn out to be a workout, as I'll explain below. I was absolutely exhausted when I returned two hours later! But I had such a good time. Since I took so many photos and it was a nice memory, this post might be a little longer than merited by the events, but I think I'll enjoy reading it later. So feel free just to skim!

My walk took me past Great Milton church, so I got two churches for the price of one. Of course I've photographed this one a thousand times before (approximately), but this time there were pink flowers!




Not long after passing the church I had to cross a large and busy road, but fortunately there was a nice large shoulder to use:


But the grass was really tall, so it took extra effort to make my way through.


Interactive map of Great Haseley. View Larger Map

The road into Great Haseley was long and straight, and would be good for bike riding. It was unbelievably windy out this time, though, which made a huge roar in the trees.


An attempt to photograph the wind.

Great Haseley is a nice village. I barely saw any people, which is always a bonus. There was the requisite pub and lots of nice stone cottages.


The Plough


Houses of Great Haseley

And here's where I got some extra exercise through having no sense of direction. As you can see in the map above, the main road through the village is Rectory Road, but you can use "Back Way" as a bit of a shortcut. I looked at the map before I left home and planned to take the shortcut.


Back Way

When I finally saw the sign for Back Way I turned onto it and walked to the end. The problem is that I had missed the first sign for Back Way and thus turned onto it where it comes out onto Rectory Road after the shortcut is already over! So I ended up walking back to where I started, doing a complete counterclockwise loop. Oy vey.

After another walk past all the same cottages and the pub, I eventually got to the church. And the sun promptly slipped behind some rather ominous-looking clouds. Argh. But all was not lost. I hung around for a little while hoping the sun would come back out, and soon I made a fuzzy new friend!


Was he ever cute. His owner told me he is Italian and a rare breed. She loved it when I took this photo of him and asked if my camera was digital so she could see the result.

About 10 minutes later, the sun came out! But only for about 30-second intervals. So this is where I really had my good workout. I literally ran from spot to spot taking photos while the sun was out, rested while it went behind a cloud, then repeated when it came back out again. English weather is ridiculous.


West front (14th-century, I think)


Side view


Longer side view


Run further down for a shot of the other end...


Do some deep squats for a tombstone photo...


And bend low to look through the keyhole at a stained glass window. Sadly, I had no key. I'm sure someone at a nearby cottage has it, but I haven't yet determined who that is.

There's info and more photos of Great Haseley Church here:
http://www.sacred-destinations.com/england/great-haseley-church.htm

Then I walked my weary self the two miles back home, getting variously sprinkled on and warmed by the sun, depending on the state of the sky above me at the moment. On the way back through Great Milton, I came across this lovely sight:


A Dodge Ram proudly parked at Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons (right), with the church tower visible on the left. Fun stuff, since I have a green one of these back home.

Today

This morning the sun shone brighter than yesterday and I thought it would be a good opportunity to take some pics of Great Milton church in the morning sun. David told me via e-mail that the weather was supposed to "go completely pear-shaped" (one of our favorite British expressions) later today, so that was even more motivation to hustle on down there.

Today's walk was much easier than yesterday - just 12 minutes each way, although that includes a substantial hill. The sky was more consistently blue, too, which was great. Here a few of today's pics:





I really love our local church. It's good and old (mostly 14th century), which is always the first requirement. It's also quite different, with its short and thick tower, smaller round towers on the corners, big wide aisles on either side, and lots of niches on the outside (they once held sculptures, destroyed at the Reformation). The stone is soft and pretty and the whole thing reminds me of a small castle. There are a few weathered gargoyles too, although I'll need to visit with a zoom lens in order to share them with you.

Since the weather seemed to be holding for the moment, I decided to finally have a look inside the church. Fortunately I knew where to get this key - the aforementioned Le Manoir next door. It was a good excuse to visit that fancy-pants place anyway.



There was a dapper-looking man in a shiny Mercedes in the parking lot, whom I took to be a personal driver from the way he was waiting, and delicious smells emanating from the kitchen. The receptionist was very nice and seemed pleased I was interested in the church key (probably because it was an easy request to handle).

