A Day in the Hampshire Countryside

As we left London today, the biggest part of our adventure was renting a car and driving it out of London. With our British atlas in hand, Michael and I navigated the M25 around London and fought our way through the always-just-up-the-road roundabout. They can be quite the challenge for those used to the overpass and entrance and exit ramp routine. Michael did a great job of staying on the "wrong" side of the road, and I was in charge of charting our course from the passenger seat.

With surprisingly little difficulty, we made it to our first stop, Chawton, the home of Jane Austen during her most productive years. I saw a lock of her hair, some of jewelry, items she sewed, and letters she wrote, all tastefully displayed in the various rooms of the home she shared with her mother and sister. The highlight of the home was seeing her writing desk, where she recorded many of her most brilliant ideas. We were also able to tour the gardens, and we saw the donkey cart that she and her sister used to take to the market. It seemed like a happy home, and I can see how she might have been so productive here.

Before lunch, we drove forty miles to Winchester to the capital of Alfrede the Great's Wessex kingdom. We spent most of our time at the impressive cathedral, which was built over a period of three hundred years, resulting in a somewhat haphazard layout. It does, however, have the longest nave of any Gothic churc in Europe. Its impressive library includes a ninth-century manuscript of the Bible, the 1000 pages of which were copied by a single monk over the course of five or six years. The church's museum also housed the chair in which Mary Tudor sat when she married King Phillip of Spain in 1554. Finally, the cathedral houses Jane Austen's tomb. She was buried in Winchester after having moved there only months earlier in order to be closer to her doctor. We also saw her last home, which is near Winchester College, a tony and prestigious school that began as a school for the poor. Our final stop in Winchester was at the Great Hall, the remains of Henry IV's thirteenth-century castle, where the purported Round Table of King Arthur can be viewed.

After leaving Winchester, we travelled further into Hampshire towards Salisbury, an important location in England since the time of the Romans. The cathedral here was our favorite of the trip, perhaps because of its austere nature, and perhaps because it was completed in a mere 33 years (fast by cathedral standards), giving to it a uniform architectural style. It boasts the tallest spire and cloister of all cathedrals in England. Uncrowded by tourists and with the organ playing during our visit, it provided a more authentic ambience than most crowd-packed cathedrals. The Chapter House contains the best-preserved original version of the Magna Carta, much better than the other two remaining originals that we saw in the British Library in London.

We very much enjoyed our travels through the rolling hills in this part of the country. There are no cities in the area we passed through, and most of the time we spent looking out at sloping farmland and grazing land for sheep and goats. I imagine this is similar to Hardy's Dorset, and I can feel a bit of the idyllic landscapes sometimes found in their fiction as we pass through. We look forward to more natural beauty on our travels tomorrow to some very ancient sites: Stonehenge and Avebury.

Note: Because of technical difficulties, we are unable to post pictures today, and we may have difficulty blogging during other days of our journey as well. The entries may also be shorter. I regret this, but find that they may be the price we will pay for being able to experience the beauty of the country outside of London.