Manors and Houses and Wales oh my.

I woke up rather unhappily at 630 am after going to sleep at 230 am for no legitimately good reason other than the fact that Noah and I got exceptionally motivated and made all of our travel arrangements for our trips to Paris, Florence, and Barcelona. After drudging my way to the lobby (coffee in hand, thank god) we eventually set off with the rest of our classmates on a tour bus going west through Britain. We first stopped at Stone Henge, which is exceptionally old, mysterious and large.

And also full of a great number of tourists who are fascinated by oldness, mysteriousness and largeness of it.

Then we stopped at Montacute house (which I wrote a paper on last week) that belonged to the Phelips family at some point before one of their relatives gambled away the family fortune. Now it belongs to the National Trust. The driveway was my favorite part (whatever that says for the house). 

I then found myself in Salisbury Cathedral which had this curious little plaque commemorating the men of Salisbury who had fought in the Burma campaign. This plaque seemed to be a small monument to the way in which empire infiltrated the English identity.

The church was rather pretty also.

From there we made our way on the bus to Tintern Abbey in Wales and after a long and tiresome discussion of a Wordsworth named for the site we all got do a little exploring around the Abbey.

We then ventured to another house of which I no longer remember the name. It was not a particularly striking house and this staircase was by far the nicest thing about it. 

Then we went to this house which I was exceptionally skeptical of since it looked like it could fall down at any moment. See how it looks like parts of it are bending? They are. The stone roof is slowly destroying the house because the upper floors were not properly aligned for structural support. 

After that we went to Chatsworth, which the exceptionally large manor house of the Duke of Devonshire who also still ives there some parts of the year. This place was astoundingly large and covered in gold. The art collection was amazing and they even had an original Da Vinci drawing. I really appreciated the collections of modern ceramic art displayed around the house. It was a bit overwhelming but the gardens definitely helped temper the excess of gaudy decoration.

Just to give you a sense of the grandeur.

After that we made our way back to London ambling through the countryside in our bus.