Ancient places

The Emperor of the Garage and I are not big on taking pre-arranged tours, because our interests differ so much from many tourists. But we took a chance and booked a full-day tour with Mad Max in Bath, because the Emperor wanted to see Avebury and our other alternatives involved renting a car (gulp. Scary for several reasons) or taking a not-too-frequent bus service from another city. But Mad Max conducts people to Avebury, so off we went. But first, they stopped at...
Our old buddy, Stonehenge. If you hold the camera just right, and stand in just the right place, you can get a shot with no modern bodies in the frame. From there, we went to the village of Avebury to walk right in among the standing stones. The whole village is a World Heritage Site.

Of the two, I enjoyed my brief visit to Avebury more than Stonehenge. It's more intimate, and there's a friendly feeling there. You can pat the stones, sit next to them, whatever you like -- but don't touch the plants that look just like mint; they're a variety of stinging nettle. Ask me how I know. And, during some parts of the year they run sheep in the fields with the stones so be aware that you're in somebody's pasture. Our tour guide, Charles, showed us how the ley lines will cross copper rods held in your hands, and he told us the story of the Barber-Surgeon's Stone.

Like most old things in England, there are a lot of stories surrounding the Avebury stones but the Barber-Surgeon Stone has a really good one. As told to me, the story says that during the middle ages, the Church wanted to erase the remaining evidence of the island's pagan heritage, so they started making the Avebury villagers knock the stones over and bury them. The villagers dug holes, then pushed the stones into them. Well, when they were getting ready to push this stone over, the barber-surgeon didn't get out of the way in time and plop! Sqwoosh! No more barber-surgeon, until the twentieth century, when a marmelade magnate-turned-archaeologist bought the site in 1934 and started restoring the standing stones. Alexander Keillor dug around in the holes and among other things, he found the skeleton of the barber-surgeon, identified as such because the tools of his trade were still on him when they found him.

In the middle ages, barber-surgeons were as close to a real doctor as the average person could get. Physicians were for the upper classes, but the likes of you and me had barber-surgeons, if we had anybody to help us.

The Barber-Surgeon's bones were sent by Keillor to the Natural History Museum in London, where they were thought to be lost in the Blitz. The bones resurfaced in 1999, and now historians are unsure that he was squished by the stone as there was no damage of that kind to the skeleton. But it's still a good story.

After Avebury, our tour scooted around near Silbury Hill (I was on the wrong side of the van for a good picture) and stopped long enough for us to get a look at the Cherhill White Horse:

By this time, we were all ready for a good lunch. Our tour guide had made reservations for all of us at a pub, which turned out to be The George Inn in the historic village of Lacock. The George has been in business as a public house since the 1300s.

The Emperor and I like to pick themes for our trips, and someday want to take a vacation in England and only stay at inns named "The George."

Lacock is one of the locations for the Harry Potter movies -- specifically, they use it as Hogsmeade, the little village near Hogwarts that the students visit periodically. Below is Hogmead's High Street!

Lacock is also where some of The White Shirt Version of Pride and Prejudice was filmed. This BBC mini-series is apparently known to women (and some men) all over the world as "the white shirt version" because as Mr. Darcy, a smoulder-eyed Colin Firth emerges dripping from a pond, wearing a white shirt.

I think I'm going to put that movie in my Netflix queue... right now.