After taking a couple of days to draw breath following the Big Visit, R and I have now launched ourselves into what promises to be a hectic week, with little prospect of downtime, and for me, not many opportunities for photography. Just to add to the excitement, I seem to be going down with the Boy Wonder’s cold. Oh joy.
This afternoon we found ourselves in Evesham, which didn’t improve my mood. Despite the fact that I’ve lived here now for virtually half my life, I still don’t consider myself a local – and given that I can’t trace my ancestry back through an unbroken fifteen generations of asparagus wranglers and plum herders, I’m confident that the locals would agree with that assessment. Still, if you have to go to Evesham, Abbey Park is quite pleasant – here with the Abbey bell tower flaunting itself in the centre of shot, and the Parish Church of All Saints skulking just behind. There’s a second, redundant, church – St Lawrence – a few yards further to the left, but I couldn’t get all three buildings in the same frame. A new wide-angle lens might help.
By the way, the railed-off area on the far left is a recently laid-out garden commemorating Evesham Abbey, which stood on this spot until the monstrous Henry VIII saw the opportunity of improving his bank balance while sticking the boot into the Pope, and had all the English monasteries dissolved, their buildings sold off, and their wealth confiscated. In areas like this, where all the land for miles around had been owned by the Abbey for centuries, and worked by the peasants on its behalf, the social and economic shock must have been devastating.
