There are lots of little villiages for you wonder around in good old blighty. There is a beautiful little villiage called Bretforton just outside Evesham, which is steeped in history. The village Pub has been used in some tele programmes, including Martin Chuzzlewit,one of my fave Dickens books
Malvern my home town is a Victorian town but there are little viliages nestled in and around the area too namely Mathon, Cradley and Colwall. They all lead into a town called Ledbury which has a old market place house. (On stilts) and many little cobbled streets with old wonky built houses. Hereford town is also very old. In fact in the Square itself was where the despencers. (Eddy 2 supposed lovers) met their rather gruesome an very bloody end and the hands of the she wolf Isabella of France, and where Owen Tulip had his head lopped off.
Eastnor Castle is just on the outskirts of Ledbury too. Rochester down here in good old Kent is another old town lots of different architechal styles. and of course there’s the castle which looks out over the Medway River.
I hope you will have a lot of fun driving around our little England. It ain’t much but it’s home.
Bet you get a few surprizes when you see how we live here in our towns etc. I’ve a freind who lives in Georgia and when I showed him a pic of our estate he couldn’t believe how closed in we seemed. he says that to get to his neighbours house he had to get in the car and drive there, where as here we just go out the door and 10 steps later you are at the neighbours door. Then of course the number of corner shops we have would at times make your eyes pop out. On this estate alone we have 7 little corner shops, and a 24 hours garage in case we need milk or bread in the middle of the night. Asda’s (Walmart) is only a 5 minute car ride away too.

Barnettbuff said …I know she was “married to England” but still, with Robert so near her both day and night, it’s still hard to believe their relationship never got past a few kisses. I tend to think that Seymore got further with Lizzie than just the “tickling” stage! Your thoughts?

i suppose the effect it had on her in both policy and personal terms would depend on the degree of consent involved…

today of course if a 14 year old girls step-father ‘flirted’ with her we’d call call social services and the police, and if they slept together we’d call it rape. we are, i think, a little too quick to measure the incident by looking at Elizabeth as Gloriana: monarch for 50 years, defeater of the Spanish, and simply one of the greatest Monarchs of over 1000 years of English history – rather than as a 14 year old girl living with her step parents, her father has been dead 3 months and who’se step-father (of a whole month) starts slapping her arse as she walks past.

looking at it like that, i think we’d all become a little less ‘flirtatous little sex-pot’ and a bit more ‘burn the fcuker in his house..’.

Barnettbuff said

Lorna, thanks for the info about local villages, I ‘drove’ through Bretforton and spotted St Leonards Church, the old stone church with the beautiful arched stained glass windows. Then on to Evesham and down to the Bridge Inn on the banks of river Avon. The outdoor tables on its banks look so inviting.
In Malvern, The Talbot looks very interesting and the beautiful Parish Church of Barbourne St Stephen. And of course the Alma Tavern across the street from the church I’m sure it would be a great gathering place, I passed the Bridge Restaurant, the Bluebell, and just down the street, Treherne House. The Malvern Retreat and the Green Dragon also looked very interesting. And what’s with the Barnard’s Green Fish Bar, fish and chips I bet? And I love the exterior view of the Scenes Bistro, looks kinda like an old bus/train station or something, bet the steaks are to die for! And I’d love to eat at the Priors Croft Bar and Restaurant on Grange Road!
And then there’s the Abbey Hotel/ museum and the Priory View Restaurant. I could spend two weeks there just looking, eating and drinking! And I want to stay up on the hill at the Mount Pleasant Hotel. And I probably shouldn’t overlook the Unicorn for a good evening meal either. And finally, the Railway Inn, though I’m certain there are many, many more interesting places to visit. Being an old farm boy, I would have to visit the Plough & Harrow out on B4211, and driving in on this highway leaving the Green Dragon, I came across the beautiful Parish Church of St Mary Guarlford (with the red phone booth in the Y of the road). How neat!
I didn’t find much of interest in Mathon and Cradley but I went on to Colwall and decided I wanted to stay at the Swan Hotel overlooking the little river Severn and maybe have a drink at the Waterside Bar. And then up the hill to visit the interesting clock tower at the top of the hill. Then on around town I come upon the Parish Church of St Peter and St Paul with it’s really tall steeple!
All in all, a really enjoyable “arm chair” visit to your wonderful country. (And MINE, many generations removed!) Thanks so much for your suggested villages for me to visit. If I were 30 years younger and in good health, perhaps I could look forward to a time I could ACTUALLY visit – but, as you guys say—“alas” I;ll never be able to do so. I’ll just have to depend upon Goggle + for my visits. I’m saving the other towns you suggested for later.

