After Salisbury, we headed off to Canterbury. We saw the place where St. Augustine of Canterbury set up the first Christian mission to Britain after he was sent there from Rome. Nearby is St. Martin’s Church, the oldest, still-worshipping church in the English-speaking world. In the evening, we got some fish and chips take-out and enjoyed it in the green space at another nearby church.
The next morning, we went to Canturbury Cathedral for their morning service and then headed north to Scotland.
Our plan on the first day in Scotland was to see the castle in Edinburgh. Unfortunately, we didn’t take into account that the fringe festival was going on and the place was a tourist zoo. All tickets were sold out. We decided to head over to Stirling to see the castle there.
We were staying in Dunfermline, just north of Edinburgh, where Queen Margaret of Scotland, who is the person our church in Winnipeg is named for, lived. We saw the abbey she founded and the place where she was laid to rest.
We said goodbye to Scotland, rented a car at the Edinburgh airport, and headed south to the district of Yorkshire. That afternoon we spent a wonderful two hours at some ruins along Hadrian’s Wall, the wall Emporer Hadrian built to protect their territory in Britain from the “barbarians” in the north.
Our home base in Yorkshire was a house in a small village called Dalton. From there were made a number of day trips. The first was to a creamery in Hawes where they make cheese. The next day we went to see Raby Castle.
Tomorrow we head south to London.