easter in a castle

Easter could definitely be worse.

We are staying in a manor house in south Gloucestershire. Obviously.

We're going with another Saffa couple, taking a long, slow meander up there, via the town of Chipping Sodbury and Bristol.

How's that for ridiculous. I wrote about Chipping Sodbury once (random) and now I'm going there.
We shall eat scones and forage for truffled chocolates in the gardens, and dress up all period Victoriana take the wellies to slosh around in, although I might suggest we hire costumes anyway.

Basically - we're having a proper English country manor house weekend. This isn't something I have done a lot of since living in the UK. Any spare long weekends have been taken up with going to Europe to tick more countries off my list. (I need to have gone to 100 countries before I die.)

Last Easter was spent in Portugal. Had my visa not expired, we would've spent this coming Easter in Estonia. I'm not joking.

And don't get me started on the Ukraine. I am dying to go there. And if I need just one reason to justify this (apparently I do, it's not exactly Spain), this is why:

Yes, that's a concrete spaceship. Socialist modernist brutalism, as seen in capital city Kiev. Need I say more?

But here we are - visaless and fucked off - so this is a nice opportunity to explore the country I now call home. I haven't been to Scotland yet. I haven't seen Yorkshire, or Cornwall (where the O'Toast ancestry originally hails from), and I certainly haven't seen Chipping fucking Sodbury.
And those are just the pretty places.

A group of us are going for a girls weekend in July to...Blackpool. And we're hiring a caravan. Again, this is not my jokey face.

But back to the manor house. Let's stay classy as long as we can.

The hotel is an ostentatious converted old castle-slash-manor house; Tortworth Court.* It might not be Estonia, but she might just do:

This is she. Isn't she gorgeous? Isn't she grand? Grand in all senses of the word, except the actual £1,000 - we found a good Eastery deal.

She has 30 acres of rolling, manicured lawns set on the edge of the town Wotton-under-Edge near the Cotswolds.

Dude. I've said this before and I'll say it again. Town names in the UK? More exciting than a 50% sale at Ted Baker.

And I've never been to the Cotswolds. Jolly ho and poppycock! Shall pack my red trousers and hunting jacket!**

* Haunted much? For extra Easter fun?

**And my wellies. And a few Easter eggs. Wait. Fuck. On diet.

chipping sodbury, rye or lower slaughter?

Had a flash reactive suggestion to my mates yesterday afternoon.

Scotland. This weekend. Let's go. If you're in say 'och aye'. If you're not in, say......'Noch Naye.'

I wanted to get away with my mates for a girlie weekend, and although Scotland was devilishly exciting (dudes wearing kilts sans underpants while eating shortbread? Och aye), it just seems a bit unpractical to go for a quick weekend.

So we're throwing ideas around. Where to go, with a hamper of champagne on a train, in Britain for a day trip?

According to the Information Superhighway, Stratford-Upon-Avon and Cambridge are nice options.

Both stepped in history and playwrights.

But then a colleague of mine went there and came back saying, "Home of Shakespeare? Full of skanks."

But then, anything outside of Hertfordshire is full of skanks for her, to be fair.
I also saw an agreeable-looking tour around Stratford-Upon-Avon, but that involved a bus, and my mates positively balked at the idea.

In all fairness, a coach trip in England is always a hideous affair. The train might be more expensive, but that's because retards and delinquents opt for the coach.

I got sneezed on in the coach queue and after seeing the man's snot everywhere, went for a silent vomit and then paid the extra fifty pounds to take the train.

God. Jesus. OK where was I.

So, where to go for one day with my mates?

One suggested Rye, a cute little town in Sussex, not far from Dover. Another mate wants to see a castle. I want to see the Cotswolds.

Two places in particular: Lower Slaughter and Chipping Sodbury.

Dude. Those are real names.

See? So much to see, and only one day. Any advice out there, oh ether?

cotwolds easter

We covered a fair bit of track over the last 4 days.

London---> Bath---> Chipping Sodbury----> Tortworth----> Bristol---->Wotton-Under-Edge----> Cheltenham----> Lower Slaughter----> Oxford----> London.

One forgets that when one does a road trip in the UK, you don't drive for more than two hours without reaching the edge of country. It's not like days on end in the Karroo, where Cape Town is barely reachable within two days solid driving.

We bought another couple with us, and together ate fuck loads of chocolate while meandering through the literary elite hot spots of Bath and Oxford, while staying in our suitably imposing and stately manor house in the heart of the Cotswolds.

It was very agreeable.

We even got a three course meal included in the deal for dinner. Food baby much?

I have seen Bath and Oxford, but the rest on our voyage of discovery had been left to our imaginations on what we think they might look like.

The Cotswolds is almost unforgivably beautiful. Just painstakingly old, and all the buildings are crafted from Cotswold limestone. It's a sort of yellowed, golden stone, quarried in Gloucestershire. I had no idea about this.

The age of some of these places (pubs established in the 1100's, for example), all crafted from this stone (roof tiles included) makes it rather remarkable in terms of classic English countryside.

If you're a scone purist (like me; I grew up in the Natal Midlands), then you would've done what we did - went on the hunt for the perfect Cream Tea.

I'm more than a scone purist. I'm a scone ho. Give me a scone and I'll probably make love to it. In public. Lewdly.

Where was I? A 'cream tea' isn't a tea with a blob of cream inside. It's a tea with a scone, that comes with fresh clotted cream on the side. It's fucking to die for.

We went on a walk around the Tortworth Court property, consisting of forest - which they like to verbosify as 'arboretum.'

Apparently that's the linguistic equivalent to 'forest' as 'extrapolate' is to 'guess.'

On trunching through the forest, fast realised it's the pivotal scene of slasher film cliche's - where murder novels or horror movies are drawn. Where some dude without a face starts wielding a scythe towards blissfully unaware tourists like us, and the sole survivor scrambles through fences and such. We were on edge.

I mean, there was a prison nearby.

When suddenly - and I nearly did something most unladylike in my undergarments - when we came across murder most foul a dead mannequin in the forest.

I then bent over to touch the [fake] body and thrust my hand unwittingly into a bunch of stinging nettles.

I thought the African jungle was fraught with shit. Nay nay. Don't mock stinging nettles. Ouchy ouchy!


It was such a lovely weekend though. Some serious lollage. To get out into the country, and leave the nutters and crowds back in London to their own defenses.

And I bought a new tweed jacket in Bristol. It's ah-mazing.