Great Scot

I SPENT the morning in Burns country.

That's Robert, not Monty, which means I was exploring a quiet corner of Ayrshire in Scotland rather than a nuclear plant in Springfield.

Robert Burns, who was born in 1759 in the hamlet of Alloway just 3km from Ayr, is not only considered to be Scotland's favourite son but the country's national poet.

He penned his first poem after the harvest in 1774, about a women called Nelly Kilpatrick who helped the aspiring farmer in the fields, and during the next couple of decades he went

on to pen dozens of versus.

While his most famous works include Auld Lang Syne, To A Mouse, Tam o'Shanter and A Red, Red Rose he was often inspired to write about the things he saw around him in Ayrshire.

Visitors can see the places that inspired Mr Burns by visiting Alloway where the cottage he was born in has been protected (above), a monument was constructed in his honour, and a museum was built to house some of his treasures.

The Robert Burns Birthplace Museum is brand new -- it was officially opened only last week -- with the building set close to the brig (that's a bridge) and the kirk (that's a church) that feature in Tam o'Shanter (below).

I visited Alloway with Scottish Blue Badge Guide Kenny Hanley who explained why the man became an icon as we looked through the cottage he shared with his parents and three younger siblings for the first years of his life.

"His appeal was that he could touch the ordinary people but he could also reach the intelligentsia,'' Ken says.

"He had the gift that he could take an average conversation or situation and write about it, his reputation grew by word of mouth, and when he published his first book the reaction was so incredible it had to be reprinted almost immediately.''

Fresh Ayr

I AM sleeping in a hotel suite tonight that is, quite literally, bigger than the apartment I occupied in Brisbane for two years.

The bathroom alone is larger than my bedroom in Kangaroo Point, with a free-standing bath that's more spacious than my first car.

It's also considerably nicer than my little one-bedroom apartment in Brisbane, decorated like an elegant English manor house rather than an Ikea showroom.

I'm staying in the Ascot Suite at the Western House Hotel, which sits on the grounds of the Ayr Racecourse right beside the sweeping turn at the end of the front straight (above).

The building was constructed almost 100 years ago and served as the headquarters of the Western Meeting Club, owners of Ayr Racecourse, until it was turned into a hotel in 2003.

More than $6 million was spent on the renovation and now there are 10 luxury suites in Western House and another 39 rooms in the two courtyard buildings.

The Ascot Suite has a sunken lounge room with plump couches, a bedroom with a princess bed (below), a dressing room with a desk, and two big balconies that look over the racecourse.

Ayr Racecourse is home to the famed Scottish Grand National, and I'm told my suite goes for around $3000 on race day.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Bonnie Scotland

AFTER 10 lovely days in England -- the experiences were lovely, not the weather -- I bid a fond farewell to Blighty today and travelled north to Scotland.

This is my first visit to Scotland, so I was eagerly awaiting the moment when the train I was riding would cross the border north of Carlisle, but there was no sign to indicate I was crossing into a new land.

Instead I got the word from the conductor that the train had rolled over the invisible line that separates England from the land to the north, and I snapped these two photos out the window to mark the big moment.

So this is Scotland?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The Cotswolds

ROLLING pastures that look like they are covered by blankets of green velvet, ancient dry-stone walls hidden beneath layers of moss, quaint cottages with clouds of fireplace smoke wafting from terracotta chimney pots, and flocks of black-faced sheep grazing beside babbling brooks.

This is the Cotswolds, a place that is just as beautiful as its name.

I got to spend a few hours today exploring some of the Cotswold's smaller settlements, hamlets with names like Minster Lovell, Bibury, Asthall Leigh, Swinbrook and Filkins.

I saw the ruins of a castle that accommodated both Henry VII and Henry VIII when they were visiting the Cotswolds on hunting expeditions, stone cottages with real thatched roof, a manor house with a wing designed by Inigo Jones, the mansion where one of Adolf Hitler's pre-war pen pals lived, and the remains of a road built by the Romans.

These days the Cotswolds makes its money from tourism -- with visitors accommodated in everything from renovated farmhouses to old manor buildings that have been turned into boutique hotels -- but back in the early days this part of central England thrived on wool.

When the Romans arrived in 43AD they didn't like the look of the local sheep, so imported a breed from Lombardy in Italy that became known as the Cotswold lion because of the fluffy layer of wool around the creature's neck.

The Romans departed in 411AD, but the sheep stayed and it wasn't long before the rolling hills of central England became the wool capital of Europe.

The mansions were built by the rich wool merchants, the cottages were constructed for the workers who looked after the sheep and weaved the fabric (below), and the gothic churches were created so everyone from the aristocracy down would have somewhere to worship.

Everything was built from Cotswold stone, the blond bedrock that sits just below the surface in this part of England and made it very hard to plant crops when the industrial revolution forced local farmers to find new ways to make money.

The stone was so admired that Sir Christopher Wren travelled to the Cotswold's after London was destroyed by fire in 1666 to source material to rebuild the capital's grand buildings, with that list including St Paul's Cathedral.

