I began writing this shortly before we left Britain, but then life caught up, and in the chaos of returning to the US, it got set aside. As I write these words now, it has been nearly a month and a half since we landed in the US and a month since we returned to Albuquerque.  Life has been…  Very good, but very busy since the return.  But the memories of Britain and Europe are still strong, and part of our hearts still live there, I think.

So now I flip back through my notes and the feel and scents of Scotland return to me.  I will do my best to transcribe some of them, but there’s a great deal to say, so this may take more than one post and some time to get out.  (Not aided, I know, by my incurable verbosity.)  Think of it as a slow-motion discovery for each of you — you’ll never know when another bit of it will pop up.  But I’ll do my best to at least finish up Scotland before, oh, say, Christmas…

One of the final tour targets for the great Rati-Lane British Isles tours was Scotland. We’d been hoping to hit all of the major regions/countries of the British Isles (England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland), but we still missed Ireland.  Ah well — good reason to return at some point.  ;-)

We had to decide on something, and we had really needed a work-free vacation, so we packed our bags and headed North.  A lot happens in a week of intense vacationing, so there’s quite a bit to report.  We’ll start with:

Edinburgh

Day 1 (Fri): Travel

Bus to Manor House station, Piccadilly Line to King’s Cross, National Express train up through England, past the now-crumbling line of Hadrian’s wall, and into Scotland.  Caledonia: land of the lochs and mountains and the flamboyant and tough northern barbarians who threw back Rome’s might.

For Americans’ reference, while the British Isles are small in a global sense, the distances are still large in a practical sense, and Scotland is very big and very spacious indeed.  Really big.  I mean, it’s small when you put it down next to, say, Alaska or the Ukraine, but it’s big to travel across.  King’s Cross to Edinburgh is just about 400 miles (about 650 km) and took rouhly five hours.  That’s roughly the distance from Boston to Baltimore or Louisville to Atlanta or Santa Fe to Denver.

We pulled in to Edinburgh about 8:00 PM and plunked down the cash to taxi to our B&B.  (Refer back to trading money for stress when travelling.)  We caught a late supper at an upscale Thai place near B&B row, and then crashed.

Day 2 (Sat): Edinburgh

Up, not terribly early (vacation!  Score!) and off to explore the city.

Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland and seat of Kings.  It is built along (and spilling off of) a ridge of basalt spanning between two ancient volcanic outcrops, and the scene feels startlingly like something out of a Tolkien novel, or perhaps George R. R. Martin. At one end of the ridge, Edinburgh Castle dominates the skyline.  The “Golden Mile” spills down the ridge away from it, lined with gray Georgian stone buildings.  At the foot of the ridge lies the new Scottish Parliament building and Holyrood Palace, home of kings-in-exile and home-away-from-home for more modern monarchs.  Finally, the ridge lifts up again into Holyrood Park to end at Arthur’s Seat, the other stone mass, open and airy counterpoint to the brooding fortress of its sister pluton.

Our B&B was on, essentially, B&B row, which is pretty much right across from Holyrood park.  So the first thing was walking through the park on the way to town. It was lovely in an ornately-sculpted, eighteenth-century sort of way. Our path took us below Arthur’s Seat (which we resolved to climb… tomorrow) and into the base of the town.

View of Arthur's Seat in Holyrood Park, Edinburgh

Then into town, entering near Holyrood Palace and the Parliament building.  We’d seen a sufficiency of palaces at that point, so we glanced in bemusement at the Scot’s brand new, £400 million (!) parliament building.  I guess when you get your independent parliament back after almost 3 centuries of suppression, it’s a cause for architectural exuberance.  Parts of the (in)famous building are really neat (e.g., the native stone facing with samples graven with various quotes and poetry), but other bits were just odd.  It is something of an architectural marvel, in that postmodern chaos-of-architectural-motifs sort of way.  Given its self-consciously avant-garde design and its order-of-magnitude budget overrun, it is, unsurprisingly, a source of some contention among Edinburgh locals.

View of office windows in the Scottish Parliament building

Side wall and fence of the Scottish parliament building

Front face of the Scottish Parliament building

We chose not to tour the Parliament building, but did marvel a bit at the exterior (with some confusion, as we first mistook the bizarrely-grated windows facing onto alleys as signs of a deluded office building).  I was taken, however, with the stretch along the Mile itself, which is faced with different Scottish stone and graven with Scottish verses in English and Gaelic.

From there, we walked up the Golden Mile.  Here we discovered a bit of a tactical mistake.  Remember that ridge of rock between the two promontories that I mentioned?  The city lies along the ridge between the two, but it slopes down from the Castle to the Holyrood Palace, which meant that we were walking the whole mile uphill.  Whups.  Still, it was a fun walk and there were great things to see along the way.  Like street bagpipers…

Street musician in Edinburgh

Our favorite street bagpiper in Edinburgh. Check out the tennis shoes.

(Remember kids: Bagpipes were designed to be heard on battlefields.  These guys were playing a good half mile apart.)

And blue police call boxes…

A true blue police call box. Inoperative, unfortunately. Or maybe that's just what The Doctor wants you to think...

