Dorchester on Thames.

This is the Abbey at Dorchester. It's near Oxford and is at least a thousand years old. It's a charming village; Robyn visited it last year, so we thought we'd take a look.

There are picture postcard thatched cottages;

While The George Inn has a horse drawn carriage on display;

It probably would have been used to take guests to and from the railway station, although it was certainly old enough to have been been there before the railway arrived.

The tyres were solid so it must have been quite a hard ride and it's always a shock to see how much smaller people used to be back then. I would have had trouble squeezing inside.

It's Oxfordshire, so the old buildings are made of this warm, orangey coloured stone;

We looked around the little museum which is in the tiny Grammer school next to the Abbey.

There are Roman relics; I was very interested by a coin/token with the head of Medusa on it which looked very similar to a carved head we saw at The Roman Baths in Bath last September.

They had a lovely pot made by 'The Beaker People' and an beautiful stone age flint axe head.

In the Abbey there was a choir rehearsing medieval sacred music for a show in the evening; you couldn't have picked a better time to have visited

We had a look at The Cloister Garden by the side of the Abbey, full of the kind of herbs the monks would have once grown for medicinal purposes.

This was the view from the back of the church, across the water meadows;

The far meadow is white with flowers of Cowslip, everywhere was a riot of wild flowers;

Back in the churchyard we saw this medieval cottage, a like a full size gingerbread house;

Of course, we'd gone there to enjoy the ancient architecture, the ecology of the water meadows and to soak up the glories of an expert choir singing ' ye olde Englishe musik'.

The fact that you can have a really nice tea at The Abbey Tearooms played no part at all in our decision to go there.

No part whatsoever.

We each had the strawberry cake and shared a slice of the Blackberry strudel as well.

 

Mmmmmmmh!



On the way back we stopped off at Goring, down by the River Thames.

There are some nice stone cottages and a weir;

But if I'm honest about it, Goring was boring.

Neil Harris
(a don't stop till you drop production)

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