Heritage weekend
Trip Start
Jun 12, 2007
1
121
129
Trip End
Ongoing
Evesham, England, United Kingdom
Sunday, September 12, 2010
After looking round we went to the café there and we all had jacket potatoes with various fillings – coronation chicken for me – yum!!
The small town of Evesham was our next stop, we didn’t know what, if anything, was there, but just decided to head that way and take a look. It turned out to be a riverside market town. First we took a look around the church and the abbey before making our way down through the park to the river. There was a Victorian bandstand in the park which offers music on a Sunday afternoon throughout the summer. Just as we got there the band were setting up, it was a gloriously sunny day (the first we’d had in a while), so we decided to sit on a bench and listen. It was just a lazy sunny afternoon, the atmosphere was totally laid back and relaxed and most enjoyable. They opened with 'God Save The Queen’ and the small audience that had gathered stood in honour of this, which made me smile. Bout as traditional as you could get really, people gathering in the park on a sunny Sunday afternoon with sounds emanating from the bandstand. We listened as they blasted through some Mozart, War Of The Worlds, the theme tune to The Mask of Zorro and many more. When we’d all soaked that up for a bit we went in search of a tearoom to have cake and coffee and found one in a small side street tucked away behind the back of the church. Mum, Dad and John each had the biggest piece of bread pudding each that I’ve ever seen!!! I had cherry flapjack and was pleased that mine was a much more reasonable size.
Apparently it was Heritage weekend in England and this meant that the Bell Tower was open for visitors, so we were fortunate to be here at the right time as it’s not always open. We clambered up the tightly wound staircase inside the tower to a chamber, where we were met by a man who told us all about the bells and the ringers of days gone by – we then climbed a further staircase into a smaller chamber where there were some current day bell ringers, who told us all about the mathematics of music and showed us the closest thing they have to written music for bell ringing. All very interesting and the man explained to us about the various combinations there were for the bells to be rung in and how to ring through all the different ‘peals’ it would take 24 consecutive hours of ringing. He said that he thought it had been done once, but it hasn’t often been attempted because if just one person rings out of sequence, the attempt is then ‘messed up’ and they’d have to start all over again from the beginning. You really wouldn’t want to be the person who rang their bell out of sequence in the 23rd hour would you!!!!
Mum and dad had booked a Travelodge hotel for us for the night in Harlebury, so we made our way over there, checked in and then went for a drive. We went to Bewdley and then ended up in Stourport-on-Severn, where dad took us for a scrumptious Chinese meal. They had this menu where you got a mixture of starters, followed by crispy duck and pancakes, then a choice of main dishes, followed by dessert for a set price. We asked if they could swap some of the dishes on it so that John, being a non meat eater, could join in. They were happy to do this, so mum ordered it and the food just seemed to keep flowing. It was mighty delicious and afterwards we headed back to the Travelodge for the night.