 

 - Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

More bicycles

IT seems the theme of bicycles is continuing...this time in Oxford.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Oxford evensong

I WENT to church last night.

No, it's not something I would typically do when travelling, and the last time I visited a catholic church when a priest was all frocked up and ready to work was back in 1985 when I was in grade six and still wearing the maroon and light blue of St Anne's Sunbury.

And, no, I didn't arrive in Oxford yesterday and decide it was time to find a service and say a few prayers.

I was kind of tricked into attending the Sunday evening service at Oxford's famous Christ Church college (below) by the folks at Visit Oxford, the local agency that promotes tourism to this English city and prepared the itinerary for my three-day visit.

The note on my itinerary for 6pm Sunday simply said ``evensong in Christ Church Cathedral -- enter under Tom Tower, say you are going to Evensong, an allow yourself to be wafted to a seat''.

So, probably naively, I went along thinking I was going to attend Sunday's choir practice where I could gaze at the inside of the beautiful old sanctuary while listening to the angelic notes of the cathedral's boy sopranos.

It seems evensong is evening mass which is something I probably should have known after attending catholic primary school for seven years, but I always knew it as "mass'' or simply "going to church".

But I always say I love visiting religious buildings around the world because, regardless of the holy aspect, they always provide a moment of peace and quiet in often hectic journeys.

So I treated my hour at Christ Church as just that, and hour of peacefulness in a beautiful building that was constructed way back in the 12th century.

Most of the service was sung by the choir -- the Cathedral Choir is made up of 16 boys and 12 men -- with just a couple of readings done by members of the congregation and a prayer or two said by the priest.

There was one boy soprano who sang several solos and his voice was so fine it sounded like notes from the stings of a violin, and the sound of the whole choir drifted through the cavernous church like a cool breeze on a warm summer's evening.

Oxford was established by the church which wanted to train future holy men, so each of the university's 38 colleges has a chapel where these early students would pray between their studies.

Christ Church is one of the oldest colleges, and it's sanctuary is one of Oxford's oldest structures as well as the town's cathedral, and while the project was started by Thomas Wolsey it was completed by King Henry VIII when the pair had a blue.

It's an impressive building and, at night when the evening service is held, the lights illuminate some of the stonework on the inside while pushing other surfaces into shadows.

The cathedral is an example of gothic perpendicular style of architecture, and the most delightful element of this genre are the ribs that stretch across the ceiling with carved stone "bosses'' or lantern hanging from the point where the main lines come together above the windows.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Beautiful Bath

The sun finally came out in Bath, after snow fell for a few minutes this morning...here are some more photos so you can see just beautiful the buildings in the historic Somerset village are.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Bath time

BATH is just as wonderful as I imagined it would be.

Seeing the historic settlement always sat very high on my travel to-do list, so it was a big moment when I drove into town two days ago and got my first glimpse of the rows of regal Bath stone buildings that meander over the town's gentle hills.

The Victorian-era structures -- three and four-storey terraces built in long rows that are as straight as an arrow or curved to follow the sweeping turns of Bath's streets -- are so elegant with rows of panel windows and tall wrought-iron fences painted a glossy shade of black.

The most expensive real estate is found on the Royal Arcade, a long sweeping line of terraces set on a street that looks like one half of a circle from above with the front rooms enjoying a view over the park where posh Victorians would promenade on a Sunday.

But my favourite neighbourhood was the Circus (below), just a couple of blocks from The Assembly where the 19th century's rich and famous would gather four or five times a week to dance the night away and find themselves advantageous matches.

The Circus is a round road about the size of a modern velodrome, with four streets leading onto it and a big park in the middle with a copse of old trees that currently stand naked to endure the winter, and the terraces that sit beside the wide footpaths are built in a curve to complete the circle.

I think it's exactly what our generic new subdivisions are missing, lines of terrace houses built in cycles around grassy parks.

The local guide told us Nicholas Cage used to live at number 7, but had to put the grand old house on the market recently when he declared bankruptcy, and that Handel and Haydn were just two of the other eminent occupants.

But these two districts are not unique in Bath and almost every building is made from the blond stone that's indigenous to the region with the walls turning a golden yellow when the weak winter sun falls on a facade.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Taking the water

TODAY I soaked in water that has been trapped underground for centuries, and in a place where the Romans did exactly the same thing more than 2000 years ago.

I'm in Bath, the beautiful settlement two hours west from London, and after doing a tour of the ancient Roman baths I went next door to ``take the waters'' in an oversized tub that was built during the days of Queen Victoria when Jane Austen was just one of the notables who liked a soak.

The Romans settled in Bath around 40AD -- they liked the spot because it had seven hills, just like Rome -- and built a bathing complex and temple over the hot spring they found near the banks of the Avon River.

They believed that gods and goddesses lived in the hot spring, so it was a very important spot for the Romans, and they would spend hours bathing, gossiping and doing business in the green mineral water that was collected in a rectangle pond.

