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squiz Member Member#: 6644 Location: Registered: 27-05-2007 Diary Entries: 3073 |
16th September 2019 Hiking - Walking: National Trust Lacock Village & Abbey and Avebury Wind Direction: Wind Stength: Surf / Sea State: Air Temperature: Sea Temperature: Weather: cloudy with rain later:(. Max Speed: Distance Covered: Monday 16th September – walks **** National Trust Lacock Village & Abbey and Avebury Manor & Stone Circle – cloudy with rain later:(. Good third and last night at the Canals and Rivers Trust car park by the Kennet and Avon Canal at Bradford-on-Avon and being Mags birthday we were going in search of a cuppa and cake out:) Packed up and left heading the short distance to the National Trust site at Lacock, Britains birthplace of photography, shame William Henry Fox Talbot didn’t tell anyone when he captured the world’s first photographic negative of a window in his home, Lacock Abbey in 1835 and some Frenchman took all the credit a few years later! According to the NT brochure there is so much to do, you’ll need a full day: Lacock Abbey is a quirky country house with monastic roots set in a picturesque village often used as a film location but to be honest we were a little underwhelmed! You park up and walk into the village which all the lovely old house/cottages are lived in but with shops selling art/crafty stuff with absolutely no connection to the area, a little Disney and none of the usual NT crowds either! The high light of the village was finding a ‘Little Popets Hidden Book’ which you are supposed to read, post a pic on Facebook and re-hide! The village is free but you then pay to enter the Abbey which includes the Fox Talbot Photography Museum. The museum was interesting, the grounds/gardens were OK but have seen much better, the Abbey being really old was alright especially the impressive cloisters and featured in Harry Pottor films! The Talbot section of the house was strange, like living in a series of corridors and we soon whizzed round there. It was then over to the Abbey Courtyard tea room where we found a couple of comfy chairs and ordered two cappuccinos with walnut cake for Mag Birthday treat:) My plan now was to head to another NT site marked on our map at Cherhill Downs with yet another white chalk horse in the hillside, there are loads of them in these parts but you couldn’t park as on a main road so carried on. Mag soon spotted we were near a Stone Circle at Avebury. We quickly found the car park as it started to drizzle and what a find this is, it is a World Heritage Site boasting the world’s biggest stone circle, which would have been even more impressive if some 18th century vandal hadn’t made it his life time’s work to destroy many of the stones!!!! It is a bit of a mix of things, first Avebury Manor a where the rooms where restored by a TV company making a programme called ‘The Manor reborn’ where the rooms were set up at different designs through the could sit on all the chairs/beds and touch all the items apart from the hand painted oriental wallpaper in one of the bedrooms! The garden was OK and again full of expensive sculpture and there was a couple of museums’ showing the history of the huge stone circle with the artefacts found there! The Avebury stone circle is huge with mounds and ditches surrounding it with roads now Chris crossing it and the village actually in the middle of it! The actual standing stones forming the circle were breathtaking and so big too looking even better against the moody grey sky and it is hard to believe they were put here up to 6000 years ago and are linked to many other sites all around this area! We did a circuit of the stones despite the drizzle and even took a picture of a foreign new age lady on her mobile who was defiantly feeling the power of the stones:) I love standing stones and these were some of the best we have seen, much better than Lacock. It was now time to look for an overnight spot, I had seen some hill forts marked on our map on the way to the Vale of Pewsey so headed there. We soon found the Walkers car park in the middle of nowhere surrounded by hills with yet another white horse and some really old things to explore tomorrow when the weather is supposed to improve! Photo Gallery Here NT – Lacock Abbey NT – Avebury |
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