August 20, Monday

The Plan for the Day was to go to Grimes Graves and Castle Acre up in Norfolk. About ten in the morning Lionel discovered that he had a hearing aid appointment in midafternoon. It was not something he could miss. So Plan B was that Margaret and Lionel would drop Bob and me off at Grimes Graves, go to the appointment, and then come back and pick us up.

It was a grey, misty, chilly day. Bob and I donned our rain gear for the expedition. Grimes Graves was in the middle of roughly nowhere on the Norfolk heath. Acres of gorse and grasses spread as far as the eye could see. We bid Lionel and Margaret good-bye and went into the visitor center.

The visitor center was a smallish flat-roofed dark brown building floating on the heath. Inside were a one-room interpretive center and a small shop. Oh, and a coffee machine. I cannot forget the coffee machine. We chatted with the girl behind the counter, bought our tickets, and went through the little interpretive display.

Out there on that heath were over 350 hollows of various depths. We could see some of them from the windows of the visitor center. They were not graves, but former mine shafts. Between 2500 and 2200 B.C., Neolithic people dug those mines into the chalkstone searching for flint. Flint is a stone found in seams in chalk. It is hard and glassy and thus was prized for tools, particularly axes. Those people dug some of the mines thirty or more feet deep, using only antlers for picks and animal shoulder blades for shovels.

Not far from the visitor center there was a square grey metal building, looked something like a bomb shelter. It sat on a circular wooden platform surrounded by metal fencing. That building covered the entrance to a thirty-foot deep mine. We could go down into that mine, and we did.

When we entered the metal shed and showed our tickets, we were issued a yellow plastic construction-type helmet. That done, the gal peered down into the hole in the middle of the floor. No one was coming up the 30-foot metal ladder from the mine. We could go down. The climb down was exciting! We didn't know what was at the bottom. I loved it.

There were three other people in a little room at the bottom when we got down. Once they hit flint, the Neolithic miners dug tunnels horizontally into the seams. Some seams were a maze of galleries before they played out. In our mine there were four or five tunnels branching out from our central chamber. The openings to these tunnels were at floor level. We had to crouch or sit down to see into them. The entrances were barred, so all we could do was look. I could understand that. It would be easy to get lost in those tunnels, plus there's the safety factor. For me, looking down those galleries had the same fascination as watching the sea or a campfire. I managed to get my camera through the bars for some good photos of them. I've always been drawn to underground caves and tunnels. I use them a lot in my novels.

Time has no meaning in out-of-the-world places like that mine. I don't know how long we were down there. Not long enough for me but, I think, too long for Bob. We finally gave it up and climbed back up the long ladder to the misty skies and green heath.

We returned to the visitor center and asked for a rest room. No such thing. What? There was no water on the site. So there were no restrooms. Not even portable toilets. We asked the girl behind the counter what the workers did. She grinned. She'd heard that question before.

“We either get in our car and drive into the village, or,” she nodded her head at the window, “there's the natural way.”

She told us that they had petitioned English Heritage for some sort of relief, without success.

We decided that right then was the time to follow the two-mile path that wended over the heath among the mineshaft hollows. As well as a relief, it was a great walk. We met only one other person out there. We read in the interpretive exhibit that another mineshaft had been cleared, one over fifty feet deep. It was only open for special events, though. We thought we found the sealed metal entrance for that mine on the walk.

When we got back to the visitor center, we needed a cup of tea. There was no food service without water. But there was that commercial coffee-making machine. Thank goodness! It probably saved our lives. Bob had a coffee while I chose hot chocolate. We sat on a bench in the little exhibit room and relaxed with our afternoon tea.

Afterwards Bob remained on the bench and read a book about the site. I wandered back out and walked around the area of the visitor center. There were three picnic tables near it in a mowed area of the heath. Two of them were filled with picnickers, despite the chill and mists. Some mowed paths in the heath grasses meandered close by the building and the picnic area. I followed them around and around for a while. As I finished one turn, there were Margaret and Lionel, just about exactly at 3:00, the time they had estimated for their return.

We each filled out a comment card, four of them, with the need for toilets at the site. Then we all left for the next attraction, Castle Acre Priory.

The ruins of Castle Acre Priory covered a lot of land. It was a huge complex, as most medieval priories were. We picked up the handsets for the audio tour, then headed out to the priory site. We did pause on the way in the reconstructed monastic herb garden to look around. It was lovely.

At first, when I walked up to the site, the west wall of the priory rose marvelously tall and ornate into the grey skies. The prior's lodging, beside the gate, was mostly intact, which added to the illusion that these weren't ruins, at all. I will admit to skipping much of the church remains to play in the prior's house.

The tour said the house was still intact enough to be lived in. Well, I suppose, if you didn't need water or electricity and liked cold stone walls. But it was certainly fascinating to linger in the rooms and gaze out the windows. There were designs on the floors in bricks, and some of the beams were painted with a red and white Tudor rose floral stencil that had survived over 400 years. Far up in the prior's great chamber, I looked down and saw Bob and Lionel following the tour around the remnants of the church. I later found Margaret exploring another part of the house.

Eventually we all got together and headed back to Tostock. There was bell ringing rehearsal that evening at the village church, and Bob and I were going along to it. Not only that, but Margaret had asked her neighbor, Jean, to give us a tour of the church.

St. Andrew's was your “Little Brown Church in a Vale,” except that it's grey. It's your classic very old church tucked among trees at the edge of the village. Fifteen years ago, when Bob and I lived in Tostock for a month, we wandered through that church more than once. We even went to an art show there.

Guest bell-ringers were in the balcony when we got to the church, along with a couple of St. Andrew's folk. This is commonly done. Sometimes, for a little holiday, people will go to an area to stay for a few days, and ring bells in every church in that area.

Margaret introduced us to Jean, and then busied herself making the coffee at the back of the church. It was a bit of an occasion, as they had just got water to the church and could make fresh coffee right there for the bell ringers.

We walked around the church with Jean, a Church Warden. She pointed out the wooden angel sculptures far above us, standing on pendants hanging from the beams. They had no heads, thanks to Cromwell's men who visited Tostock on December 5, 1644. Statues of saints and much of the stained glass also fell to Puritanism that day. Jean told us that some churches escaped destruction by locking their doors. But there was a strain of Puritanism in Tostock, so the church was open to Cromwell's men.

Jean showed us the 500-year old ornately carved pews with animal figures on the armrests. The beginnings of the church building dated back to the 1200s, and by the early 1400s the building was completed pretty much as we were seeing it. We finished the tour at the baptismal font, near the table where Margaret had made coffee.

I was tickled to find the head of a woodwose staring at me from one of the carved panels on the stone font. Jean then showed me another woodwose on the font, and said there were other woodwose carvings in obscure places around the church.

I first found a woodwose on a Suffolk font at some church we were visiting with Syd Rutland years ago. Although the written tour guide of that church identified the figure on the font as a woodwose, I couldn't find a definition of the word anywhere. It was over a year later that I found the word in an old unabridged Oxford dictionary. A woodwose is a wild man of the woods who appears out of the leaves and scares old ladies and small children. He used to show up at festivals in ancient Celtic times. I put villain woodwose in my books.

Nowadays I have noticed that the term woodwose is sometimes used, but Green Man is a much more common name for the figure. You've seen him, I'm sure, on cement plaques in garden shops. It's that fierce face staring out of a wreath of leaves. Sometimes the figure has a beard of leaves. I don't have one in my garden. I probably should get one. Maybe it'll scare off the armadillos so they won't dig up my flowers