Sadly the interior of the church is not nearly as cool as the outside, but it was generally attractive and there were a couple interesting things to see.


The choir and altar were decorated with bread for the upcoming harvest festival. I think the bread is real, but I didn't poke it.


The only sculpture I could find inside is this lady with a silly hairdo.

The main historical highlight is the Dormer Monument, which was carved from alabaster in 1618 for a local well-to-do family. Although monuments aren't really my thing, I will admit this is a nice one.



My favorite shot of the monument: the skirts and shoes of Mrs. Dormer.

I've now added these and lots more photos to my photo gallery at:
http://www.sacred-destinations.com/england/great-milton-church-photos/

I made it all the way home in good weather, but about an hour later, the dark clouds came and it began pouring down rain. And now it is dark as night and hailing. I'm sure glad I got outside when I did! And I hope it stays cloudy tomorrow so I can rest! :)

Celebratory dinner in Oxford

Yesterday was our three-year anniversary, yay us! I'm happy to say that after three years of marriage, two of which have been spent in a foreign country with pretty much no one else to hang out with, we still really like each other. And we arrived in the UK just a few days before our anniversary back in 2005, so we celebrated both milestones with a nice evening in the "Big City" for dinner (that'd be Oxford, not London).

David found a great parking spot on St. Giles Street, which left us with the perfect distance to walk to dinner - just enough to revisit some familiar Oxford sights but not nearly as long as we used to have to walk back to Wolfson College!


St. John's College looking lovely in the evening light.


St. John's again, with nice flowers and ivy.

It was great to be in Oxford again and it was nice for us country bumpkins to revisit one of our favorite old haunts, ASK Italian restaurant on George Street. I completely forgot to take any pictures of our dinner, but at least that means it was tasty and fun.

We ate at this restaurant not too long after our arrival in the UK and over our delicious pasta dishes we reflected how far we'd come since then. This time we didn't blink at the prices on the menu (in fact that place seems downright cheap now, with pretty much nothing over £10!), we weren't surprised in the least that all our waitresses were from somewhere in Eastern Europe, and the American girls sitting next to us sounded weird. We finally speak fluent British (the vocabulary, sadly not the accent) and have started to use terms like "lift," "lorry" and "car park" even with each other.

In other news, despite what the above pictures might suggest, summer seems to have left us again. Yesterday was beautifully sunny but very cold, down to 40 degrees in the morning and not all that much warmer during the day! And today it was cloudy and windy in addition to being very chilly. Oh well, at least it's nice and cozy in the farmhouse. I turned on the heater for the first time today, which led to that burnt-dust smell that always reminds me of winter.

Walk to Little Milton

Saturday afternoon we had a nice walk into Little Milton. This neighboring village is actually prettier than Great Milton, with a main street lined with lovely stone cottages. I'd been wanting to take pictures of it for awhile, so it made a good goal for a country walk. We took shortcuts through a couple different fields and footpaths, and it was just lovely. We even saw two big bunnies bounding away from us!


Field in Great Milton


Cottage in Little Milton


Main street, Little Milton


Little Milton church (built 1844 in a 14th-century style), west view


Little Milton church, south view


Some funny carved heads on the church


Inside of the church, which happened to be open because a guy was mowing the churchyard. Not terribly interesting, but it was nice to see the inside (which is normally locked) after so many visits to the outside.


We cut across an even larger field on the way home (this is all quite kosher in England, where you can walk anywhere you're not told not to). We aimed for the gap between the trees seen in the left photo. Those "straws" of cut grain (right photo) were really stiff and difficult to walk on, giving us quite a workout!


And back on comfy pavement for the final leg home.


Some wise words to live by, seen on a gate in Great Milton.

Information and more photos of Little Milton can be found here:
http://www.sacred-destinations.com/england/little-milton-church.htm

Three English Cathedrals

Last Tuesday morning David had to be in Leeds for a meeting, which required staying Monday night there. So I decided to take the opportunity to do my own "business trip" that I've long been planning, but with some difficulty given my current lack of a train station - a photographic tour of the cathedrals of Peterborough, Ely, and Lincoln. They are all grouped fairly close together on main train lines near the east coast, and are all on my "must-see" list before leaving England.