And Adam Smith, trade goods in hand…

Adam Smith, the economist of nations.

And my man, Hume!

Hume's da man!

Along the way, we encountered hordes of tourist shops, ranging from kitsch to high-end.  We popped in to a woolen-goods shop, where Susan picked up a lovely Fair Isle sweater and we grabbed a sun-catcher for our friend Cat (who put up with entirely too much shit from our cats).  Further along, Susan invested in her new hobby of Scotch exploration, snagging an (apparently) lovely bottle of 18-year old Scotch (whose name is not presently at hand — oops).

Finally, we reached the imposing Edinburgh Castle, fortress and last refuge of kings and queens for centuries.  From this site, for over a thousand years, Scottish war chieftans and lords and kings had sallied forth to give battle to everyone from Vikings to English to other Scots.  (And, to hear the brief history blurbs in the Castle tell it, largely to get their asses kicked.)  Here, the infant Mary Queen of Scots holed up from her terrifying uncle, Henry VIII, and here too she herself later gave birth to James VI, future king of Scotland and England.  The Castle was the centerpiece of the Scottish struggles for sovereignty and independence from England for centuries.

(Part of) Edinburgh Castle

The intimidating bulk of the fortress, perched on its promontory of black basalt.

At this point, we were famished, so we made a bee-line for the chic castle cafe.  We were surprised to discover that it was actually good — a big change of pace for tourist monument eateries. (Of which we have sampled our share and then some at this point.)  We had a lovely lunch.  A decadent mushroom bisque to start; then I had haggis, neeps, and tatties (haggis with turnips and potatoes), plated in a surprisingly upscale presentation.  Susan had salmon (Scottish, of course), with lime sauce.  And we split a fantastic slice of Victoria Sponge Cake for dessert.

Contrary to popular opinion, haggis is actually not only edible, but in fact quite tasty.

On to the castle.  We toured the Scottish Crown Jewels.  (Older, by a considerable margin, than the English, but a tad bit less pretentious.  But only a tad.)  The great hall, home, now, of piles and piles of weapons, and, says the audio guide, a fantastically preserved original beam ceiling (and lots of Victorian fanciful interior decor).  Dungeons and walkways and battlements and courtyards.  The Scottish War Memorial.

But we’d done plenty of castle touristing at this point and were a bit burned out, so after only a couple of hours, we called it a day on the vasty pile of stones and headed back down the Mile.

We were a bit at a loss for evening plans, but this turned out to be the week of the Edinburgh film festival, and we hoped to get a piece of that action.  After some tired-tourist dithering, we boldly set off across the wilds of Edinburgh, in search of an art theatre.  After some slight bus mishaps, we pulled in to the theatre we sought just in time to catch the early evening round of animated shorts.

This was a bizarre, but entrancing series of indie animation bits, varying in length from about two to fifteen minutes.  Angst was definitely the theme of the evening.  A blind, old widow, searching for eyes in jars of buttons in her lonely hut in the woods, and the owl-spirit of death who comes to bring her sight and surcease.  The tale of the man who sits at the top of the great cliff to count people in animal costumes who come to cast themselves off the cliff.  The counterpointed stories of three everyday people and their reactions to close encounters with death.  A wordless musical tale of the child who wakes to follow the tooth fairy back to her subterranean home.

Heads abuzz and evening falling, we left the theatre in seach of supper.  Walking back in the direction of our B&B, we ran across “La Bagatelle”, a low-key, but fabulous French restaurant, where we had a stunning and surprising meal.  The appetizers, in particular, were strikingly unusual: Salad with sautéed chicken livers and raspberries, and terrine of pork with apricot jelly.  Then Susan had a fabulous chicken supreme with asparagus velouete, while I enjoyed pork cutlet with truffle sauce.  Altogether, it was one of the best meals we’d had since… Well, France.

Back to the B&B and crashed out, to be ready to take on…

Day 3 (Sun): Edinburgh, reprised

We hopped up to head back to Holyrood Park and Arthur’s Seat.  In spite of the imposingness of the butte, the climb was not bad — the greatest challenge was finding the correct trail up the side.  From the top, we attained an unparalleled view of Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth.  (Linguistic aside: Firth is a Scots word meaning “inlet” or “estuary”.  It’s originally from Norse, and is related to “fjord”, which gives some sense of just how prominently the Vikings figure in the history of Scotland.)  Among other features, we could get a much better view of the entirity of the Scottish Parliament building.  They tell us that the aerial view is important to fully appreciate the architectural design of the building.  We appreciated that it still looked rather like a jumble sale from above.

Probably the most photographed vista in the Edinburgh area

Susan enjoying the sunshine atop Arthur's Seat

The direction marker atop the Seat

After taking the air on the Seat, we headed back down, leisurely. Took a turn through a ruined chapel at the base of the Seat…

Ancient chapel just above Holyrood Palace. Susan does her part to stave off entropy.

And then headed back to the Mile.  There was a great deal more of Edinburgh to see, of course, but we weren’t going to be able to catch all of it, regardless.  So our goal for the day were the Vault tours.

