The Cotswolds & Stonehenge

March 4, 2014

(On the Cotswolds Walking Trail)

Every time I watch a movie adaption of a Jane Austen novel, I find myself drooling over the scenery. The windswept plains, blue skies flecked with cloud, the colors that seem to burst right out of the screen—it takes my breath away, every time, and I’m not even there. I’m sitting on a couch with a cat snoring in my lap feeling like my heart is about to explode because it’s so dang gorgeous.

When I went to England, I had all those movies swirling around in my head. Would the real thing live up to all that cinematic glory? It did. It does. On a trip to the Cotswolds last weekend, I stood on those rolling hills, breathed in the English country air, and felt like I might burst from how beautiful it was. We drove to Broadway Tower, a castle-esque structure that’s situated on the top of a hill overlooking acres and acres of prime sheep-grazing land. After enjoying the view from the top of the tower, we walked two miles down a gentle, muddy slope and I got my fill of breathtaking English countryside. I felt like Elizabeth Bennett—minus the affinity for brooding, high-society men.

(Broadway Tower)

It was so overwhelmingly gorgeous, the poet in me was struck silent. How could I ever capture what I was looking at in words? The stormy blue sky, threatening rain, the rolling pastures dotted with sheep, the sleepy town nestled in the valley below me, the delicate purples and golds of the crocuses (crocuses in February!) that pushed up through the soil at my feet. It was like something out of a dream. Or a movie. Except all the Jane Austen novels in world couldn’t capture the smell of the land—like dirt and grass and water, or the sounds of sheep calling out to each other as a pack of Americans traipsed across their pasture, or the soft, slightly oily feel of the wads of wool caught on thorny branches.

(Cotswolds sheep!)

I had a similarly wonderful experience when I visited Stonehenge a couple weeks earlier. It was overwhelming in the best way. The wind nipped at my cheeks and blustered around me, making me sway with its force. I stood in the shadow of stones erected thousands of years ago, by people I couldn’t even imagine, for purposes that remain mostly a mystery even to this day. But whatever the site was used for, I could feel the power pouring out of the earth. It was like the stones were alive. Their energy pressed in on me, made my heart thump a little harder, my breath come a little quicker. The wind that had made me want to huddle under a blanket when we’d first gotten off the bus barely registered, except to heighten the brooding power of the land.

(Stonehenge)

I looked around at the people gathered. A few stood apart, like me, gazing wide-eyed at the stones. But almost everyone else was too busy gathering up their friends for endless photos to steep in the wonder that I thought couldn’t be ignored. It made me pause, made me wonder about people’s priorities. Yes, I was excited to share the dozens of pictures I’d snapped of the place on Facebook, but some of the people I watched barely glanced at the stones the entire time we were there. They kept their backs to them, their focus not on the ancient magic that surrounded them, but on the cameras that clicked away in front of them. It was disheartening. Were these tourists not feeling what I was feeling? Were they closed off to the energy I could feel seeping from the sodden earth at my feet? The energy that had drawn ancient peoples to this site over and over for centuries and centuries and centuries? It’s hard to look that far back in time, to grasp the history that is laid out before you—especially when that history is six thousand years deep. But I wished that everyone around me would stop for a moment and at least try to ponder it.

I think that sometimes we just go to places because we’re supposed to. Visiting New York City? Can’t miss the Empire State Building. Paris? You obviously have to see the Eiffel Tower. Egypt? Don’t forget to take ten thousand pictures of the pyramids. Obviously everyone should experience these places, but I think the reason these legendary structures are so, well, legendary, is because humans made them. Human hands, just like the ones attached to our own arms, crafted these mind-boggling structures. History is hard to grapple with sometimes, but, standing in front of those monolithic stones in the English countryside, I was moved by the magic of the site, magic harnessed by humans just like me.