Adventures of a Southern Yalie

I guess one of my favorite things about Europe that I have noticed everywhere I have been, whether in Italy, Denmark, Scotland or England is the abundance of flowers everywhere...I mean the flowers seem to grow without any attention being given to them. Back home in Georgia it seems like a full-time job just to get a rose bush to look nice and grow pretty roses. Over here, nice roses are everywhere...along with plenty of other interesting little plants, like the one below. So I guess this blog post has lots of flowers and vegetation pictures.

The few pictures below are of a church courtyard in Cambridge that is basically overgrown and unkempt.

I think it's a shame they even had to put up the sign (see below) in a church courtyard/cemetery.

Most of the epitaphs on the headstones are almost illegible by this point.

Last night while walking through the grocery store we found the little chocolate eggs that have toys inside...the ones that are illegal in the states. I think they're illegal because the government thinks that everything should be edible, and it poses a choking hazard to store an inedible toy inside a chocolate egg. But I think they're neat!

Tonight we walked up to the highest point in Cambridge... "Castle Hill." It's hardly a hill...it's more like a knoll. Seriously, it looks like a place I would have built a fort as a young boy. This hill is small, and it's hard to believe somebody was able to fit a castle on it hundreds of years ago. The castle must have been a very modest place. Check out how small this place is, even though it offers a fairly nice view of Cambridge. I found it kind of funny, but at least they don't call it "Castle Mount" or anything. :-)

See below...what you see in the entire size of Castle hill. It is about the size of most living rooms in houses today.

And below is the full height of the hill.

And below is the hill, as seen from the street.

And then on the way back I saw an old church behind the trees and wanted to go look. It turns out that it is St. Giles Church, and it's early gothic in style. One way you can tell it is early gothic is by the simple windows with no stone tracery.

Below is the statue of St. Gile, I suppose.

See the windows below and how narrow they are and how the come to a point in a fairly sharp manner...those are "lancet arches" and that's another big characteristic of early gothic buildings. Also, see the shaft/pillar in between the two windows? See the band/ring just below the top where the pillar meets the capital? That band is also characteristic of early gothic buildings, because the masons would hide the joinery of the stones with those bands so the joints wouldn't be so obvious. But there is one thing that points to the building's actual origins: the statue of St. Giles above the door. A statue like that cannot be original. All statues with very few exceptions were completely demolished when Henry VII created the church of England. Along with the fact that bricks were used in the construction instead of cut stone, it is clear that the building is actually a neo-gothic building from the 1800s. And I actually looked it up on the internet, and it was completely rebuilt in 1878. So yeah...some more useless facts about english gothic churches.