The Vaults are a series of chambers located beneath the three major bridges of Edinburgh.  Not bridges over water, but bridges over the valley: they span out from the top of the central rock ridge to either side, meeting the hills that rise beyond the glacier-valleys that straddle the ridge.  Over the centuries, buildings arose along the tops of the bridges and up against the bridge arches, leaving vaulted spaces beneath the streets of Edinburgh.  For a time, these vaults were active as store rooms for pubs and restaurants, spare meeting space, homes for the otherwise homeless, and haunts of murderers and thieves.  In the early nineteenth century, they were condemned and closed because of water leakage and lack of sanitation, and it was only in the past decaded that some of them were re-opened to tourists.

The gloom of the Edinburgh Vaults, lit by Susan's sunny disposition.

Seventeenth century wine racks, echoes of long-forgotten pubs, wine shops, and gathering spots for Edinburgh's famed intelligentsia.

Our guide was a local history student, picking up a few quid by guiding curious tourists through the ill-lighted vaults and telling them tales of the people who lived and worked there and even an occasional creepy-crawley story.  Unfortunately for him, he had no other customers than us that afternoon, so we hounded him mercilessly with questions and requests for elaboration.  I could tell that he was torn between his history geek-ness and his canned spiel.  I think he was happy enough to see us off at the end of the tour.

From the Vaults, we went in search of the Museum of Musical Instruments (a branch of the U. of Edinburgh School of Music, as I understand).  While searching, we were amused to rest our feet near the Tron Pub (considerably older than the Tron that geeks usually think of!).  Sadly, no pix of Tron…  We did find the museum, which focused mostly on keyboard instruments, so we didn’t find any notable violas for Susan to drool over.  We were, however, treated to some fabulous harpsichord playing by a fellow who was working his way through the collection.

We still had a great deal of Scotland ahead of us, so we headed back early to the B&B to catch a nap and then an early Italian dinner. (The high point was the tagliatelle with salmon and white wine cream sauce; the calimari was acceptable, but not as good as that in Madrid. Oh well.)

We crashed early again, in preparation to fly off to the Orkneys in the morning.  But that’s another post, for another day…

As archaeology and ancient culture junkies, Susan and I have really been wanting to see Stonehenge and other of the great standing stone monuments of the British Isles.  (Yes, I know that other countries have them too, but we’re here now, so…)  Unfortunately, they’re a bit challenging to get to for the car-free.  Fortunately, our local friends Gwen, Joe, and Gavin have a car and volunteered to take us on the sightseeing tour.

One of the secrets that we learned from the locals is that, while the English Heritage group keeps most tourists at a distance from the stones themselves (for the stones’ preservation), it is actually possible to get to go inside the circle and to touch the stones.  You have to make a reservation well in advance, because only a limited number of people are allowed in each day, in fixed, early morning time slots.  So, entirely too early on Saturday morning late in April, we hit the road, headed for the Salisbury plain.  This is a couple hours away from our end of London, so it was a bit of a trek to get there early enough.  But it was a glorious morning and an incredible experience.

The circle of Stonehenge, seen from the approach across the Salisbury Plain.

For those who aren’t familiar, Stonehenge is one of the great mysteries of Brittanic culture.  It’s a neolithic monument, dating from roughly the period of the Great Pyramids of Egypt, and far before the written word had entered the isles.  It was constructed in phases, over as much as 3,000 years (depending on which parts of it you’re talking about and whom you ask).  And, unlike the Pyramids, we really have no idea what it’s about.

It’s clear that the circle has astronomical functions — the alignment captures midsummer and midwinter sunrise and sunset (respectively) precisely.  But beyond that, we know little about why or even who built it.  Given that it was built in phases over a span of time greater than that from Christ’s birth to today, it seems virtually certain that it was used by different cultural groups for different things over different eras.  What is amazing is the amount of effort that went into its construction and the fact that it remained of importance for so many millennia.  And that all of that importance is now lost in time, like tears in the rain.

It is difficult to describe the sensation of standing among the stones on a quiet, bright, sunny morning.  The sense of age and mystery is amazing and humbling.  The stones are immense — the small bluestones in the inner circle are nearly my height and weigh something like 4 tons apiece, while the great sarsens in the outer ring stand over twice my height and weigh as much as 25 tons each.  Their weight and silent mystery resonate in all the places of my soul that long to touch other times and places.  I can’t really put words to it properly, so I’ll let the stones speak for themselves.

Sun flares at Stonehenge.

A different view of the circle, showing how they've fallen over the ages.

The stones are home now to lichen and a variety of other life: birds, spiders, mice.  The lichens are fascinating — it turns out that they can do genetic studies on the lichens to determine their age and origin.  There are some lichen colonies that are, apparently, thousands of years old and live only here, on these stones.

Lichens growing on a trilithon.

New life nestles among the ancient stones.

A view of the outer ring of sarsen stones, showing the longest remaining segment of capstones.

The lintel stones in the outer ring of sarsen stones are works of high stone-shaping skill.  They’re actually assembled with tongue-and-groove construction aligning the lintels and mortise-and-tenon joints holding the lintels in place.  You can still see the tenons at the top of some of the uprights that have lost their horizontal stones:

Stone tenon, once used to align and support a lintel capstone.

