The Four Ages Of Sand

English Heritage 11. Dartmouth Castle

The best thing about Dartmouth castle is the view FROM Dartmouth Castle. It's situated at the top of an estuary and you get lovely views back towards the town. This looks continental doesn't it? Don't be fooled though, the period of blue skies and sunshine was brief, and was sandwiched between horizontal rain and flooding...

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Nice place to live:

On the opposite side of the river you could see these indentations in the cliff face (to the left of the tip of the mast) Any ideas what they were for?

The answer is:

English Heritage. Stone circles

Part of the plan for the Devon holiday was to scoop up a load of the English Heritage sites in the area.

It didn't happen because of diabolical traffic jams and equally diabolical weather. I managed one castle (see next post) and spent some time on Dartmoor looking for a Bronze Age stone circle. It's a stunning place, with weird rock formations:

and constantly shifting weather:

I got badly rained on, fell in the marshes and nearly lost my camera. I never found the stone circle unless this is it, in which case English Heritage is really "bigging it up" (That's a bit of "street" language to attract the youth to 4AoS. Though I suppose putting "bigging it up" and "street" in speech marks means I've already lost them...)

English Heritage 10. Wrest Park

We visited Wrest Park in Bedfordshire last week.

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Keen-eyed 4AoSers will spot the notoriously camera-shy Universal Mist in this picture too.

Here's the drawing room:

and the ceiling

I love the elegant language people used in those days to insult each other:

The best bit about Wrest Park is the 90 acres of beautifully laid out garden.

These were popular at the time:

Artificial ruins!

English Heritage 9. Rochester Castle

Rochester Castle towers over the city;

One of the towers was destroyed by King John in 1215 by undermining it using tunnels dug through the foundations then set alight with the fat from 40 pigs! The original towers were square-shaped but when they rebuilt the tower, they used a new design, so now 3 corners are square-shaped and the south-east corner is round.

The grounds make a perfect place for a picnic and you get a great view of the old town and the Cathedral from the top of the keep. Entrance is free, though fortunately they charge a fiver to go up the tower so we got the use out of our shiny new English Heritage cards again.

English Heritage 8. Audley End House and Gardens

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Now THIS is more like it. At a hefty £10.50 each to get in, Audley End House makes you feel that it was worth splashing out on English Heritage membership.

It's a wonderful place, full of all the stuff you'd expect in a top-notch stately home, but what struck us most of all were the gardens. You have complete access to the grounds, which stretch as far as you can see, and with no "Keep off the Grass" signs, people were playing, cycling, picnicing and generally enjoying the spectacular landscape.

English Heritage 7: Priors Hall Barn.

Priors Hall Barn in the tiny village of Widdington is a very early example of a timber barn and was built around 1440, using around 400 oak trees.

It's not much to look at from the outside

but quite impressive inside

The thing that surprised us the most is that it's left open all day and the site is completely unmanned. There are loose bundles of the original medieval wooden "nails" and other artifacts lying around which an unscrupulous person could pick up and sell on ebay, and make a lot more money than by selling antique toilet paper...

English Heritage 6: Silbury Hill

Next on our English Heritage list is Silbury Hill.

This should really be in the "What is it? (for)" category because noboby knows why it was built.

As big as many of the pyramids and constructed around 2300BC - the time that the great pyramid building period was coming to an end - just about the only thing that's known about it is that it's completely man-made and was built in 3 separate stages using different materials. It's a spooky sight, and best seen from a distance:

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A 14m deep hole appeared in the top of it in 2000, and the ongoing stabilisation work may lead to a greater understanding about what the hill was for, how it was built and how long it took to build. Present estimates are "less than 115 years, or between 140 and 435 years." How did they work that one out?!