I guess Larry that what we are going to have to do is send you a lot of photos of what old blighty looks like. Google maps is a handy little tool, and i’ve been using it quite a bit myself these last few months or so. As for visiting, well as the saying goes if mohammed can’t go to the mountain, the mountain will have to go to him. Maybe you might end up with a few mad brits on your doorstep.

Barnettbuff said

Thanks again for the info.
Sorry to hear of the flooding there. Never experienced anything like that in ‘this part of the country’. Many of our rivers give big problems, usually in early Spring during heavy rains for days on end. Though I live only about 40 miles from both the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers, enough height here to prevent flooding. I’m only about 18 miles from Kentucky Lake (made from the Tennessee River) and 28 miles from Lake Barkley (made from Cumberland River); but there again, the land is too high here to be affected. Actually the Lakes do not exceed their banks, and their waterline is high enough to prevent houses from being built too close, though sometimes boat docks take a beating during high water. Both Kentucky and Barkley Dams help to regulate the water levels in both lakes. If you Google Ky Lake, you’ll find us almost smack-dab in the middle of the US, almost due South of Chicago, Illinois at the southern tip of Lake Superior of the “Great Lakes”, south about (I don’t know) maybe 450 miles or so.
Your “Old Country” has so much more ‘character’ than Her “up-start off spring” that there’s no comparison considering their interest and charm! Everywhere I look there, there’s always something beautiful to see. All your buildings and even ‘farm fencing’ built of stone, are lovely. I guess my biggest surprise is the number of (what I would call) row houses, in even your small villages. I’m referring to the two story, multi-family complexes I see all over the place. We don’t have those types of living quarters so much here. Of course, being a University town, we have more of that type than small towns without higher educational facilities.
Our sense of preservation is quite lousy! Something gets a little age on it, — we tear it DOWN! I’m just waiting for them to START on me!
Everyone here thinks ‘new is better’ — the older I get, the less I agree with that! Though we did build a new house 3 years ago! But we no longer needed the larger two story home we had lived in. It’s tough going upstairs to my bedroom on my butt, one step at a time, LITERALLY! Lorna, you should appreciate that. Our den was two steps down from the nearest bathroom, which meant, in a wheelchair, my wife had to help me each time I took a trip to the “library”! That got very common the three months, or so, I was totally disabled.
We enjoy our new home, but it hasn’t the charm and ‘feeling’ that our older home had. “New is better”, bah, humbug!!! But don’t tell my wife that, she just might try to TRADE me in for a younger model!

I much prefer older built properties for a lot of different reason, I guess we’ve been lucky where our dinky little house is concerned as it was built in the 1930’s of course it’s been modinised since then but it has more charm and charather, then modern built houses, which to me always seem very clinical and boring, plus the way the newer houses are built now, you can hear the neighbour next door but 2 flush the toilet in the middle of the night. With our house you hardly hear the neighbours at all which is good. Good old blighty does have some extemely charming little houses I wonder did you see the thatched cottage in Cradley when you drove through, and the old black and white shop, which started out as a bakery years and years ago, and then became a tavern and then finally a shop?

I’ll try and find a couple of pictures of some of our querky and wonky built old buildings for you. Give me an older built house anyday. Modern day houses have that many cracks in their wall that you can take a friggin road test on them and most likely pass as well.