Beneath the lintel stone.

Shadows of present and past: Susan framed by a trilithon.

After Stonehenge, we headed for Avebury.  The awe of the stones hung with us as we drove.

Before arriving at Avebury, we stopped briefly at Silbury mound:

Silbury mound.

Just as mysterious, and at least as ancient as Stonehenge, Silbury mound is an artificial hill, constructed by an astounding mounding clay and chalk.  While you could build it with only “modest” effort using modern earth-moving equipment, in its day, archaeologists estimate that it required 18 million man hours to move the nearly quarter-million cubic meters of earth.  And we have no idea why.  It doesn’t seem to be a barrow or burial mound, and no significant implements or artifacts have been found in the excavations of the site.

Today, it stands starkly out of the plain.  The photo doesn’t really capture just how obviously man-made it is.  It is dramatically different than all of the land features around it, and you have no doubt in your mind, as you face it, that it was built by human hands.  It’s quite a bit larger than the photo makes it look as well — it really does tower over you as you stand there.  Unfortunately, it is currently closed because some of the old excavations have collapsed, so we couldn’t get any closer than this.

Then it was on to Avebury.

Avebury is a small village in Wiltshire, not too far from Stonehenge.  It is notable now because it sits in the midst of an enormous neolithic structure — immense earthwork ditches and banks, a huge stone circle (much wider than Stonehenge’s), and a prehistoric roadway or avenue lined with standing stones.  Many of the stones were partially or entirely buried until unearthed in the Nineteenth Century, which preserved them against the depradations of those seeking building materials or fearing what they represented.  Today, they have been mostly unearthed and concrete pylons laid in to mark the positions of some of the missing stones.  The remaining stones stand an imposing sentinel around the village.

Part of the great Avebury Stone Ring. The village of Avebury can just be seen in the background.

These stones are older than Stonehenge by a good five centuries, at least, and they are just as mysterious.  They are in a very different style, being undressed stone, but they represent at least as much effort.  Some of the large stones clock in at 40 tons.

Susan and Gwen hold up one of the Avebury Stones.

Gavin, Gwen, and Joe (Joe's back, anyway) at Avebury. Yes, the grass really is that vividly green.

One theory (or at least story) told about the stones is that they are gendered — the tall, narrow stones being male, and the shorter, broader stones being female.  I don’t know that there’s any evidence supporting this, aside from the raw fact of the dimensions of the stones.  But it’s a nice story.

A "male" stone.

Part of the avenue leading into (or away from?) Avebury.

The earthworks surrounding Avebury are also monumental, even if they’re a bit less striking than the stones themselves.  I can’t find figures, offhand, about how much effort it took to construct them, but my guess is that it was well more than Silbury Mound, when you consider that they ring the entire village.  And when you consider that all that digging was done by neolithic humans, with no domesticated animals, using deer antlers for digging tools, it becomes awesome and terrifying.  What inspired them to so much effort?

After the stone tour, it was lunch at a local pub in Avebury, then back to London, tired but filled with wonder and fascination.

“And then, when Henry took the throne, he…”

I had to interrupt (being a loud and obnoxious American), “Which Henry?”

He stopped his flow of lecture and blinked.  “The Eighth, of course.  We’ve only had two monarchs, you know: Henry and Elizabeth.  All the rest were just placeholders…”

Henry VIII, as rendered by Ewerth. National Portrait Gallery, London

The funny thing is that he’s not completely kidding.  While all the monarchs of Britain have left their marks, some have done so more than others.  Being ignorant Americans, who barely remember most of our own presidents, much less the leaders of that-other-country-over-there, we didn’t really realize the extent to which Henry VIII left much more of a mark than most others.  When you start looking around the UK, he stands out in the parade of royalty.  My history books in high school sort-of mentioned him, and we all know his famous portrait, but we (Americans) tend to think of him as an overweight, turkey-leg bearing chap, whose major accomplishments were writing Greensleeves, fathering Elizabeth I, and running through wives like Imelda Marcos ran through shoes.

No.

Henry VIII was a ruthless, bloodthirsty bastard, who ruled with might and terror.  He revolutionized the British military and was an advocate of advanced military technology.  He bucked almost a thousand years of tradition and accumulated power to break with the Catholic church in Rome.  Contrary to popular representations, that move was only partially about his desire for a divorce — it was probably much more about power and economics.  In one fell swoop, he broke the power of the monasteries and grabbed their money and lands which, by that point, included over a third of the property in England and Wales.  It was the largest land grab in British history (short of the Norman Conquest itself).  It represented a huge infusion of capital into England’s coffers and funded Henry’s continued warfare.

But just having grabbed their power, lands, and monies wasn’t enough.  It was necessary to break their spirits as well, in some sense.  Or, more properly, to wipe out any popular support for the clergy by utterly humiliating them.  Henry had horses stabled in churches, pulled down monasteries, and issued writs allowing townsfolk to carry of the stones and roof lead of abbeys at will, for whatever purpose they liked.  We visited one small church that had a waist-high gated fence around the altar because Henry had issued a permit allowing cockfighting in the sanctuary.  His soldiers used some churches as outhouses.

