On the Roof with the Earl

For an American not many things seem more surreal than standing on a five hundred-year-old manor house in the midst of a tour directed by current, titled, owner of the house. Yes, that's right. We came to see a three-hundred-year-old diary (the original couldn't be located, but the Earl kindly made copies of the transcript pages that were missing from my copy), but instead we ended up on a tour - a tour that went decidedly beyond the scope of the normal public access to the house. It ended on the roof overlooking the large grounds at Stanway. We ranged through the house seeing where an 18th century midwife had etched her name into a pane of glass, discussing the horrible Victorian wing added to the house and when it subsequently, mercifully, was torn down in the twentieth century, and admiring the beautiful drawing room that had been completely refurbished in the 1720s. We then strolled past the 17th century entry gate, the medieval church, and stood in the tithe barn (built in 1370, thank you very much). We also stood in a sort of sitting room where the Earl opened a drawer that produced a bundle of letters and a lock of hair one of his ancestors cut from his head when his wife died. In 1755. He was incredibly tolerant of our goggled-eyed staring and clearly enchanted with his family's history.

Thursday also included stops in Upper Slaughter (nope, I 'm not making that up, it's just up the road from Lower Slaughter and just beyond Lower Swell, which is, of course, next to Upper Swell), Adelstrop, Stow-on-the-Wold, and over into Oxfordshire to see Chipping Norton and Swerford. These villages and towns are all in the picturesque Cotswolds. The day was perfect for travel and we were able to collect photos of the houses and grave markers for the Travell family.

That was Thursday. Friday was spent much more prosaically at microfilm readers deciphering property details from 18th century probates. A project that concluded today - in much haste as today was our last day in the Gloucestershire Archives.

Now that we've exhausted the archival possibilities of Gloucestershire we will see a few sites today and tomorrow before journeying onto Chester. We will arrive in Chester bright and early Monday morning as soon as the archive opens. In the meantime we will lunch in Cheltenham - a place once described as "an eligible residence for single gentlewomen" - and visit Tewkesbury Abbey.