Trip To England Part One: The Village I Grew Up In

Well, hello there.

 

I have just come back from spending the past month visiting with my Mum and sister back in my childhood village in England.

 

I spent the time from when I was eight, until I left to go to college in the United States at nineteen living in an idyllic village in the heart of England. It had been almost four years since my last visit (the longest I'd ever been away) and my first time there in the summer for nine years and it's as if time had stood still and as if nothing had changed.

 

 

I'm often asked what I miss most about England, and usually I say it's charm. It's understated, a moment in history preserved and adorned with such manicured country gardens.

 

I grew up in a Norman Rockwell kind of painting, with idyllic cottages strewn around farmland and the river Stowe. Many of the cottages have thatched roofs with an ornamental quirk, like this cottage with it's peacock.

 

 

This building used to be a post office, albeit through a window or two but is now a family home with the most beautiful flowers to admire.

 

 

Next to the old post office is this chocolate box cottage, which also has a thatched roof with a peacock.

 

 

This is the clubhouse where mostly the men hang out.

 

 

The Parsonage, where the Reverend used to live is right next to the church and was built in the Georgian times.

 

 

The Church of Saint Mary. The Domesday Survey of 1086 mentions two priests. Centuries have passed and it still stands representing eight hundred years of births, marriages and deaths.

 

 

Many of the old village names are on the headstones in the churchyard.

 

  

 

From Tudor architecture to...
 

 

...Elizabethan architecture.

 

 

My husband joined me for the last week of the trip, and together we accrued a lot of pictures. We were trying to capture every memory possible, and to create new ones with my family and childhood friends.

 

Come back in a few days for my post on by going back in time and re-living my ancestors footsteps.

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