Since my last blog, which was regrettably a while ago, I have had a few more adventures involving a ruined abbey, the capital of Wales, the most studied woodland in the world, and one of the greatest stately homes in England.

Cardiff and Tintern Abbey

Last Saturday I took another bus trip with the same guide who so capably escorted us around the Cotswolds and Stratford a month ago. I must quickly digress and remark on the inexplicably hurried pace at which my first month in England has flown by. It still seems like just last week that I was sitting in the terminal at Heathrow with that giddy smile on my face. A month may have gone, but thankfully the smile has not. Also thankfully, I never had the awful “culture shock” experience that the travel advisors at Guelph warned me of. I hope I am not jinxing it, but I have been so busy enjoying this beautiful city and the beautiful country, that the depression and homesickness that was supposed to befall me has been forcibly suppressed and replaced by elation and excitement instead. Anyhow, it has been a month since my last formal bus trip, so I jumped at the chance to spend a day in Wales visiting Tintern Abbey and Cardiff with some of my fellow foreigners. We caught the bus at 8:30 in the morning in Headington and arrived at our first destination, Tintern Abbey, around 10:15. As I mentioned previously, there is nothing better than getting up with the sun and having a completely full day of travel. Best of all, was that on this particular Welsh morning, the fog was as thick as Habitant pea soup, and as we exited the bus at Tintern Abbey, the sight was truly something to behold. The physical setting of the abbey is spectacular in its own right, perched on the banks of the River Wye and bordered by towering, forested valley hills. Add the smoky cloud of fog that enshrouded the ruins and muffled the sound of voices, the grass dripping with dew, the moss clinging to the stone walls, and the lonesome song of a solitary bird, and the atmosphere became powerfully and tangibly mystical. Needless to say, we were all in awe of the setting and the spectacular ruin that in some places was nothing more than a few stone walls, but in others still displayed the prominent Gothic stonework of its heyday.

Tintern Abbey

After Tintern Abbey we drove for another hour or so and arrived at the capital city of Wales – Cardiff – around lunch time. We had until 4:45 to explore the city, and my flat-mate Devin and I decided that we wanted to see the bay – he because he had yet to see the “coast” and the ocean, and I because I had heard that the bay was an interesting study in urban revival, a transformation of an industrial port to a shopping and restaurant district. We took the train down to the bay, because the city centre of Cardiff is separated from the bay by a distance too far to walk given our short window of exploration time. We found our way to the water’s edge and wandered around Roald Dahl’s Plass (a plaza named after Welshman, and childhood favourite, Roald Dahl). The fog had followed us from Tintern Abbey, and we could hardly see 10 metres out to sea so we decided to have lunch and wait for the fog to lift. And that it did. As we ate we sat at a second floor window and watched from our table as the receding fog slowly revealed more and more of the bay that had been completely invisible an hour before. It is a very nice waterfront area, and the piece de resistance is the Millennium Centre building.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wales_Millennium_Centre

It is absolutely spectacular. I am not always a fan of some of the modern, minimal statement buildings in architecture, but this building is fantastic. The bluish-silver slate walls, built with Welsh slate are beautiful, but the obvious centre piece is the copper-clad facade with the engraving that reads “Creu Gwir Fel Gwydr O Ffwrnais Awen” in Welsh, which means “In These Stones Horizons Sing” in English. It’s quite an evocative and hopeful line, and very appropriate for a building that is so celebratory.

Cardiff and Tintern Abbey was an overwhelmingly successful day-trip and the small taste of Wales that I got has left me wanting more. My ideal plan is to hike the Pembrokeshire Coast path in May, and see some of the Welsh seaside, and after a day in Wales I am determined to make it happen.

The Bay: pre-lunch

The Bay: post-lunch

Millennium Centre

Millennium Centre facade

Cardiff city centre

My Countryside Ramble

On the Tuesday following my Welsh excursion I decided to finally venture forth into the countryside by myself for a day-long wander. Armed with my hiking shoes and my trusty walking map of Oxford and the surrounding area I headed out. The Brits really do have a thing for walking, and I love it. Because that means the Brits have a thing for creating walking maps, maps that are invaluable to foreign invaders like me. The Ordnance Survey has mapped all of the UK and these maps are incredibly thorough, showing the typical things like roads, railways etc. but also showing National Trust sites (including gardens!), Roman ruins, quarries, waterfalls, lookout points, and most importantly pedestrian rights of way. The green dotted lines that criss-cross the maps of England are a testament to British walkers and it is amazing how far one can go without following any roads. I only wish Canada had a similar model. The point is though, that I walked for basically an entire day and was walking next to roads for maybe half an hour in total, it was marvelous.

My destination on this gloriously sunny Tuesday was Wytham Woods, the woodland owned and managed by Oxford University. It’s like Oxford’s version of the Arboretum, and as soon as I heard of it, and saw that it was well within walking distance, I resolved that that would be my first adventure. I followed the Oxford Canal out of town for most of the morning. Most sections are quite picturesque, with lovely gardens edging the canal that is lined with riverboats, many of which are evocative of the washer woman’s boat in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (I watched the whole movie on YouTube last week, I forgot how much I loved it). After following the canal for what seemed like eternity, I pulled out my map and realized that I had slightly over-shot my exit, but it was a minor miscue and soon I was on course again. I passed through the villages of Wolvercote and then the pretty hamlet of Wytham before staggering up a hill to the woods and finding a very welcoming bench to sit on. I soon realized that I needed a permit to enter the woods since Oxford students and faculty use the forest to conduct experiments in ecology, climate, zoology etc. so I went into the sawmill building and luckily one of the English woodsmen said I could wander around and apply for a permit when I got back home. How these guys got the job that allows them to spend all day in the woods I would really like to know. There’s nothing I would enjoy more.

Oxford Canal

The walk was lovely. I walked a great big loop, eventually terminating at Botley, a suburb in outer Oxford. Although it was spring-like in temperature, there are still no leaves on the trees here, but it did little to minimize the beauty of the walk. The trail winds through dense forest, pastures filled with sheep (another welcome reminder of home), and clearings with spectacular views to the city. I found another bench to rest, looking out on to one of the clearings with its blazing gold grasses, solitary oaks and scrubby saplings shooting up in the sunlight. Snowdrops and daffodils offered cheerful specks of colour, bobbing in the cool breeze among the otherwise somber landscape, and the overall effect made me quite pensive and calm. I sat for an hour or so and very reluctantly got to my feet and began my downhill trek towards the city. There were some incredible views on the walk back as I passed through more of the rolling Oxfordshire hills and before long I was back in the noise and concrete of the suburbs. As you may have surmised, I will be returning to my woods as often as possible as soon as I get my permit.

Thatched cottage in Wytham

My new friends

My future home

The clearing