Aerial objects included one buzzard, one kite, several kestrels and a lot of fat alberts. These last flying out of Brize Norton and taking me back to my days with the Home Office when I used to spend quality time in Wootton Bassett, near its Lyneham cousin. The place having acquired its 'Royal' handle since in recognition of its role in the repatriation of the casualties of our liberation of Iraq.
Burford church was a rather extravagant affair, not very holy, rather a testament to the past wealth of the town. There were lots of memorials, a lot of them to various members of the Sylvester family, including one to one Edmund Harman, Henry VIII's hairdresser and privy councillor, a throwback to the days when the body servants of monarchs were important people. It seems that he had a sideline as a pioneer of the South American trade and his memorial includes the earliest depictions in stone of South American aboriginals known to the UK, possibly copied from an original in a Flemish book. Looks a bit Mexican flavoured to me. Does Harriet have hairdressers in her family?
The rest of the town included lots of Cotswold stone, lots of old buildings, lots of antique shops, pubs and tea shops. Not much in the way of regular shops at all and, in the round, not the sort of place I would care to live in at all. Better suited to the manufacture of jigsaw puzzles, biscuit tins and chocolate boxes. We did try for a ham sandwich, which turned out to be substantial but inferior, not a patch on the offering from El Vino reported on 9th March. But it did come with plenty of regionally accented chat.
And so onto Lechlade where we stayed in the Old Swan Inn, said to be the oldest pub in town and boasting at least three large fireplaces, one of them in our bedroom, sadly converted to coal effect gas. But the two downstairs were of impressive size and looked to have been in recent use. Good atmosphere, good black pudding starter and some work in progress. So, for example, the antique oil lamp on my side of the bed still sported a torn mantle rather than a light bulb. Over our bottle of white called Percheron, we started to speculate about the source of the brown goo used to decorate the salad under the black pudding. Could you make the stuff by stirring a little vinegar into a jar of Branstons' and straining the result through a medium sieve? Rather in the way that you could make the finest pâté by taking the meat paste out of jars of Shippam's and pasting it into a more pâté formatted receptacle. Bit of jelly and trimming on the top and Bob's your uncle.
In the morning we were interested by the large supply of damp wood chippings spread around the Inn's back yard. First thought was that they were flood related, but not convinced as the pub must have been quite a lot of feet above the Thames down the road. Unfortunately there was no-one around to ask.
Then a quick turn around town to find more more old stone buildings and more antique shops, but also a very decent wine shop, selling said Percheron for about one third of what we had paid for it in the Old Swan, about par for that particular course. I got some Alsatian white, to be reported on in due course. Wound up with a very pleasant walk east from the old stone bridge over the Thames, across a short grass field, presumably once a water meadow with plenty of space for flood water to flood out in. Not clear how the grass got to be short as it was: can you run sheep in a field next to a river without fencing them in? Were the rather sparse posts in the next post anything to do with it?
No comments:
Post a Comment