England

Left Hastings and made our way south towards Beachy Head where we parked the car and walked along the cobbly English beach (we really are spoiled with beaches here in Australia) to see the white cliffs. It was wild and windy all along the coast with the sea lashing against the boardwalk and even spray blowing across the road as we drove out of Hastings.  When we got back to the car we heard on the radio that there had been a tornado at Bognor Regis which is not far from where we were.

Drove through back country roads towards Salisbury where we stopped to see the Cathedral.  The town of Salisbury is pictureseque and makes the perfect backdrop for the Cathedral which stands vast and majestic in spacious green grounds.  Some of the vertical columns of the buttresses are quite bowed under the weight of the vaulted stone ceiling though it is said that the bowing has not worsened in the last few hundred years(!)

After leaving the Cathedral we went to Stonehenge, ancient grey monoliths shrouded in mystery and swarming with tourists.  We eyed the carpark full of buses and cars and turned down a narrow dirt lane along the fence separating Stonehenge from the masses.  We could see it quite well and it was easy to ignore the people swarming around the base of the monoliths.  Some of the light filtering through the scudding clouds was quite beautiful.

Our guidebook mentioned another stone circle at nearby Avebury.  It is much larger in overall diameter than Stonehenge and has the feel of being even older (though I don't know if this is the case) and it is unusual in that there is a small village bisecting the entire circle of stones.  The stones here are not as large and don't have the lintels across the top and, perhaps because of the close proximity of the village, many of the stones seem to be missing.  But the village seems to have been there a very long time and still has a feel of great age in old stone buildings with their steep, thatched roofs.

On the way from Avebury to Bath we passed one of the famous chalk horses carved into the hillside and while stopped there some locals said that we should see the village of Lacock on our way to Bath so we found some more back roads to take us there with only a slight detour.  Lacock is a superbly preserved National Trust village and we were disappointed to see that the old monastery was closed.

Because of our scenic route we arrived late in Bath, the traffic into the city is the worst we've seen anywhere and we had some trouble finding accommodation