As you probably guessed from all the pictures, we recently visited the UK. We wanted to take in the sights, of course, but also sought out places associated with favorite writers. What we didn’t necessarily plan were all the encounters with various holy places and things along the way:
- St. John Southworth, laying in a reliquary in the middle of Westminster Cathedral
- St. Thomas More, whose execution site is marked on Tower Hill just across the road a bit from the Tower of London
- Venerable Margaret Sinclair, whose shrine is in St. Patrick’s, Edinburgh
- St. Margaret of Scotland, whose Gospel-book is in the Bodleian Library and has a chapel dedicated to her in Edinburgh Castle
- The Holy Thorn Reliquary in the British Museum
- St. Columba, who cast a monster from the River Ness upstream to the Loch (!) and was subsequently given the land where the Old High Church of Inverness sits now
The Lindisfarne Gospels and Codex Sinaiticus were also highlights, along with all the other beautiful illuminated manuscripts.
As for writers, we visited Charles Dickens' house, scratched our Mary Poppins itch with Kensington and St. Paul’s Cathedral, went to Mass at the Oxford Oratory (“Where Gerard Manley Hopkins was a priest, Cardinal Newman preached, and JRR Tolkien attended Mass”), wandered Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top and Wordsworth’s stomping grounds in Hawkshead. Visiting Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey feels like cheating, but there was Spenser and the rest. Among them was Dr. Johnson; we passed by Boswell’s Court in Edinburgh, which was neat. Greyfriar’s Kirkyard in Edinburgh is said to have inspired a few names from the Harry Potter series, and we spent a morning picking through the riches of ages along Portobello Road.
We were blessed with excellent weather - warm (verging on hot) in London, mostly sunny and cool in the Lake District, and more of the same throughout Scotland. We traveled exclusively by train, foot, and one tour bus. It was lovely to travel and great to get back. By and large we ate pretty well, too. Visited quite a few pubs and drank excellent beer, too.