More Abbeys

I am conflicted about our current hotel.  Our room is super small,  the bathroom seems put together with spare building materials and the steps to get to our room are steep and narrow and on the outside if the building.  However the place e is clean, the owner is super nice and responsive and he makes great breakfasts.  That’s probably why the place has had great reviews on Booking.com.

After our hardy full English breakfast we packed up and  headed out to see the Glastonbury  Abbey. It’s actually the ruins of the former abbey but some of the towers,  portions of the chapel are still standing.  It was ordered to be closed by King Henry Viii and it’s valuables stripped from the site.

The site is also home to the legend that King Arthur was once buried here. Some historians feel that this was a story made up by the monks in the 1200’s to draw attention to their order,  help increase visitors and thus revenue which provided them enough money to build this once great abbey.

After lunch at a fry shop around the corner which had surprisingly good and reasonably priced fish and chips (4.5 in Yelp) we headed towards Wells and the Wells cathedral.  The Wells Cathedral was impressive and well preserved.  It seemed larger than Westminister Abbey in London but the bodies interred there were not as famous. My favorite feature of the Abbey was the original working clock that had Knights jousting on the 15s. It's supposed to be the 2nd oldest working clock in existence.  The architecture is also different that the other buildings with scissor arches in addition to the regular plain Jane arches you see at most of these old cathedrals.

Finally we drove to our new basecamp for the next few days.  Even though it was listed on Booking.com it a three bedroom townhouse with a well equipped kitchen, and the Waitrose grocery store not too far away.  We’ll be eating in or picnicing for the next few days.