United Kingdom 2001
Three Storytelling Festivals!
This trip was framed by Cathryn wanting to attend three storytelling events. We had arranged a house exchange for two weeks
with a couple who ran a B&B in an old Sunday school in Derbyshire. As our trips overlapped, we spent a few days with them on both sides of the pond.
The exchange provided us with a travel base, advice, hospitality, and a car. They got the same, plus they wanted to go to Las Vegas to get married!
So exploring Darbyshire and the Peaks District was our beginning. It was rural and charming with the medieval custom of well dressing still being practiced.
The Peaks and Well dressing
Wells were "dressed" in colorful mosaics of natural materials in honor of the pre Christian spirits of the wells each spring.
The church tried to stop this pagan custom, but it persisted in Derbyshire. Now they sponsor it by declaring a spiritual theme.
The colorful designs are from flower petals, nuts, and leaves.
Eyam
My biggest fascination was the plague town of Eyam, who lost half its population in the 14th century while it voluntarily
isolated itself not to contaminate others. Quite a story.
Renaissance Chester
I wanted to attend three storytelling festivals: Festival at the Edge, in Shropshire. Beyond the Border in south Wales and the Folk Park Festival in Belfast.
The storytelling festivals were wonderfull! One was in a Welsh castle. One was on a sheep farm in tents with beer and dogs allowed. One was at the preserved old buildings in a folk park in Belfast.
There unlike at festivals in the USA, stories can be quite long, very classical or politically incorrect.
Bath and the Cotswalds
Bath was from the Roman plumbed baths of 200AD and still in use until 1900. We drove south through the unbelievably quaint Costswalds. England was fighting Mad Cow disease in 2001. Though the beasts did not
seem particularly angry, we were not allowed to hike freely and stepped through many a chlorine foot bath.
The Old Mill Stream
Sheep from woolen mill country.
Site of one of the early monastic movements of Anglo Saxon times. They did not survive Henry the VIII's reign.
Medieval ghost town
Avebury
Avebury stone circle, which was much more personally involving than Stonehenge. You could wander and touch to your neolithic heart's content. A Medieval town was built in the center, thatched rooves and all.
Cathedral Detail
Would you believe there is a Farlee Castle? Without even seeking my roots, we bumbled upon on it. The name is not for the family, but the region. And in ruins, too. Bad maintenenace, those ancestors.
©Cathryn Tells All
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