Category: Travel

Two Churches and some other stuff

J L-M’s Roman Mornings kicks off with an ancient Roman masterpiece, the Pantheon. If you have been to Rome you will have seen it so we don’t need to revisit it this trip.

Roman Holiday

The picture is a detail of Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino by Turner. He had been painting Rome for twenty years and this was his last picture of the city, completed in 1839. It was sold by Sotheby’s in 2010 for £29.7 million – a record for a Turner – to the Getty Museum. But… Continue reading Roman Holiday

Quiz Answers

When you open this website sometimes you must think “I don’t want this. This is just what I don’t want. What I want is Wodehouse and I want Wodehouse now.”

Quiz

Put on your thinking cap. Mark Mason has written Question Time – A Journey Round Britain’s Quizzes. I know this because he has an article about it in the October edition of The Oldie.

War and Wet

The war memorial in La Romieu is a history of modern France.

Published
Categorised as Travel

Angéline and Her Cats

On Friday we had lunch outside in the square at La Romieu. The village gets its name, likening it to Rome, from its magnificent church and the Collégiale St. Pierre, a 14th-century cloister with a tower (above).

Published
Categorised as Travel

Castelnau

The Boileau Arms sat on the south side of Hammersmith Bridge at the beginning of Castelnau Road. Since the 1980s it has changed hands and name many times and is now The Castelnau. All this is terrifically relevant to Gascony where Castelnau is a common place name.

Bastide Town

The French are better at preserving their architectural heritage than the English. Gascony (aka the Gers) teems with bastide towns built from the 12th to the 14th centuries.

Five Go Down to the Sea

The title may ring a bell if you grew up on a literary diet of Enid Blyton. In fact we were four as our fifth had a knee injury and we didn’t have Timmy, the dog in the Famous Five series.

Published
Categorised as Art, Travel

Nature Notes

The soft water, clean air, quietness and lack of light pollution in Yorkshire was good for my skin and I slept better. One lunchtime it was too hot to eat outside; unusual in Swaledale and the farmers were out in force tedding, windrowing and baling; making hay while the sun shone.