What fivemack did last week

As you will see, what fivemack did this evening was to discover that cartography is a complicated art, even if you remove all the hideously complicated data-gathering stages and simply want to represent a few paths by tracing from a known map:



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Unprecedented enthusiasm; abbeys

Got up at quarter to seven this morning, noticed the weather wonderful, and resolved to walk; buses to Winchcombe, then a couple of hours across country, along the Warden's Way past Sudeley Castle, to the beautiful little village of Ford.

Lunch (just a starter: little point in intemperate exercise followed by intemperate eating) at the pleasant Plough pub there, and another hour and a half (including an utterly beautiful view, miles across the Vale of Evesham, from the escarpment here) to the abbey at Hailes where I met up with helenbr and my housemate Ed, walked around the remains trying to remark knowledgably about reredorters, lavers and chevets (foiled somewhat in this regard by Helen and Ed both knowing significantly more than I), and got a lift with them back home. Eleven miles.

I've developed a certain fondness for Cistercian abbeys, a mixture of Dorothy Heydt's A Point of Honor, Northanger Abbey, Sibyl, nostalgia for a large number of buildings of the scale and quality of Oxbridge colleges, all wiped out in half a decade 470 years ago, and the feeling the buildings would look really good reconstructed in a modern 3D graphics engine. There are several dozen of them in England, "far from the concourse of men" means they tend to be situated in picturesque wilderness, and usually they were large enough to have a fair amount survive even Fat Henry.

Also it'll give me an excuse to go to Fontenay sometime.

Probably I'll swim tomorrow.