Autumn and Oxford........

It's been a long, long time since we went through the change from summer to autumn but it hasn't been too bad an experience at all.
The weather has stayed exceptionally good and we have only had one morning of drizzly rain in the month that we've been back in the UK. The change in the season was quite sudden though and the trees went from dark green to the autumn colours in about a week and of course the leaves have been falling everywhere.

Ash trees turning golden.

The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is no exagerration, as orchards, gardens and fields are full of ripe fruit and crops. Out walking by the river, I happened upon a small copse of Blackthorn trees covered in sloe berries. I picked a couple of pockets full and turned them into "Sloe Vodka" when I got home. The traditional drink is "Sloe Gin" but vodka was handy, so it had to do.

Apparently, it tasted OK as a cocktail, when mixed with grape juice or cider.

Sloe Vodka - I think I'll set up a cottage industry!

Later in the week, I made a short trip to the local railway line, to get a snap of a steam train excursion. Carnforth, (my home town), was the last working steam depot in the UK and still has a steam museum from which regular excursions are run.
Unfortunately, the early morning mist rolled in about 5 minutes before the train arrived but I still managed a ghostly effort of the train passing over the eleven arches viaduct at Capernwray.

The age of steam isn't quite dead.

In our last week before departing the north we had time to visit Iris' niece Billie-Chantelle, Issa and their family at Birkenhead where we had a nice afternoon at their lovely home coupled with typical Scouse hospitality. They also gave us a nice bottle of champagne for us to enjoy as part of our 45th anniversary.

 

Champagne camping!

After leaving the north, we spent a couple of days at Oxford, a town that neither of us had visited before. As everyone knows, it is home to one of the world's great universities and seats of learning but this apart, the town itself is very ordinary. We spent a full day in the Ashmolean Museum though and didn't even come close to boredom.

The first room that we checked was one dealing with coins and currency. The first exhibits that took our attention were "coin hoards" and there were several examples of these, where some unfortunate owners had secreted their hard earned, (or in some cases, hard stolen), cash in out of the way places, only for someone to discover it hundreds of years later.

One of Roman hoards had included a very rare coin minted from gold taken from the Temple in Jerusalem, after it was sacked by the Romans, in 70AD. The coin has an inscription to the effect that the Emperor had dealt justice to the Jews. Justice in this case being mass murder and destroying the Temple.

Another poster indicated what a soldier on Hadrian's Wall would earn in 110AD. Apparently, they were paid the equivalent of 13 asses or 325 pints of beer a day. Quite a tough choice to make I suppose, (asses and beer were the only consumer goods available on the wall).

The picture as you may note, states that the Romans were on the Wall in 110AD. To the best of my knowledge, (and I have never been wrong), they didn't start building the wall until 122AD.

The section on coins/currency also included a 3 Peso bill from Cuba, featuring the one and only Che Guevara. I knew that Che was one of Castro's henchmen but apparently, he was also Governor of the Bank of Cuba after the revolution. It mustn't have been much of a job 'cos he was soon off revolutioning again elsewhere in South America.

 

The ex-Governor of the Bank!

The section on English history from 400-1600 was the highlight of the museum (for me), because of the display containing the "Alfred Jewel". This jewelry was made for Alfred the Great but for what purpose no-one knows definitively, although it is thought to have been the base of a stick used to point to text when reading. It is as bright and fresh as the day it was made and the words in Saxon around the outside say, "Alfred had me made". The jewel was found by a farm labourer when he was ploughing a field. Needless to say, the field "owner" claimed ownership!

 

The Alfred Jewel

One nice feature of the Ashmolean is that it has a (large) number of separate rooms, each covering a particular period in history, or a specific subject, (e.g. coinage or ceramics etc.) This allows you to be quite selective and avoid any topics that you might find boring. My favourites were the AD 400-1600 and the English pre-history sections, especially when I came across the neanderthal skull of Grandad!

 

Iris says he has my smile!!!

Neanderthals pre-dated modern humans in Europe by 150-200 thousand years and only lasted for a few thousand after we moved in. Some of the neanderthals mated, (by choice???), with the modern europeans, with the result that modern europeans have 3-4 percent of neanderthal DNA. That's one way to preserve the species I suppose.

Finally, we came across a vase that included an artist's impression of Odysseus, who as the museum put it is - "surfing on two amphorae". He'd better watch that he doesn't get his naughty bits caught between them.

To end our account of Oxford here is a Saxon Tower and an old building of medieval vintage (now a bank).

 

Church tower circa 1000AD.

 

 A medieval Oxford building, (of which there were precious few).