Pea and cucumber soup
Trip Start
Jun 12, 2007
1
122
129
Trip End
Ongoing
Worcester, England, United Kingdom
Monday, September 13, 2010
One of the features of the property is a large fountain which has been restored to working order. I love fountains and water related things and they schedule the fountain to go off every few hours for 20 minutes at a time. When we arrived the fountain was going to start up in around 10 minutes time, so we made our way over there first and positioned ourselves to watch it. There was scarcely another person around and we sat in silence as the fountain started up and we watched as cascades of water thundered down – it was pretty impressive.
Following the fountain show we took the audio guides round the site listening to details of the history of the property and eye witness accounts of the day the fire took place. It started to rain as we walked round, at first lightly and then heavily – mum and dad took shelter in the main part of the ruins and me and John continued round the grounds listening to the guides.
In the grounds mum found a huge fungus, which she was assuring us was edible, it might well be, but not one of us trusts her judgement on fungus's - berries, fruits etc, yes, if she says its edible we all try it, but fungus ..... NO!! This is bourne out of an incident a few years back when mum nearly bumped dad off by insisting that this particular fungus was edible and realising ..... just as she finished cooking it and was serving it up for them to eat ..... that it was in fact a highly poisonous one! So yeah, we always give each other a sideways glance and smiles along with some heckling of course, when mum presents another fungus that she assures us we can eat!!!! (Just in case you're wondering, mum didn't pick this, some other vandal had done that and left it discarded on the floor).
When we’d finished at the ruins, we took shelter in Saint Michael’s church which is adjacent to Witley Court. Inside the walls and ceilings are richly adorned with gilding and paintings by Antonio Bellucci, it’s not at all what you would expect to see inside a church in England and I was quite taken aback by the opulence of it. There was a lady inside who gave us a great account of the history of the church from it’s founding’s to it’s current day presence.
Afterwards we found our way down a grass track to what looked like a converted bungalow – converted into a tearoom!! We sat out in the conservatory listening to the rain as we ate some delicious sandwiches, soup and homemade cake. Once we’d filled our bellies, warmed up and dried out, we headed back to the car to move on to Worcester.
The reason for heading to Worcester was to visit the cathedral, which I had heard was spectacular. We arrived just as a tour was about to start, so we joined onto that and I spent the next hour and a half in awe of the intricate architecture within. It’s definitely worth getting a tour round here as you get so much more information than if you just looked at it, plus if you are lucky, as we were, you get a much more personal slant to it all, with any questions answered – we were extremely fortunate though that we went on a quiet Monday afternoon, and this meant there were only the four of us, plus one other lady on the tour. When we left the cathedral it was late afternoon coming on early evening, so we decided to make our way across country homeward bound.