Henry didn’t hesitate to use force against those who opposed him, and the Tower of London saw a steady stream of political opponents on their way to the headsman’s block under Henry’s reign.  He once executed a priest’s mother because of the former’s political crusades against Henry on the continent.  By the time of his death, our tour guide estimated, over 50,000 families had lost someone to Henry’s reign.  It makes his daughter’s moniker, “Bloody Mary,” for a measly 300 Protestants burned at the stake, seem like blatant historical hypocrisy.  Another tour guide cited 153,000 writs of execution ordered under Henry.  This man had the “do not fuck with me” meter cranked to 11.

But this is just one example of the fuller portraits of European monarchs that we’re getting here.  (Living in Europe for a while has done way more for my sense of history than all my HS classes did.)  Take Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, for instance.  What do most of us get out of American history lessons about this sweet couple?  What’s that I hear?  Funded Columbus to sail to the Americas?  True enough, but Spain paints a much different picture.

Don Fernando y Doña Ysabel, Reyes de Castille y Aragon

Like Henry VIII, Ferdinand (II, of Aragon) and Isabella (I, of Castille) were way up there on the “scary and powerful” scale.  They united two kingdoms to create the first major modern nation-state in Europe (what we now think of as Spain).  In the process, they annihilated the last of the Islamic state on the peninsula and slaughtered the Moors.  They were also bent on establishing a fully Catholic state, so they didn’t stop with Muslims — they expelled or killed every Jew they could lay their hands on and purged any other non-Catholics they could identify.  To aid in this process, they created that fine institution that we know today as the Spanish Inquisition, which proceeded to repress, terrify, torture, kill, and purge Muslims, Jews, Protestants, and even other Catholics for over 350 years.  Their reign towers over Spanish history — certainly in the South of Spain, you can’t go anywhere without tripping over their actions.

Nice people.

Oh, and did I mention that their youngest daughter was Catalina, better known to history as Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s first wife?  That explains a lot…

Louis XIV

France had Louis XIV.  Best known today by American school children for Versailles, elaborate hairdos, and having dukes vie for the honor of being his personal royal poop-carriers.  All that is true enough, but again, that portrait evolves out of a much more complex, powerful, and dangerous man.  He reigned in France for over 72 years — still the longest run for any European monarch.  (Victoria, the longest-reigning British monarch, only made it a skosh over 63 years.)  During that time, he raised France to being the most powerful nation in Europe, and possibly in the world at that era.  Through his brilliant military leadership, France overturned the balance of military power in Western Europe of the time, emerging on the top of the heap after a series of wars.  He played his enemies as skillfully as he played his friends, keeping both at odds with each other and weak against him.  He defended the borders of France with a scorched-earth policy in Germany and he broke putatively impregnable fortresses.

Louis manipulated his nobles into an elaborate game of courtliness that kept them close at hand, where he could keep his eye on them.  Like F&A before him, he felt that the best way to a solid and united kingdom was religious unity, so he purged Protestants and Jews from France.  (Technically, his revocation of the Edict of Nantes allowed Protestants to remain in France, so long as they did not preach, advocate, or practice Protestantism.  Oh, and their children were to be forcibly baptized Catholic.)

His royal palace at Versailles is now known as one of the most extreme displays of power, decadence, and luxury that has ever been known in the Western world.  (Notwithstanding Bill Gate’s house.)  But it wasn’t just personal aggrandizement.  It was a calculated move as part of Louis’ strategy to centralize all power in France on himself and keep the nobility under his thumb.  By creating such a seat of luxury and wealth, he made it de rigueur to see and be seen there, so everybody who was anybody (anybody who might possibly have been a threat, that is) had to be there in person.  Similarly, by setting up a system of dispensing favors and power by physical proximity to his royal self, he kept the most powerful people the closest to him.  And I’m sure that he found the irony of keeping the second-most-powerful people in the kingdom waiting hand and foot on him utterly delicious.  His reign and designs set the social and political course of France for a century, leading ultimately to the Revolution, with all of its chaos and blood.

It’s interesting and kind-of strange.  Even in the cadres of  most-powerful-people-in-Europe, a few seem to stand out.  I guess that’s not surprising — most Americans know only about a very few presidents of the US either, let alone the other congress-critters and supreme court judges who have critically shaped our country.  Still, none of the US leaders resonate in history with the intensity that people like Henry, Ferdinand and Isabella, or Louis do.  Which is, of course, a lot of the point — by design, none of the US leaders can hold that kind of power.  (A great thing, if you think about some of the psychos we’ve managed to elect over the years.)  But it’s certainly an odd feeling to think about those eras and people.  Educational, but makes me spend a lot of time recompiling world views and going “hmmm…”

Oh, and Henry didn’t write Greensleeves either.

Edit: My Spanish postdoc wrote in with some corrections about Spanish history. (Good to have someone who really knows something giving feedback!) Here’s what she had to say:

The Catholic king and queen never join the two kingdoms. As a matter of fact, when Isabel died, she passed it to her daughter, Juana, who left it to her son Carlos V, who finally inherited everything their grandparents had … as well as the Austro-Hungarian Empire (from his other grandad). Which is kind of funny, because Carlos V shouldn’t have inherit any of his grandparents lands if his uncles/aunts had had a child before dying.