On Monday, we visited Peterborough and Ely together on our way up to Leeds. They are are both in Cambridgeshire, not that far north of Cambridge. It took us a little over two hours to drive from Oxford to Peterborough, and the countryside around there is really lovely.

Peterborough Cathedral

Peterborough Cathedral was a good one. Sadly, its most unique feature, the west front, was entirely covered in scaffolding. But this is what it normally looks like (courtesy of Adrian Fletcher over at Paradoxplace):



But we still got to see the rest of the exterior and the nice interior. Most of it dates from the 1200s and is in the Norman or Romanesque style.


Exterior of Peterborough Cathedral.


Firefighters were practicing going up in their lift-chair-thing in the cathedral yard while we were there, which David especially enjoyed.


Interior of Peterborough Cathedral.

One of the most interesting features inside was the ceiling, which was painted with designs and pictures in the 13th century. I've never seen a similar ceiling anywhere else.


The ceiling from beneath the pretty tower vault - painted bit at the top.


Closer look at the painted ceiling.

The other interesting sight was the tomb of Catherine of Aragon, the unlucky first wife of King Henry VIII. After she failed to bear Henry a son (though she did have a daughter) and he became very interested in the childbearing hips of Anne Boleyn, he asked the Pope for permission to get a divorce. The pope refused, mainly because Catherine had powerful relatives in Spain. So Henry declared himself the head of the Church of England, got his divorce, and that was the beginning of the English Reformation.



The title above her tomb is "Katherine, Queen of England," which is rather touching because she was denied that title upon her death. She did have a daughter, as you probably know, who later became the queen known as "Bloody Mary."

More info and photos at Peterborough Cathedral on Sacred Destinations, and more photos here on Flickr.

We both agreed this cathedral was appropriately large, good and old, and with some interesting features, but neither of us was blown away. I began to fear that even I was becoming jaded from the privilege of visiting so many cathedrals. Fortunately, the next two took away that worry! They were both fantastic, and in quite different ways.

But first, our stomachs demanded we make time for lunch in Peterborough. The town center was right next to the cathedral and was historic and pleasant. In the center of it all was an old man preaching about salvation and the Last Days from a small wooden lectern, and his small audience included two young Mormon missionaries resting on a stone wall.


Market hall in Peterborough. The preacher is among the crowd to the right.

We had a very good lunch of toasted sandwiches and chips at a tea room not far from the market hall pictured above. It must have been geared to tourists, as the menu proclaimed it "A truly English experience." We didn't really agree - we thought it looked like Elmer's. But it was very tasty and the waitress was super nice, so we were very happy.

Ely Cathedral

Ely (rhymes with "freely") Cathedral was about an hour or so from Peterborough, in the exact opposite direction of Leeds. I felt terrible that David was going so far out of his way for me, but he said he didn't like the idea of me traveling alone all day and wanted to see the cathedrals too. What a guy!

Things went well from the moment we arrived in Ely. Places to park were scarce, and yet we found a free parking spot on the street almost right in front of the cathedral. We could hardly believe our luck - parking is one of the biggest headaches in our UK travels.

The next pleasant surprise was the approach to the cathedral, which was green and shady and very beautiful. This accounted for a lot of why we liked it so much.




The west front (above) has quite a unique appearance, primarily because the smaller tower that once stood on the left (to match the one on the right) fell down a few hundred years ago. It has never been rebuilt, leaving the cathedral with a rather lopsided look. I am a sucker for unique features, such as the crazy scissor arches at Wells Cathedral, and I like this one a lot as well.

We started by walking around the outside, where we got this nice view:



and met these silly characters:



When we went inside, we learned that a tour of the "octagon" was leaving in five minutes. Always happy for a good view on a sunny day, I went ahead and joined up (David opted out).