For more, see the English Heritage site:

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/server/show/nav.00100100100s006001

Whilst checking my pyramid facts (those boffins are constantly alert for any 4AoS inaccuracies) I came across this great article which debunks the idea which often pops up in New Age literature, on the web (http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/parade/henryr/quest/sphinx/index.htm) and TV documentaries that the Egyptian pyramids and the Sphinx are more than 5000 years old and a product of an earlier advanced civilization:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/pyramid/explore/howold.html

English Heritage 4 and 5

We stopped off at this Tythe Barn in Bradford on Avon so we could tick it off our English Heritage list.

To be honest, it was a LITTLE bit dull, which just goes to show that being old doesn't necessarily make you interesting (Universal Mist made a similar point about me later in the day...)

In fact, we were more impressed by the tea room and restaurant:

But the main point of the trip was to see the stone ring at Avebury, the 5th English Heritage on our list.

Everyone's heard of Stonhenge but the Avebury stones 20 miles down the road are just as impressive, maybe more so, and unlike Stonehenge which is completely fenced off, you can touch the stones and wander around anywhere you like. In fact the village of Avebury sits inside the stone circle. I didn't take any photos worth showing so this is from:

http://www.sacredsites.com/europe/england/avebury.html

Ninety miles west of London and twenty miles north of Stonehenge stands Avebury, the largest known stone ring in the world. Older than the more famous Stonehenge, and for many visitors far more spectacular, the multiple rings of Avebury are cloaked with mysteries which archaeologists have only begun to unravel.

Similar to Stonehenge and many other megalithic monuments in the British Isles, Avebury is a composite construction that was added to and altered during several periods. As the site currently exists, the great circle consists of a grass-covered, chalk-stone bank that is 1,396 feet in diameter (427 meters) and 20 feet high (6 meters) with a deep inner ditch having four entrances at the cardinal compass points. Just inside the ditch, which was clearly not used for defensive purposes, lies a grand circle of massive and irregular sarsen stones enclosing approximately 28 acres of land. This circle, originally composed of at least 98 stones but now having only 27, itself encloses two smaller stone circles. The two inner circles were probably constructed first, around 2600 BC, while the large outer ring and earthwork dates from 2500 BC. The northern circle is 320 feet in diameter and originally had twenty-seven stones of which only four remain standing today; the southern circle is 340 feet across and once contained twenty-nine stones, of which only five remain standing.

Here it is from the air:

Image credit: http://www.blunsdon-pc.gov.uk/print/tourism-aveburystonecircle

English Heritage 3. The Westbury White Horse

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There are many figures carved into the chalk hills of the West country. Some are less than a century old, and some go back thousands of years. The Westbury White Horse is the oldest one in Wilshire and is at least 300 years old. It may well have Saxon origins, or perhaps was built as a "mock-saxon" monument in the late 1600's

The views from the top are wonderful. My only problem with it is that it's free!  Having joined English Heritage last month, Universal Mist and I were looking forward to flashing our shiny membership card and walking past the long queues of the paying public. It turns out that at least half of the English Heritage sites are open access, a fact that the nice salesman omitted to mention when I was filling in the direct debit form...

Here's another we saw on our way to the next English Heritage site. Thankfully it's not on the list so I don't mind the riffraff enjoying this one.

It's the Cherhill white horse, the second oldest white horse in Wiltshire. Cut in 1780 by Dr Christopher Alsop who is said to have directed the marking out of the horse from a distance by calling instructions through a megaphone, it used to have an unusual feature; a glass eye. Upturned bottles were angled to refect sunlight and the gleaming eye could be seen from a great distance.

Answer to "What is it? 49" and English Heritage Part 2

It's... the mortice at the top of:

Stonehenge, which is also Part 2 of our English Heritage list. Universal Mist spotted 2 amazing Faces in Places on the stones. I can't believe we're the only ones to notice them, but a quick search on Google only dug up this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/474977.stm and our faces are MUCH better than his:

and this is one of the head stones:

I tried to submit them to Faces in Places but you have to join Flicker and then join some group and it all got very complicated and frustrating and I ended saying a word that also starts with F and rhymes with Flicker and then gave up.