Lavenham, a small villiage on the way from Oxford to Cambridge, has over 350 house built in the 1300 and 1400's. The first one we stopped at was an art gallery called "The Crooked House". I wonder how they came up with that name?
We saw several houses in town with this problem. It's not clear to me whether they were ever built on the plumb.
Then we had lunch at "The Swan". You find lots of these in England. Here all the swans are the property of the Queen. But we did find out in Cambridge that there are three places in England where they are allowed to eat swan (I can still hear Susan gasping). One of which was in Cambridge.
We found a public footpath that took off through a very pastoral setting.
To the top of the ridge for a view of the village, plus what appeared to be a WWII vintage airplane heading to the airport (where American GI's were stationed in WWII. In the pub at The Swan there were walls with signatures of the GI's who had been stationed there).
And then it was back down the hill to the village.
As we were walking down a random street, we came upon this garden in someone's back yard. The English do love their flowers.
We visited the Guild Hall (or gild hall as they spelled it back then) which had a very interesting exhibit starting with the prehistoric inhabitants over 100,000 years ago up to the present. Lavenham was a very prosperous wool town, at one point the 14th richest town in England. Of course now the most important industry is tourism.
There was another place nearby, Melford Hall, an Elizabethan manor house. However after driving around on cow tracks for about 15 minutes, we decided to give up and just move on to Cambridge. Looks like it would have been interesting to see, but maybe next time.
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