Early summer was spent in the UK, England and Scotland, with
my Chile teacher friends, Glenda from Canada, Sue from England, Lynda from
Scotland. This was our third reunion since we reconnected in 2010, now 45 years
after teaching and living together in Santiago, Chile. Erica, who lives in
Chile, is still working and couldn’t join us. In 2010 we were in southern
Chile, then in 2011 in Minnesota and Canada, and now with Sue and Lynda in the
UK. We traveled four weeks; Lynda did all the planning and all the driving. We
admired her skill as we rode on narrow winding hilly country roads in both
England and Scotland, mostly lined with hedges or stonewalls. Our trip had 5
stages, and Glenda and I had a pre stage in London, and then at the end, I
added an additional stage that turned out to be another reunion. This time with
two women, Jane and Margot, that I had taught with in Denmark 30 years
ago. Both now live in England,
Margot in York, and Jane and her husband, Lars, in Berwick-upon-Tweed.
Darlene, Glenda, Sue, Lynda
London was great fun; we walked and walked and walked, mostly along the River Thames, and saw all the familiar sights and some new ones too. We visited art galleries: Tate Modern, Tate British and the National Gallery. One day we took the train to Hampton Court (1514) to see the palace where Henry VIII lived with various wives. It’s a beautiful palace with exquisite gardens.
Stage 1 of our trip together began at Sue’s house in the
village of Woodbridge where the River Deben flows out to the sea, northeast of
London, and near Ipswich. It’s a lovely rural area with rolling hills, green
fields, vivid yellow rape fields, and grazing cattle. Each day we set off to
explore a different area and walk. We visited the area where British painter,
John Constable (1776-1837), had painted, a pleasant walk though fields and
partly along a river. Another day we visited Sutton Hoo (625 AD), an Anglo
Saxon burial site where two ships and their captains had been buried with their personal goods which included helmets and
stunning jewelry.
Some beautiful Anglo Saxon artifacts were on display in the museum. We drove by
many lovely cottages with thatched roofs just like in Denmark.
I’m always on the lookout for wild flowers and it turned out
to be the summer of blue bells; we saw our first purple carpets in a forest
here. As we continued our trip north we continually saw blue bells, an endless
number along the roadsides and in fields. It wasn’t until I got to Berwick at
the end of my trip that the blue bells ceased, but then there were buttercups,
fields and fields of them.
Stage 2 was spent at a farmhouse in Yorkshire that we rented
for a week near the village of Helmsley. It was set high on a hill, and on one
side of the property there was a view from an escarpment of endless farms and
pastures in various sizes and shapes with stonewalls outlining them. There were
mostly sheep in the fields. We
went on several good walks in Yorkshire exploring the moors and dales, and also
the medieval town of York. York has many old buildings, a magnificent church,
called the Minster from the Saxon word for mission church. We also walked on a
section of the city wall. We visited the seaside towns of Witby and Robin
Hood’s Bay, unfortunately it was very foggy and we saw little. We had a
delicious meal of fish and chips, however. We drove over the moors and only saw
dark brown heather at this time of year, very bleak, dreary, and depressing. We
felt sorry for the sheep in the cold blustery wind. One of the highlights in the area was a magnificent abbey
ruin, Rievaulx, with both the church and the monastery from the twelfth
century.
Stage 3 consisted of two two-night stays hostels, the first
stop was Hadrian’s Wall, a Roman wall from 124 A.D. when the wall was build
from shore to shore for 73 miles to guard the northern most boundary of the
Roman Empire. We stayed in Once Brewed and ate at the pub called Twice Brewed.