 After the Romans left the site was swallowed up by the Avon -- turns out the people who followed them into the west of England weren't so keen on keeping clean -- and the site wasn't discovered until the 1800s when an engineer investigating why a particular building's cellar kept flooding came across the subterranean treasure.

He found a great underground complex of baths and steam rooms, the site was excavated, and the Victorians embraced the idea of taking the waters when they weren't promenading on Bath's elevated footpaths.

The site fell into disrepair again, was closed to bathers in the 1970s but renovated as a tourist attraction, and a few years later Thermae Spa was opened across the street to gather the geothermal waters so modern folk could once again soak in the rich minerals.

There is an indoor pool on the ground floor, and an outdoor one four floors up on the roof which provides bathers with glorious views over the Bath skyline, as well as a couple of historic tubs including the one I got to soak in which is housed in the original 19th-century building.

Did it make me feel better?

It made me feel warmer on a freezing winter's day, and my bones appreciated being submerged in a pool of water that was 35 degrees when it was hovering around zero outside.

Food, glorious food

AS the old saying goes, travel expands the mind.

But there is no doubt that some trips also expand the waistline, an this is one of them.

When a hotel chain or tourist authority is hosting a trip, just as the folks from VisitBritain are looking after this one, most of the meals are taken care of with lunch and dinner reservations made at some of a destinations most desirable eateries.

 In London we ate at Tom's Kitchen in Chelsea (above), which is a favorite with the Sloan Rangers as well as William and Kate, and today we enjoyed lunch at The Hind's Head in Bray which is one of Heston Blumenthal's restaurants (below).

Heston is one of only a handful of English chefs who has been given three Michelin stars and now he owns a cluster of eateries in the hamlet of Bray

which sits a stone's throw from Windsor Castle.

The Hind's Head, which occupies a pub that was built during the days of the Tudors and has been a favorite with royals through the centuries with Diana taking her boys there for special meals when they were enrolled at Eton, serves a menu of "historic British dishes made from the best seasonal ingredients''.

For lunch I had devils on horseback with mango chutney and pancetta, pea and ham soup with a scotch egg, tea-smoked salmon and soda bread, roast cornish lamb, and apple and blackberry crumble which really hit the spot on a cold winter's day.

Bray is a bona fide foodie destination with this sleepy settlement home to two of the four England restaurants that have been granted three Michelin stars as well as a couple of gastro-pubs -- including The Hind's Head -- that have won awards for serving exceptional food at affordable prices.

Just for the record, the two three-star eateries in Bray are Heston's main establishment The Fat Duck and the Roux brother's place The Watershed, with one of Gordon Ramsay's spots in London an the French restaurant at The Dorchester rounding out England's elite Michelin list.

A royal affair

SO far this tour of England has been all about the royal family.

I have visited Kensington Palace where a long line of princesses lived, seen the royal family's collection of carriages at The Royal Mews, had a tour of Eton where William and Harry were educated as well as numerous kings both foreign and domestic, and walked around Windsor Palace.

Before this visit it was all just Henrys and Georges for me, I thought the war of the roses was a movie starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, and the only way I knew the difference between the two queens called Elizabeth was because Helen Mirren played them both on the big screen in the same year.

But that's all changed and now I'm an authority on things like the line of succession and the size of the Queen's horses, I can tell you where all the senior and reserve royals live, and recite endless facts about William and Kate who feature in every news program now it's less than 100 days until their April wedding.

 While Kensington Palace (above) is still a royal home -- the Lancasters and Gloucesters, as well as Mr and Mrs Michael of Kent, live in the building's private apartments -- there is one wing open to the public and visitors can explore grand rooms with high ceilings while hearing stories about the princesses who lived in the house.

Kensington was home to both Princess Diana and the Queen's sister Margaret before they died, and the place William and Harry stayed when they were with their mother, and the palace the young Victoria occupied before her uncle died promoting her to the throne.

I visited Victoria's room and saw the bed she was sleeping in when woken to be told she was Britain's new monarch, which was a beautiful suite with a view across Hyde Park to London's skyline, and the stairs she was carefully escorted up and down as she was growing up.

After doing a few more royal attractions in London, which included eating lunch at William and Kate's favorite restaurant Tom's Kitchen in Chelsea -- I was told he likes the burger and she orders the chicken ceasar salad -- I left the big city behind and drove the 30 minutes to Windsor.

I was never terribly impressed by Buckingham Palace, and even less so after learning that none of the royals actually live there but the Queen uses it as her office visiting only on Tuesday afternoons, but Windsor was awesome with the medieval stone walls and towers dominating the landscape from its position on top of a hill (below).

A local Blue Badge Guide took me on a tour of the palace -- not inside, we followed the walls which took us from the bridge over the Thames on one side to the Long Walk on the other -- and I was shown the tower that accommodates the Queen's private apartments.

The four-storey suite has, so I was told, magnificent views across Great Windsor Park as well as to Heathrow's runways and the new fifth terminal.