Oxford

Today is Thursday.
Went for a walk around the small Cotswald village of Stanton Harcourt where we had spent the night, in a driveway, for $40.
We decided to be like the locals and just park the van in the middle of the road and walk away and leave it there for a couple of hours. The fact it had, in big orange lettering, all over it 'warning tourists' made no difference.
We walked about the streets and saw some great old buildings. We are not on the main tourist route so we had the place to ourselves.
Steven spied an interesting roof shape behind some houses, we found a driveway with a small sign on it that said 'St Michaels Church'. The church turns out to have been built in 1135, nearly one thousand years ago. It is still never locked and is open to all. The grass is only cut were most people walk and the gravestones are so weathered that they have no inscriptions on them. We managed to find one date of 1645.
It was an absolute gem to stumble over. It isn't in any of the guide books.



 




















The doors to some of these houses are obviously for very short people.

Tammy feels tall amongst buildings for short people. This is the side of someone's thatched shed. Tammy found out about the spider webs shortly after the photo was taken.
 




 



This was the free house we visited last night










These appeared to be the original town stocks with a new thatched roof over them.
Once we found them Steven got a bit paranoid and thought it best to go and move the car.
It was still there.
Off we went to Oxford.





 
Oxford
Unbelievably old and historic.
We had no idea how big and how old Oxford is. Everywhere you look it is just history.
We arrived on the one day in the year when all the colleges are having open days for prospective students. We visited a couple and got guided tours on the pretense of sending one of children there, I hope Amy-Jayne enjoys St Johns college where we have signed her up for philosophy.

 

We climbed to the top of St Mary the Virgin Church, that has been there since the 13th century.
Brilliant views over Oxford.

Traffic is fairly heavy as no where in England was ever designed for cars and large amounts of people.




 





The Bridge of Sighes
Basically it's all Steven wanted to see in Oxford, something to do with someone called Morse.

 It's Madness

Then we were off to Silverstone.
Found a spot to camp and got ready for the Madness Concert. Steven did this by drinking warm beer.
We had forgotten how many Madness songs we knew, the mostly English crowd which was in the thousands new the words too, they even sing along with the fill in music between bands. Their favourite songs would appear to be the ones that have 'da da da da da daaaayyy' in them.
Madness were great.

We will have a bit of a rest for the next 3 days at Silverstone.

That's Steven on the bridge.