September 2021 Part One - Unlike Boudicca, we didn't burn down St Albans when we visited!

 September proved to be a month of escape. I had a long weekend off, and we decided to go away for a bit. James booked a cheap Holiday Inn, which was in the centre of Stevenage. We did the drive from Southampton, and made sure we had a few stops along the way to get out and explore. 

We had what I call a travellers lunch (on a services, so James could use the toilet and I could get some more painkillers, as for some reason, I brought my Amitriptyline with me, but not any paracetamol & ibuprofen. I'd also forgotten to bring any socks with me, so I ordered some to be collected in Stevenage. I think the Amitriptyline was messing with my brain a little, at times it felt like it was really hard to concentrate and remember things.

Our first stop was St Albans, and typically for us, made sure we visited the cathedral first. I didn't know much about St Albans, other than it fell victim to Boudicca's revolt against the Romans and was burnt to the ground. The cathedral was small but interesting, and tags itself as the oldest place of Christian worship in England, which is quite the claim. What I liked most about the cathedral is the fact it had some really fun little details, like for example a tic tac toe board, scratched out in the base of one of the columns, obviously reserved for particularly boring services!

These are the crisp Gothic arches in the cathedral, which has the longest nave of any cathedral in England, as well as being the only remaining crossing tower from the 1000's still standing, making it very notable indeed.

In the picture below you can see the more Romanesque feel of the crossing tower, which was so full of light and colour from the ceiling, it was for me, the most beautiful area of the Cathedral.

For some bizarre reason, and I can't work out why, I never took a picture of the front of the cathedral. The only real outside shot I have is this slightly wonky view of the tower. I blame it on the fact, that I was hungry and in need of some lunch!

Our next stop was Houghton House, an English Heritage (but free to visit) ruined home on the top of a hill, giving beautiful views of the Bedfordshire landscape. It's a really curious but enticing building, with a wonderful mix of red brick & classical stone, as well as some intricate little details within. It's a little walk away from the car park, but the walk gives you a lovely look at the ruined house as you approach.

Imagine your carriage pulling up to this entrance!

I love the little details above the columns, the stone pattern with coats of arms.

Not bad for a grand entrance! It's speculated, that not proven, that Inigo Jones designed the two Italian style portico's for the building, which was built in 1615. The house didn't have a long history of use, it was mainly a hunting lodge, before being fully lived in from around 1660 by the Bruce family. However, the house was dismantled and stripped of anything of value in 1794. Interestingly, the grand staircase was moved to The Swan Lodge in Bedford, where it still remains today if you fancy visiting it.

You can still catch glimpses of grand details left behind, such as the etching in the stones above the windows.

And love or hate graffiti, it's always interesting to see older graffiti around, giving you a record of when people visited and when. They didn't have instagram and what not back in the day, so this was sometimes the only proof you had of actually visiting somewhere!

A view out the front entrance and up through the tree lined avenue. This is the direction you walk down to the house, and it's interesting in the fact that the most grand side of the house, it's actually not the main entrance.

A little more graffiti, this time in a niche where something would have been stored in. Maybe candles, or a nice vase of flowers.

We then headed into Stevenage, and having never been before, I wasn't sure what to expect. But I wasn't too impressed. There's a proper almost brutalist 60's style town centre, of which most shops were closing or closed already, plus a large amount of empty units. It wasn't the nicest of places, and didn't seem particularly safe either. We ended up walking over the bridge over the train tracks to the sort of leisure/retail park and grabbing dinner there. We then headed back across, and in the dusk and coming darkness of night, the centre did not seem particularly nice, verging on a little unsafe. There seemed to be a lot of people just hanging around, including one foul smelling homeless man who harassed us for money as we walked past. We said "sorry, no change" several times, before he then demanded that we go to cashpoint and withdraw him money. We sped up and curtailed round to the hotel. Perhaps tomorrow night we will have dinner at the hotel instead.