Spain as a unique kingdom is a really modern concept that many current Spaniards are not even happy with :-)

Magdalen College Tower in Oxford

Wednesday, the four of us (me, Terran, Mom and Dad) piled into an Evan Evans Tour Company bus for a day-long tour of Oxford, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Warwick Castle.  High-density bus tours aren’t our usual mode of signtseeing — Terran and I have found that we’d actually rather see fewer places in-depth than glance at lots of them — but it seemed like this one hit places we hadn’t thought to go, and it seemed like it would be fun to see what a bus tour is like.

Courtyard of Balliol College in Oxford

Reactions are mixed.  For one thing, getting there better be half the fun because you spend half your day on the bus.  Like anything road dependent, it’s hard to know how bad traffic will be, which makes it impossible to accurately guess when you’ll get home.  We were fairly lucky this time, though.

The walking tour of Oxford was perfunctory at best and left us feeling a bit grumpy about the prospects for the rest of the day.  We were there a shorter time than it took us to get there from London by bus.  The tour took us through the streets to the fronts of some famous buildings and shared a lot of interesting tidbits from Oxford’s long history, but it didn’t include the *inside* of any buildings or even into any of the college courtyards.  Such tours were possible — we saw signs for interior tours of the Bodleian Library, in which Terran and I are very interested, and some other more in-depth walking tours as we strolled the steets.  We can go back to do these, and we’d already planned to, but my folks were stuck with a surface overview so shallow that it wasn’t clear whether it was worthwhile to have gone at all.  We took a few lovely pictures, at least.

Me, Mom, and Dad at Shakespeare's Birthplace

We boarded the bus with a lot of trepidation after Oxford and continued to Stratford-upon-Avon.  Terran and I had heard it was a pretty kitchy place with little to see, so we’d considered this stop to be of least importance.  We turned out to be wrong.  S-u-A turned out to be charming and educational.  The Shakespeare Birthplace home is authentically restored and features guides in every room to describe what daily life was like for the upper middle class of the time.  We learned a lot.  Actors in costume roamed the birthplace and the main drag of the town, breaking into spontaneous drama of scenes from random plays.  And there were flowers in the gardens blooming everywhere, which helped keep my mood high.

We also learned a lot of the known details of Shakespeare’s life that renders him far less mysterious than the collection of urban legends I had heard.  The path of his life is actually well understood and not even so insane for his day: he worked in London as a playwright for twenty years, returning about three times per year to visit his family.  His wife and children lived with his parents.  When he made enough to retire, he retired fairly young and built a comfortable manor house in S-u-A that he and his wife lived in until he died.  The retirement house was unfortunately torn down by a crotchety owner who got sick of pilgrim Shakespeare fans knocking on his door in hopes of getting a look-round.  Seems like a truly bizarre way to react — most people would have just sold the place to someone who actually wanted to run a tourist attraction.  At least, this is what the tour guide told us, and I’m sure every word is meticulously researched. :)

The tour continued through the rolling hills of the Cotswold agricultural region,

Warwick Castle

again filling us with history while we drove.  The area was lovely, and getting there started to actually be half of the fun.  Since we have no car and would rather avoid driving, we’d never have been able to see the Cotswolds in this way.

Warwick Castle was another pleasant surprise.  It’s the ancient fortress of Earl Warwick the Kingmaker, power-player of the Wars of the Roses, that was sold to the Madame Tussauds Company of wax museum fame in the 1970s to much wailing and gnashing of teeth by the locals.  The company turned it into a tourist museum with a surprising amount more taste than their wax museum chain.

Warwick Castle grounds from the battlements

Bits of it were kitchy — the grounds looked and felt very much like an SCA event — but it was overall very well done.  We toured two wax exhibits: a recreation of a weekend social party in 1898 and one on preparing for battle during the Wars of the Roses.  So, Victorian and Medieval.  Then we took a speedy and heart pumping stair-climbing tour of the battlements.  In our usual slow style, we could have spent a day there, but we had a rollicking good time in two hours.

We pulled back into the city around 6:30, tired but in good spirits, and we had enough time for a comfortable dinner and a pint at our local pub, The Salisbury.

The Palace of Versailles with a bit of obligatory scaffolding

It started out as a misadventure, but everything came out fairly well in the end.  We started by dropping by the open market outside our hotel to pick up food for a picnic.  Terran had been sucked in by the street vendors the night before and picked up two different kinds of cheese — a bleu and a soft cheese sort of like brie but more pungent.  I’m not sure if we actually tracked what they were called.  The morning of the Versailles trip, we stood in line at the bakery (boulangerie).  We were surprised there was a line, but after we looked, we discovered there was always a line at bakeries in the morning.  It appears that the idea is to get bread when it is fresh in the morning.  I guess that was also true in Madrid, but we usually shopped at weird hours.  The line moved quickly, and we picked up a baguette and a couple of chocolate eclairs.  Then we dropped by the prepared meat store (charcuterie) in search of pate.  And we found it.  The prices in that store made our eyes pop out.  We tried not to look like stupid tourists while we went around, scanning the prices for something we felt we were willing to pay for.  We ended up with a jar of duck pate with dried figs in it, and it was delicious.

