From Plymouth, the next stop was Exeter to visit Exeter Cathedral and the "Underground Passages" (tourist-speak for the Medieval water tunnels under the town).
Stayed in a small town twenty minutes out of Exeter and took the train in on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Exeter Catherdal dates from the 1100's-1200's and has the longest continuously Gothic vaulted ceiling in the world -- pretty impressive. Cathedrals are interesting for their imposing size, their statuary and their history -- otherwise they pretty much all look the same. Surprisingly, some of the more interesting tours of the buildings are not offered on Sundays so I didn't get to see all that there was -- did however get to relax and listen for a while to a choral recital in the late afternoon -- talk about atmosphere!
I seem to have spent quite a bit of time underground on this "journey" (slate mines, wine cellars, coal mines, vaults, crypts, dungeons, etc...) so thought I'd add a tour of a Medieval water system to my list. These vaulted passages were built to carry water from springs located outside the city walls into the city -- mostly thru clay pipes servicing wealthy homes and cathedrals but eventually made available via wells and spigots to all residents. Narrow (some places required sliding thru sideways) and short (got my money's worth out of the hard hat), it was fairly interesting, mostly for it's novelty. Supposedly haunted but I can't imagine why any self-respecting spook would hang-out in a stone-lined water tunnel!
Ended the day with tea, clotted cream, jam and scones at the rooftop cafe in the Marks & Spencer (or as they call it "M&S) department store -- watching the busy street-scene four stories below. (Wondered if it was intentionally named "Marks & Spencer" versus "Spencer & Marks" -- could've had a whole new following.)
Next day it was off to Maiden Castle -- not a castle but rather a huge Neolithic ring-fort -- built on a hilltop in the middle of nowhere -- with four concentric earthen walls, each about forty feet tall and thirty feet thick -- the interior space covers the expanse of over five hundred football fields! Today, it's an amazingly well-preserved ruins functioning mostly as pasture for sheep and cattle -- after the first five minutes of walking around, you don't even bother looking where you step!
It was really interesting -- again having to use your imagination to picture what living there must have been like -- hundreds of houses, thousands of people milling around living their lives, coming and going. You access it via a steep quarter mile path and pass thru openings in the rings that would've been blocked with huge, twenty foot tall wooden gates -- it had to be totally overwhelming in its day.
Later in the day, I visited Beaulieu, the site of an automobile museum, stately home and the ruins of a Gregorian abbey -- my interest was the abbey. A nice mix of ruins and restored (halted decay) buildings allowing you to really get a sense of what it must have been like to live and work in a fourteenth century abbey.
Spent much of my time there just sitting and absorbing the atmosphere -- not many people around, most come for the cars. It's the kind of place where you can close your eyes and almost hear the monks chanting -- some visitors have reported actually hearing chanting and the abbey has the reputation of being one of the most haunted places in England (which is a big-deal as almost every place in England claims to be haunted!) Other than being such a quiet, peaceful setting that I almost dozed off, nothing supernatural happened.
