It was a foodie day! Full English breakfast. Incredible spread for lunch at Stoneleigh Abbey. Cakes, scones and hot beverages at Adlestrop. A three course meal at the Indigo Hotel an hour after arriving in Bath. Whew.
First stop: Stoneleigh Abbey
Stoneleigh Abbey, Warwickshire, was built upon the footprint of a former Cistercian Monastery dissolved–like the rest–during the Reformation.
Jane, along with her sister and mother, traveled to Stoneleigh with Thomas Leigh from Adlestrop (our next stop) when he inherited the estate.
After our guided tour of the main floor rooms of Stoneleigh Abbey–the upper floors have been remodeled into private rental apartments — we descended to the estate chapel–a place likely visited by Jane Austen and often cited as the inspiration for the Mansfield Park estate chapel.
And then we were invited for a “small” luncheon…if by “small” you mean food for four score or more. (We numbered less than thirty.) OMG, there was so much food: plates upon plates of assorted finger sandwiches. Several hot and cold salad choices with sides and fixings. Too many desserts to even count from petit fours to full cakes. And more that I don’t even recall. Meal Two was a delicious whopper of a lunch.
Our bellies full, we proceeded to re-board the motor coach to continue our southward progress.
Adlestrop
Jane Austen made three visits to Adlestrop over her lifetime, staying with the vicar Thomas Leigh, a relative of Jane’s mother Cassandra Leigh Austen and the eventual heir to Stoneleight Abbey (from whence we’d come!) She and Cassandra were visiting with Thomas when he decided to leave Adlestrop and take possession of Stoneleigh Abbey. The women traveled with him to his newly-inherited estate.
After touring the church and grounds, we walked back through the village to the town hall where an afternoon repast of hot beverages and bakery had been prepared. (Third meal, if you’re counting!) Again, I was amazed at how delicious the scones with clotted cream were.
Climbing aboard our coach for the final leg of this journey, we found ourselves traveling through the Cotswolds. Often referred to as the “Heart of England,” the area is renowned for its landscape of green rolling hills, stone walls, woodlands and little towns and villages. Many of the buildings are made from Cotswold Stone, a yellow limestone, giving the area a unifying charm.
The rural vistas began to give way to the urban fringes of Bath as we entered this most beautiful of English towns. Founded by the Romans and enriched by the wool industry of the Middle Ages, Bath developed into an elegant spa city, famed in literature and art, during the reigns of the Georges I, II and III.
And Jane Austen, although not a great fan of city life, spent five years here.
We reach the Hotel Indigo, our home for the next three nights, scattered to our various rooms and then reassembled for a group dinner (Fourth & final meal!) in one of the hotel’s fragmented* dining rooms.
*Fragmented? A few words about the hotel itself: The facility is spread across several adjacent buildings that were probably lodging houses in Bath’s heyday. Getting between them was a challenge.
Also, I was lodged on the top floor of “my” building. I took the stairs up…once. Never again.
But I digress when I mean to extol the abundance of USB ports provided in the room. No jostling between outlets trying to charge devices. The only device I needed to use was a plug convertor for the MacBook’s power supply–and the outlet was built right into the desk! (Although, as I discovered at our next stop, it didn’t prevent me from leaving behind one of my plug convertors in said outlet when we departed.)
7,372S/3.5M
Dave In Austenland 