View of the grounds from the wall where we had our picnic

Getting there was the misadventure.  We’d read several places that you should try to get entrance tickets to the palace ahead of time to avoid lines.  My 2009 travel book indicated that you could get a combination train and entrance ticket at the subway ticket office.  We tried this and got dumb looks.  Guess there’s no combo ticket, or at least not in February.  So we just bought the train ticket.  It’s about an hour out to Versailles by train, and when we got there, we were supposed to be able to buy tickets at the tourist information office.  There were well-posted signs to the office when we got off the train.  We followed them and ended up in McDonald’s McCafe. (I kid you not.  McDonald’s has a chain of cafes in France.  I don’t know whether to be amused or frightened.)  A couple of circuits of the area did not uncover a tourist information office.  At this point, we were getting very annoyed.

So we said: “Look, it’s a cold, rainy day in February.  This is almost as far off-season as you can get.  Let’s just show up.  How bad can it be?”

A row of galleries, each a different color. We assume this is the inspiration for The Masque of the Red Death.

Look, guys, this is VERSAILLES.  It’s one of the top tourist destinations.  Do not EVER ask yourself how bad it can be.  It can be worse than that.

So, yes, there was a line at entrance.  But it could have been a lot worse.  It only took up 30-40 minutes.  They processed the line very fast by giving you annoyed, dumb looks when you asked for any clarification on what the type of tickets meant.  We ended up buying a ticket that included the newly opened suite of Marie Antoinette, and when we consulted the map, it turned out that the suite was a half-hour walk one-way across the grounds.  In theory, there were shuttles, but I’m not sure we ever saw one.  With the time lost shopping in the morning and standing in line, we didn’t have time to go there.  It’s a pity, but we still had a good time.

Since all the delays at set things later than we’d intended, our first act at Versailles was to unpack our picnic and eat it on the grounds.  It had been misting off-and-on all day, but it wasn’t raining at that moment, and the air was misty and mysterious.  I will have to dig up pictures of what the grounds look like when things are blooming, but it was beautiful just the same.

The Gallery of Mirrors. Wow.

After that, on to the King’s chambers.  The entry fee came with an audioguide.  This was possibly the best audioguide we’ve had yet.  In general, audioguides seem to think that they justify themselves by giving you as many words as possible — you end up standing in front of something for ten minutes, blocking foot traffic and annoying people, while you listen to a long-winded essay on why this painting was King Fred’s favorite portrait of himself.  In this audioguide, the facts were almost always both fascinating and concise.  But it was also on extremely old hardware and had trouble loading its own entries.  So we’d end up hanging around, blocking foot traffic, trying to get the device to work.  You just can’t win.

For a tidbit of history, the Palace of Versailles was constructed by King Louis XIV, the Sun King.  He had lived through civil war and wanted to move his capital out of Paris to someplace remote in order to keep his nobles more isolated and under his control.  It worked, aside from practically

I attempt to photograph myself photographing the Gallery.

bankrupting France.  It seems like a lot of it worked simply due to his personality.  Louis XIV believed that as a royal, he was bound to make his life a public performance.  Even his bedchamber was roped off into public and private areas.

And, of course, there’s just nothing like the extreme conspicuous consumption of the great halls of Versailles.  I guess I’d expected them to be less lovely for their absurdity.  But every room left me awed.

After we finished the King’s halls and established we couldn’t possibly get to Marie Antoinette’s suites before closing, we toured the queen’s and dauphin’s suites.  If you have a leisurely day at Versailles, I might advise touring these first.  They’re quite lovely, but after the King’s halls, you tend to think, “Ho, hum, this is nice, but it should have much more gold leaf and murals on the ceilling!”

So, we didn’t get as much time as we would have liked, but we still had great fun.

More pictures:

A drawing room in the queen's suite. At one time, it house Madame de Pompadour.

Looks like the same style as the chairs in Mom and Dad's parlor!

A random view from wandering around the grounds.

Greenwich is probably best known as the baseline for both the Prime Meridian and the Greenwich Mean Time: 0º longitude and 0:00 hours.

And, of course, the canonical things to do when you’re there are to stand on the zero line…

Susan half in one hemisphere and half in the other.

… and to set your watch by GMT:

The Royal Observatory clock. Note the prime meridian line running vertically through the clock.

Sadly, these days the public clock display is set from GPS time, rather than an on-site master atomic clock.  Oh well.

While it may not be entirely obvious, the fact that 0º and 0 hours are co-located is not at all a coincidence, nor is it just the whims of the British Empire in action.  The two are actually quite fundamentally linked, at the level of physics and math.  The small observatory museum had a fascinating discussion of the science and technology of location and horology.

The short-short story is that knowing your longitude can be reduced to knowing what time it is.  Or, more precisely, knowing what time it is where you are relative to what time it is where you started.  For example, if you can figure out that when it’s exactly noon to you, it’s 11:00 AM at your starting point, then you know that you’ve moved 1/24′th of the Earth’s circumference east.  (More precisely, you’ve moved 15 degrees east, which is 1/24th of the Earth’s circumference, or roughly 1670 km, only at the equator.  Close enough for this discussion, anyway.)  So knowing time gives you distance.  Therefore, it makes perfect sense to put your 0 time base on top of your 0 distance base.

