Second Day in Ludlow
I’m back to writing about our England trip again. We started our second day in Ludlow with a vegan version of a typical English breakfast–roasted mushrooms and tomatoes, canned baked beans, hash browns, hot tea, and very sour, very delicious local apple juice. The apple juice was the best part of the meal.
“I’ve learned I don’t care much for an English breakfast,” Rob said.
It was a terribly cold day, the frost so heavy that it looked like snow. The lady who served us our breakfast gestured toward the frosty world outside the window and said, “It’s a sharp one this morning.”
And oh, she was right. I went out wearing tights with leggings over them, jeans over the leggings, and a long skirt over my jeans. I crammed slipper socks into my shoes, and I put on three sweaters. Rob basically put on all the clothes in his suitcase (he had on warm-up pants under his jeans). Our range of motion was severely restricted by our many layers of clothing, so we walked stiffly, woodenly, slowly. We made our way through the biting wind to Ludlow Castle.
Ludlow Castle is basically a ruin, a beautiful ruin, still privately owned by the earls of Powis. It’s open to the public every day of the year–except, amazingly, the day we were there (the castle people were preparing for their annual Christmas Fair). We couldn’t go in, but we did look around outside.
The area around the castle was wild and overgrown; it didn’t seem to be tended at all. There was a little path through the dry, plumed, frosty grasses, and we followed that around the whole length of the castle wall. We gazed at the ruined towers and the terribly old studded doors that led out into the weeds or simply into the air now (the steps leading down from one door had completely crumbled away). Dark birds (ravens, I think) flew out of a tower’s peepholes and landed in a nearby cedar.
I wished we could have gone inside the castle because supposedly there are lots of secret passageways and dead-end staircases. Oh, I forgot to mention that the castle stands on a cliff above the gentle River Teme.
It was so cold in the wild, neglected garden around the castle. After a while we had to go down into the little town to a restaurant to warm up. I got some hot black currant tea, and Rob got hot chocolate and a bright yellow lemon cupcake with pink sprinkles and a little almond-paste daisy. (I wanted to steal Rob’s cupcake.) We sat at a little table and talked about all the tempting English desserts we’d been seeing around: Victoria sponge, treacle sponge, sticky toffee pudding, mincemeat pies, sherry trifle, elderflower ice cream. . . .
After our tea and chocolate, we went to St. Laurence’s, Ludlow’s famous church, which was established in the 11th century. (It was fun getting there, figuring out Ludlow’s maze of little narrow medieval lanes.) St. Laurence’s is well known for its 15th-century misericords, small carved ledges on the undersides of the choir stall seats. The carved ledges are beautiful but had a very practical purpose. When the seats were tipped up, the ledges provided support and relief to the clergy and choir, who had to stand through long services.
We bought a little guide to the misericords and then we went and stood in front of the actual objects and admired each one as Rob read aloud from the guidebook. The carvings were wonderfully funny and brutal (very medieval). For example, a really famous one shows a dishonest alewife being dragged off to hell as one demon reads from a long list of her misdeeds and another serenades her on the bagpipes.
The misericords were really entertaining to look at. The dolphins had teeth as fierce as lions’ . . . and the angels looked like eagles (they had feathers all over their bodies). It was fun standing in that cold stone church, that cave-like church, patiently admiring the worn carvings as Rob read aloud from our flimsy little guidebook. I love taking time to do things right; I wanted to give those old treasures their due.
