Monks must have been short!!!

This morning we attended church with Jane. There is a team of trained bell ringers that go around to the Anglican churches in the area and ring the bells. Jane's has 8 or 10 bells and they ring them to a musical tune for about 20-30 minutes. It is quite lovely, unless you don't get up for church. Then it is probably annoying! We enjoyed them. The service was very different than what we are used to, but very nice too. Every village and town has an Anglican church building and they are all the same. Very big with a very tall square bell tower, and the building is built in the shape or a cross. (As we were driving along we saw many, many churches that looked like this.) They have just a small congregation now-a-days, so financially it is tough to keep it up. Currently the most pressing problem is bats in the building, and they are not permitted to deal with them (I guess they're protected or some such baloney). Their 'by-products' stain the floor and wood pews and it is messy.


An interesting practice which we noted in the huge Abbey we toured in Bath, as well as the smaller one in West Down, is the burial of the dead right in the floor of the church. There are several graves in the West Down church (Jane's), as well as an wooden effigy of a knight which is set on the floor under some windows. It looks sort of like the carved sarcophagus the Pharaohs used in Egypt. No one knows for sure if the fellow is in there or buried out in the cemetery or in the floor somewhere. There was a large tomb and effigy in the Bath Abbey belonging to one of the previous vicars from many centuries ago.









After attending church with Jane, we headed for Wales to the Llanthony Priory (Abbey). Boy did that place give me a headache! I banged my head on the top of the doors several times, but was it ever worth it. We slept in one of four rooms that were used by monks. It was amazing looking at the ruins, and even more amazing thinking how old the place was...simply fantastic!