The wall was nearby up on a hill. We followed it up and down for about three
miles and ended up at the ruins of a Roman fort and museum, Housesteads. The
fort was huge since an army of 800 soldiers had lived there. The next hostel was in Newton Stewart, Scotland. The hostel was very
nice and very comfortable. We visited several gardens in the west of Scotland,
which have palm trees because of the Gulf Steam and a mild climate. We were on
small winding roads and eventually made it to the western coast at Portpatrick,
a very pleasant harbor village with a spectacular cliff walk. It was so
spectacular that we returned the following day and started at another point and
hiked to Portpatrick. The wildflowers were magnificent, puffy pink thrift, lots
of blue bells and golden gorse shrubs on grey and brown rocky crags with
nesting birds.
Stage 4 was at the home of Lynda’s daughter, Anna, and her
husband, Tim, and two and-a-half year old twin boys. What a busy household!
They live in the country near a small village called Dunlop, about an hour
southwest of Glasgow. We took a
tour of an elegant country mansion, Dumfries, near Cumnock, built in the 1700’s
and furnished with Chippendale furniture with brightly colored silk fabric. The
next day we sailed to the Isle of Bute and had a tour of a castle, Mt. Stuart
(1870’s), built by the same family as Dumfries. The house was incredible with
marble, stained glass, and carved wood. The gardens there were especially
beautiful with rhododendrons in full bloom; some were trees, 40 feet tall in
amazing colors. They were definitely the most beautiful and impressive ones I
have ever seen. It’s interesting that many of these large estates can only be
maintained because they have been donated to a national heritage organization
that makes them available to the public. It is very difficult these days to
afford to maintain these huge country estates.
Glenda and I spent a day in Edinburgh; we enjoyed the castle and walking on the royal mile. Then we headed north to Inverness. Driving through the Scottish countryside is lovely with very green fields and lots of sheep. We drove by mountains and many lochs or lakes. We went on many walks; often Sue dropped us off so that we didn’t have to back track. Everywhere we drove we saw wind farms; Lynda constantly complained that all the power was being sent to England.
Stage 5 was at Lynda’s large country home near Inverness on the Moray Firth, or inlet. From her home across the firth, we could see mountains with snow in the distance. The sun was setting at about 10:00 and we watched several spectacular sunsets. One day we went to the west coast driving around the firths and on the many peninsulas; islands were in the distance. There were some lovely sandy beaches that we explored. One day we visited the Battlefield of Culloden where the English massacred the Scots led by Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745. We walked near Lynda’s house through the forest and up the moor, and drove by Loch Ness. Lynda kept us occupied everyday with activities, including a fun competitive version of croquet.
The three of us left Inverness on the train, and I arrived
in Berwick-upon-Tweed (on the Tweed River) for Stage 6 of my trip. Berwick is
in the extreme NE of England on the Tweed River with two very nice old bridges,
red tile roofs, and many churches. There had been a medieval wall that was
rebuilt with an Elizabethan wall in the 1570’s. By the time it was fnished, it
wasn’t needed because that type of fortification had become obsolete, but it’s
great to walk on with excellent views of the city. Jane and Lars live right in
town and everyday we took buses to different places and traveled in and out of
Scotland. For hundreds of years Berwick was either English or Scottish
depending upon which war was won by whom. Since 1482, it has been English. One especially
nice excursion was to Holy Island or Lindisfarne which one can only visit when
the tide is low and one can drive on the causeway. A castle from 1570 rises
high on a rocky hillside on one end of the island. The castle is small and
cozy, as castles go. We walked on several sandy beaches, Bamburgh and Spiddel, which
are very wide when the tide is out, and we walked on cliffs above the sea.
Margot, another English teacher in Denmark visited from York. It was great
being together with old friends.
It was a fantastic trip; I visited places I had never been
before and with special friends. The English and the Scottish countryside are
very beautiful. We ate lots of salmon and halibut. It was cold, not wet, but
definitely long sleeved and jacket weather. It’s been a pleasure returning home
to heat, but it has also rained a lot. I’m at the cabin now and the ticks and
mosquitoes are horrendous. The lake, however, is good for swimming.
Rocks on the beach in Spiddel
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