The octagon is an unusual central tower that has never been done anywhere else. It was built in the 1300s after the original Norman tower fell down (a lot of things have fallen down at Ely). It involved moving the pillars, strengthening them, and then constructing a structure made of 200 tons of English oak timbers decorated with stained glass and roofed with lead.


View of the octagon from outside.


View of the octagon from below.


A closer look.

The tour was seriously cool. All the stairs didn't even seem too bad, since they were in small sections.


First we emerged on the second level of the cathedral interior, where we had a nice view of the transept (cross-arm of the church).


Then the stairs got steeper and narrower as we climbed up farther...


On the way, we walked across the top of the bridge-like area that connects the Lady Chapel (left) with the east end of the cathedral (right).


And finally we entered the octagon itself, where the guide explained a bit about the physics of how the oak timbers (which are something like 800 years old) hold it all up.

The wooden panels pictured above are the backs of the angel paintings in the tower. These swung open like doors, allowing us to stick our heads out and peer straight down to the floor below. Talk about vertigo!


Our guide talking about the history from across the octagon.


And the magnificent, dizzying view to the floor below!

And even then, we weren't done climbing. Another short set of stairs brought us up above the wooden angels to the roof, where we stood outside the stained glass windows of the octagon and had more magnificent views.


The octagon and stone pinnacles on the roof.


View of Ely and the pretty landscape from the cathedral rooftop.

There's a complete photo gallery (215 pics) from Ely Cathedral now online at:
http://www.sacred-destinations.com/england/ely-cathedral-pictures/

Leeds

From Ely it was another two hours or so to Leeds, which is a huge city. The very wide and well-lit cloverleaf freeways almost made it feel like we were in L.A. But our sat nav guided us well to our hotel, where we arrived around 7:30pm.

We got to stay in the plush, company-paid Malmaison Leeds. It was as fabulous as we'd hoped, even though David said the room was smaller than the one he had last time. As usual, we did not want to leave, and it was a shame we didn't actually spend much time there.




Above is what we had for dinner - sandwiches via room service!


The toiletries in the bathroom were fun, particularly the breath spray called "Snog Me Senseless."

Lincoln Cathedral

Tuesday morning, I set off for the train station (handily only a couple blocks away) at 8:07 hoping to catch the 8:20 train, and just made it! My train ride went pretty quickly and smoothly. I started out on a huge Leeds-London train that had well over a dozen cars and was mostly filled with business commuters, then changed over to a tiny green choo-choo-er with only an engine and one car for the rest of the way to Lincoln.

Lincoln Cathedral is one of the biggest cathedrals and in England and universally considered one of the best, so I was quite excited to see it. It did not disappoint!
As we pulled into the station at Lincoln, I was thrilled to get a surprise first glimpse of it across a lovely swan-filled river:



I had forgotten that it was perched so high on a hill, though, so it was a little overwhelming to think of the hike I had ahead of me. And it was quite a hike indeed. I had only limited time to spend in Lincoln before I had to be back in Leeds, so I went as fast as possible and was sure huffing and puffing when I finally reached the top about 15 minutes later!


This road is called "Steep Hill," and aptly so. It was a very charming medieval street filled with great galleries, tea shops, pubs and such.


At the top of Steep Hill is the Cathedral Quarter, which was fantastic.

It is not really clear in the above photo because of the tree, but the cathedral's facade is almost entirely obscured by a great stone gateway:


Cathedral gateway (taken from the cathedral side)

And so you can't really see the cathedral very well as you approach. Then you walk through the darkness of the gateway before emerging into the light and seeing this:



Even my wide-angle lens doesn't do this view justice. I was absolutely blown away! That facade is the hugest, most cliff-like thing I've ever seen in an ancient building. If you look at the size of the people in the above photo, you might be able to imagine what it's like when they look up at it. Just incredible.



That huge central portal is also very cool and quite unique. It is filled with fantastic carved sculptures in wondrous detail, and I was so sorry I had to leave before the sun fully swung around to the west to shine on it.


Details of the portal in the shade.


