Bartimaeus

Beautiful blue skies continued and we enjoyed the sight of two cormorants flying and landing in a tree.

We made our way to a rather rickety mooring outside a pub. We found ourselves really enjoying the food at the Bridge Inn and Ferry in Offenham, and the warm welcome. It is rare for us to have lunch and dinner in the same venue on the same day and we hadn't even run out of food on the boat. I can recommend.

Between meals we had a little tour of the small town. The roof top characters continued with a thatch squirrel scampering along a row of houses, only a little larger than life.

There was also a dragon, much larger than the squirrel but whether larger than life, who can tell? The dragon depicted with St George is bigger but the dragon in Ivor The Engine was pretty small, with a high squeaky voice, unlike Ivor who sang bass in the male voice choir.

But we weren't in Wales so we weren't expecting singing dragons. We found another maypole. It still had its ribbons wrapped around it. 

The ribbons start half way down. This one didn't give it's height but it was still pretty tall. Someone passing remarked on it being hard for me to fit it all in to a picture.

We set off the next day, Friday, and went the short distance to Evesham continuing to clock up only one lock a day. There was plenty of room to moor and a man walking by assured us there was no heavy rain expected so our non flood safe mooring was safe enough for the next 48 hours. Shane had checked this out anyway, but nice someone else was considerate.

Shane had a plan up his sleeve for entertainment. He was keen to check out the Almonry. It was not to be, as it was closed. He was disappointed that in this case his advance research had not been helpful. However there are gardens  to walk in and noticeboards with history snippets. They did keep giving tantalising mention of an interesting exhibit that could be a seen in the Almonry, such as an ancient scripture or the Evesham world map, from 1390. However the weather was good so an outside day was pleasant. Noticeboards explained the lives of the Benedictine monks and the lands had been extensive, Lady Godiva had been one of their benefactors. It lasted over 800 years before Henry VIII ordered its destruction as part of his dissolution of the monasteries, when the monks were driven out.

The crown kept the riches. Some of the stone had been reused by the locals in building. We made our way back to present day town and were met by an unusual vehicle joining the queue of traffic at the lights. They waited patiently then jogged briskly past when the lights changed.

In the parkland near the moorings, I had noticed a gate that had a whale on it - an even more unexpected creature for an inland town. It turned out that, like Edinburgh, there had once been a whale jawbone arch. It had deteriorated after a century or so but the memory was kept alive with an artistic representation of the arch, in metal and a wooden whale sculpture within it. There was another set of whale gates too.

We had reason to stay two days in Evesham. Shane had bought tickets to go to a concert. We had listened to snippets on line and decided he sounded interesting. In the meantime on our wanderings, we had seen that there was also a free concert in the All Saints Church. Shane decided he had other things to do, but I went along. It was the unusual combination of an organist and a soprano. The organist, Gus Orchard, introduced the pieces and the soprano, Sheilagh Armit joined him for some of the repertoire. What a mighty instrument the organ is, such variety a good deal more than Ivor's three notes! While this one was not hugely decorative, it was unusually positioned centrally in the church, near the altar, where the organist could easily be seen playing and all the stops and foot pedals are fully on display.

The organist stood up between pieces and spoke to the audience.  He had pieces by four different  composers. Although I wasn't familiar with the pieces, I enjoyed the recital. I was only slightly disappointed to see I hadn't noticed the stall selling wine at the start. I might have enjoyed it even more!

I corrected that mistake by ordering myself a gin and tonic before the evening concert. The main man was  Robert Vincent, a singer and songwriter from Liverpool, was joined by Anna Corcoran playing keyboard and singing harmonies and Danny Williams playing double bass and singing harmonies. They rounded off our visit to Evesham very nicely indeed.