A weekend jaunt

After my last post, I met my friend Heather for lunch and hopped on a train to Exeter, about 2 1/2 hours from London, in the southwest of England.  I had enough daylight left to wander around town and see the old city wall (you can see the bottom stones laid by Romans!) and the outside of the old Norman castle (William the Conqueror was here!).  History nerdiness spiked, let me tell you.  The next morning, I reported to my conference -- which turned out to be pretty small and mostly made up of grad students.  The upside of this was that everyone got a chance to meet each other over the two days, and we all heard everyone's papers.

I gave my paper in the last session, so Heather was able to come and hear it.  I'm delighted to say that I was very pleased with the paper I finally gave, though I'd been tinkering with it until the night before.  By necessity, it didn't include everything I learned about Kemble over the summer, but I think I told a neat, clean story.  And since, as I'd guessed, hardly anyone had even heard of him, I was safe as the Kemble expert of that particular conference.

The next day, we set out on a weekend tour of southwestern England.  First up was Dartmoor National Park; I wanted to go since it was so close to Exeter.  Sadly, without a car and without bus services that only run on weekends, the best we could do was go to Okehampton (on the northwest border) and rent bicycles to go along the edge.  Still, we took a little hike at one point just to see some wilder-looking countryside.

On Day 2 of our excursion, we headed east to Dorchester, the town on which Thomas Hardy based Casterbridge (see The Mayor of Casterbridge).  This was because Heather is a Hardy fan and writing a chapter of her dissertation on his architecture.  Therefore, we absolutely had to visit the house he designed and lived in.  (Did you know he originally trained as an architect?  I didn't.)  We also stopped by the cottage where he was born and grew up.

On our last day, we hit two ancient sites.  First, and most giggle-inducing, was the Cerne Abbas Giant. (Pronounce that "Sern Abbas.")  It's a figure drawn in a hillside just a bit north of Dorchester, just by scraping off the grass to reveal the chalk underneath -- and it's, well, anatomically correct.  Read more about it here.  We took a short hike up and around the field he's in, but (understandably) he's fenced off, so we couldn't get a good look at the drawing up close, just a sideways view of some squiggly lines.


Last stop was Stonehenge.  I had heard that it's fairly disappointing and all fenced off, but it's really not, at least if you've paid admission.  In fact, the path gets quite close in certain spots.  There was also a handy audio tour to explain the different sets of construction that happened over a few thousand years (what a timescale!).  Of course, it was a bit hard to concentrate on some of it, because we got drenched in a little downpour.  We were actually pretty lucky that we didn't get rained on until this point in the trip, and it was over pretty quickly.  Plus, it gave us dramatic skies to make Stonehenge look even more mysterious.

We wrapped up by catching the tail end of evensong in Salisbury cathedral (love boys'/men's choirs!) and treating ourselves to a hearty and delicious meal at The Haunch of Venison, a restaurant that dates to at least 1320, when it was serving construction workers for the cathedral.  That's crazy!  All in all, a perfect weekend that went much, much more smoothly than our last outing.