Posts in Category: England
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Haddon Hall – Star of Stage & Screen
Even if you’ve never been to Haddon Hall, chances are that you’ve seen it. Perhaps no building in England has shown up in as many plays, movies, TV series and novels as this Tudor palace in Derbyshire. Whether standing in as the setting for no less than three adaptions of Jane Eyre or just being itself in […]
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Tewkesbury Fair – Re-Enacting a Medieval Battle
This is my seventh post on a recent trip to Great Britain with Canadian military history experts Liberation Tours on a tour titled Medieval Britain: Castles, Cannons & Crowns. One of the main reasons Alison and I signed up for this trip was the prospect of going to the famous Tewkesbury Medieval Festival, the largest of […]
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Warwick Castle- 1,000 Years of British History
This is my fifth post from a recent tour of Britain with Canadian military travel specialists Liberation Tours. It’s titled Medieval Britain: Castles, Cannons and Crowns and will take us from London to Edinburgh in just over two weeks, stopping at some one the best known sights in the country and a few lesser known ones […]
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Churchill War Rooms – A Must Visit in London
Samuel Johnson famously said, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life” and he was dead on. Perhaps no city on earth has as many must see attractions as London – The Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, The British Museum, Westminster Abbey, even Madame Tussaud’s if you can stand the lineups. […]
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Salisbury Cathedral – A Most Beautiful Church
While I am not a religious person, I do greatly appreciate the beautiful art and architecture that religion can inspire, none more so than the awesome Gothic cathedrals of western Europe. These wonders in stone often took hundreds of years to complete; Cologne took 600 years. As architectural tastes changed over the centuries, the results […]
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Stonehenge with Francis Pryor
This is my third post on a recently completed trip to Britain with Canadian military history specialists, Liberation Tours. Titled Medieval Britain: Castles, Cannons and Crowns, the tour took us from London to Edinburgh with stops at an incredible variety of well known and lesser visited sites dating from 2500 B.C.E. to the Battle of […]
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HMS Victory – The Most Important Ship in Britain
Britain has a long sea faring and naval tradition that stretches all the way back to Alfred the Great. By the 18th and 19th century British sea power was responsible for the creation and protection of the largest empire ever created. Constantly challenged by the French, Dutch, Spanish and even the United States, the British […]
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Battle of Hastings – England’s Last Invasion
The peaceful and bucolic scene above disguises the fact that on October 14, 1066 the most important and decisive battle ever fought on English soil happened right here – the Battle of Hastings. It was the final successful invasion of this storied island and marked the end of the Anglo-Saxon rule that Alfred the Great had […]
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Beatles Tour with Guide Paul Beesley
If you are a baby boomer like me then you will never forget February 9th, 1964. That is the day The Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and the music world was never the same again. The passion that The Beatles aroused in their fans was unparalleled and the Fab Four went on […]