When I first arrived, there was a graduation ceremony for the University of Lincoln being held inside. This was a bummer, but the cathedral is so huge that visitors were still let inside the eastern half of the interior, and I was able to see the western part after the ceremony was over about an hour later.


And the morning sun did give me a good opportunity to photograph the east end. On the right is the Chapter House, where the cathedral's dean and chapter meet to discuss church matters. It's patterned after the chapter houses used by monks, but Lincoln Cathedral has never been attached to a monastery (there's no river up here on the hill, for one thing).


There were great gargoyles all over the outside, and I took some time with our little zoomy camera to capture some of them. Above is a pig and a man with a bugle (?) high atop a pinnacle.

Inside, the highlights included:


The beautiful east window, still with its medieval stained glass


A soaring Gothic nave, which my wide-angle lens seems made for



A lovely choir, with a full set of choir stalls with many medieval carvings


A nice chapter house with star vault and...


...set pieces from The Da Vinci Code movie!

Lincoln Cathedral stood in as Westminster Abbey during filming, and lots of monuments and murals were constructed to make it look the part. It was a pretty exciting event for the people of Lincoln and many of them even got to be extras in the movie. Some of the props have been left on display in the chapter house, along with some interesting posters about the whole experience. I learned that Audrey Tatou was always cold in the cathedral and that Tom Hanks promised his sons a game of cricket in Hyde Park one weekend. Fun stuff.


The set included these very real-looking murals painted on a canvas in the chapter house, and still left in place.


By this time I was so hungry I was actually starting to feel a little dizzy (sightseeing is the only time I regard eating as inconvenient!), so I stopped in the cloister cafe for a quick lunch. In between bites I attempted to send a text message to David about my return plans. I don't know how some people text as fast as they do. Practice, I'm sure, but I find it so tedious.

Then I headed back outside and over to Lincoln Castle to climb the observatory tower for photos of the cathedral. This was actually my second time doing this (the first was while waiting for graduation to finish), but I was hoping the light would be a bit better by now since it was approaching 1:30.


Lincoln Castle gate and inside, with tents for graduate receptions.


The observatory tower that I climbed twice, and a view of the castle wall from its base.


The climb was well worth it - such a nice view!

I had waited until the absolute last minute in the hopes of getting the best light on the west front, so then I had to really hustle back down the hill to the station for the 2:04 train back to Leeds. Boy were my legs like jelly by then! Thankfully I made it, and even had three minutes to buy a water and magazines before boarding. Also got to talk to David briefly as he was on a break from his meetings, which was nice.

I had a pleasant ride to Newark where I had to change trains, but then the fun ended. I took about 30 seconds to find my connecting train's platform on the departures screen, then as I was crossing the footbridge over the tracks, I heard the whistle for my train! I sprinted down the stairs and just as I reached it and still held out hope for hopping on, it pulled away.

I was so disappointed, especially because it meant I would hold up David from getting back home from Leeds. He had told me his meetings would be over by 3:00, but had said to take my time since I was having such a good time. What a guy. My train was supposed to arrive in Leeds at 4:00, but now the next one wouldn't get me there until 4:30. And then that train showed as being delayed... and then it was cancelled. We're not in Switzerland anymore, Toto.

So I hung out in the waiting room of the Newark village train station for a couple hours, trying to remain calm and being very thankful for those magazines I'd picked up in Lincoln. David continued to be great about the whole thing as I kept him updated via short exasperated text messages.

Eventually we decided that the best bet now would be for him to come pick me up on his way home. In the meantime, I got to chat with a nice lady from Alberta, Canada on an outdoor bench in the sunshine. I learned about the Chinook Winds, a phenomenon that gives Alberta crazy temperature changes. Very interesting.

My rescuer showed up around 4:30, still in pretty good spirits despite his unplanned detour to Newark, and we had a nice rest of the drive home. We even ended up getting home about the same time we'd hoped. So British train failures notwithstanding, we had quite a good time on our two-day adventure up north.

There are lots more photos of Lincoln Cathedral here.