Now, where you choose to put 0 longitude is a matter of convenience or, in practice, the might of the British Empire.  But having done that, your time base is naturally set.

This is a familiar story to anybody who has read a bit of the history of technology or exploration.  What I found really interesting was the museum’s history of horology, focusing on the Harrison chronometers of the Eighteenth Century.  These were the first timepieces with sufficient precision and robustness to be used in practice for navigation.  He built a series of chronometers in response to a contest to devise such a device, and the Royal Observatory Museum holds originals or replicas of the first four models, most in working condition.  (The fourth, “H4″, ultimately won the contest.)  They are fascinatingly intricate machines:

Harrison's first contest chronometer. State of the art for the day, but not quite good enough.

(Sadly, we weren’t allowed pictures in the museum itself, so this is a stock image grabbed from the ‘net.)

What really startled me, though, was the evolution of the chronometers.  The H1, above, is about 3 feet tall, made of delicately machined brass.  I have trouble guessing how heavy it is, but I’m sure that it would take a couple of people to move it around.  H2 and H3 were similarly intricate, delicate, and bulky.  But then, just a few years later, Harrison released the H4:

Harrison's H4, ultimate winner of the contest.

Looks like a pocket watch, doesn’t it?  In fact, it is the great grandfather of all pocket watches — within a few years, it had been duplicated, miniaturized and was being mass produced for individual use.  The H4 itself is too large to be a convenient pocket watch (you probably can’t tell without a scale, but it’s maybe 4 or 5 inches across), but compared to its predecessors it’s a model of compactness and elegance.  It was incredibly startling to see three massive beasts of chronometers lined up, followed by something that looked nearly petite in comparison.  It is both a reminder that recent memory is not the only era in human history when technology has advanced blazingly quickly and a vivid demonstration that getting the core design ideas right makes a huge difference in the final design.

"Stop! Here is the Empire of the Dead."

Unlike the catacombs of Rome, the Parisian catacombs are relatively recent.  (As in, roughly as old as the United States, rather than roughly as old as Christianity.)  They were established at the end of the Eighteenth Century, as Paris’s cemeteries were overflowing, leading to incredible problems with disease and nastiness.  They fixed the problem by disinterring all 6 million bodies in the Parisian cemeteries and moving them to abandoned (and hastily sanctified) subterranean quarries under the city.

Ever wonder what 6 million corpses look like?  Here are some photos:

Memorial cross in front of the ossuary bone piles.

Skull and crossbones.

Close-up on bone walls.

Memorial inscription in front of another of the ubiquitous walls of bones.

Another close in on the bone and skull walls.

Susan looking a bit uncertain about the whole affair.

As you can see, they really took great care with the bones — they didn’t just chuck them into a hole in the ground, but carefully stacked the skulls and long bones (mostly femurs and humeri) into walls, and then piled in all the small bits behind them.  They even arranged them in aesthetic patterns and erected numerous monuments, memorials, and inscriptions.  Over all, it was fairly touching.

One of the oddest things there, though, was just outside the ossuary.  (The quarry tunnels run for almost a kilometer before you enter the ossuary itself.)  One of the miners spent years carving a relief diorama of a prison/fortress complex that he had been imprisoned in for some time:

Fortress carving, catacombs of Paris.

Fortress carving, catacombs of Paris.

Sorry about the dim, grainyness of the photos.  It was very low light and flashes were prohibited.  (Not that that stopped some stupid tourists, of both American and French persuasions.)  We were pretty proud of figuring out our fancy digital camera enough to get any pictures at all in these conditions.

One of our discoveries shortly before we left Madrid was a genuine Egyptian temple sitting in the middle of the Parque de Rosales near the Royal Palace:

El Templo de Debod, Madrid Spain

The story is the Temple of Debod was in the Nile river basin south of Aswan and would have been flooded out by the lake generated by the Aswan High Dam project.  In order to save it and in gratitude for their assistance with other temple projects, the government of Egypt gave it to Spain and it was moved to Madrid, stone by stone.

It was a bit of a surprise to us to find it here.  It turns out that there are bits of Egypt floating around other grand cities of Europe — Paris and London both have obelisks donated by Egypt and, of course, the British museum and the Louvre both have extensive Egypt collections that were not precisely donated…  Still, it was an unexpected and lovely find.

We got there fairly late in the day, so we only got a couple of nice pictures.  (And, like many museums, no pictures were allowed inside at all.)  But I particularly liked this one:

Temple of Debod, view down the causeway

It turned out to be tiny and cramped inside.  Which, I suppose, should not be surprising, given the size of the total structure and its provenance.  But we’re used to thinking of the grand temples and vast cathedrals, with huge, vaulted spaces.  Finding a tiny, cramped space was a reminder of just how expensive building was through most of human history.  (And still is, to those of us holding mortgages.  :-)  More meditations on that point later…