Northward, ho!

Hello!
I'm terribly sorry that I'm late yet again. From Monday to Friday last week we were on a long trip to the north of England and Scotland and I only had occasional access to wifi. Then, I had two projects and a paper to do, along with other assorted homework. Long story short, I've been pretty busy, so here is an enormous blog post to fill you in on what I've been up to.
Okay. We left bright and early Monday morning to start our trip to the north. After driving for a good long while, our first stop was the Preston temple. I'm really glad we got to go even though we only stopped for a little while. I've been feeling rather homesick and it was nice to see something that felt so much like home. London is amazing and this has been one of the most incredible experiences of my life, but it definitely still is a foreign country. The temple felt very familiar and it was really nice to be there.

Plus, it was a gorgeous day.
After visiting the temple grounds, we headed into the city of Preston. A local church member was there to show us around a bit since Preston is an important church history site. Preston is where the first English Latter-day Saints were baptized, which is a pretty big deal since most of these new members immigrated to the US and crossed the plains, helping to build up the early church. The missionaries had a lot of success here and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a bit part of the town's history as well. There are three different plaques in the local park commemorating different church events that occurred in the history.

Incidentally, this town is also where President Hinckley served part of his mission. It was in Preston that his father sent him the "Forget yourself and go to work" letter. Pretty cool.
We then pressed on (get it? like Preston) and went further north.
Our next stop was at our hostel in Ambleside, which was on the shores of Lake Windermere in the Lake District. It was the most unbelievably beautiful place. Neither words nor photographs can do it justice. It was just so serene and picturesque and seemed so entirely unreal. I'll talk about it more in a bit because I want to do this chronologically and we only stopped there for a few minutes to drop off our bags. Our bus then took us to the neighboring town of Grasmere, which was the home of William Wordsworth. We had dinner at this diner-ish place that's owned by the Wordsworth Trust. I... would not recommend it. The main course was a bland lamb stew served with bread and a drink that was meant to be lemonade, but was carbonated and terrible. That't that point of lemonade: it isn't carbonated. Or, it shouldn't be. Then, for dessert, they had some sort of cake-like substance served with a mountain of whipped cream on top. Now, I'm not really a whipped cream fan in the best of times, but I'm still pretty hungry, so I'm giving this cake a chance. I guess in England, when they say whipped cream, they mean just that--cream that has been whipped. No other ingredients. No sugar, for instance. It tasted like milk with the consistency of toothpaste. Not a fan. Sorry, cake.
Anyway, after our disappointing dinner, we headed down the road to tour Dove Cottage. This is where Wordsworth lived for about eight years, and where he wrote his greatest poetry (according to our guide. I'm not terribly familiar with Wordsworth's words-work). We learned lots of interesting facts about Wordsworth during our tour of his cottage. Our guide was the curator (I think that's his title, but I may be wrong) of the Jerwood center, which is part of the Wordsworth Trust that holds and studies manuscripts and first editions of Wordsworth and his contemporaries, so he was quite knowledgeable. Wordsworth had a lot of famous house-guests while he was living at Dove Cottage, and most of them were opium addicts, so that's fun. He was best bros with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and they wrote a lot of poetry together. Wordsworth also played host to Thomas De Quincy, who wrote a book called Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and Sir Walter Scott of Ivanhoe fame (which I confess I only know about because of Betsy-Tacy).
After the tour, we returned to the hostel and I sat by the lake and read for awhile, which was the nicest thing ever (or would have been if it were a little less chilly). The sun was setting and I don't think I've ever seen a more beautiful landscape.

I just wish that instead of this picture, I could take you there and show you what it was actually like. Pictures can only give you an idea, and just seeing what something looks like can't tell you how it really felt to be there. This one view is quite pretty, but without seeing the whole and being surrounded by the inexpressible beauty of it all, this one view can't even be what it was when I took this picture.
So, sorry. I hope you get to go sometime.
Anyway, we went to bed. The next morning, our group split in half. There were two different sessions of a workshop with the Jerwood center. You could either go hiking in the morning and work with the center in the afternoon or work with the center first and go to the Beatrix Potter house. Beatrix won for me, so I went to the center with the earlier group.
The workshop was really good. It was an amazing opportunity that we got to have because BYU has some sort of special relationship with the Wordsworth Trust. The curator guy, Jeff, was very interesting, but he let us kind of steer the session toward what we were most interested in. We discussed several Wordsworth poems, but we also got to look at and even hold some of the treasures they had in the center. The girl sitting next to me asked to see a first edition of Frankenstein, so he pulled it out and had her hold it and read aloud the part when Victor brings the monster to life. She started crying, and I was close to tears myself, which was weird on both our parts since she'd never read it before and I hate the book. There's just something really special about first editions. Here's what it looked like:

Another girl got to look at Wordsworth's personal copy of Paradise Lost, which he had bound with extra pages so he could write his notes into it.

It was just a really neat experience.
Then, we took a terrifying bus ride to Hill Top Farm, the home of Beatrix Potter. Our bus driver for the week was a psychopath named Tracy. She was a chain-smoking, cursing, leggings-wearing maniac who would brook no deviation from the itinerary. She once yelled at us over the intercom for being a bit late back to the bus after our professors had given us permission to stay longer. She also ran into a stone wall that some people said collapsed (I couldn't see, so I'm not sure if that's true) and just drove off.
Anyway, this was probably the worst drive of all. The roads were not designed for buses. They were narrow and steep and winding and terrifying. We did make it, though, thank goodness.
Hill Top was so pretty and idyllic. It was exactly where Beatrix Potter belonged. She had kept very detailed descriptions of her gardens and what plants had been where, so it was almost exactly like how it had been when she lived there. There were even rabbits in the garden:

It was just so perfect.

Unfortunately, so pictures were allowed inside, but it was the coolest thing. They had little copies of The Tale of Samuel Whiskers that you could carry around with you because she'd used rooms in her house for the backgrounds in the illustrations. It was so crazy to look at the illustrations and then see the exact same thing in real life--rugs, furniture, and everything. Another interesting thing about that book is that actual events in her house inspired it. Her cat climbed up the chimney and got stuck. They had to cut out a floorboard to rescue the cat. She turned that event into that book where Tom Kitten climbs up the chimney, is captured by rats who hope to turn him into a dumpling pudding, and is saved by a dog who cuts out a floorboard.
I remembered watching a cartoon of this story at the Johnsons' house, so I looked it up on Youtube. It's the craziest thing to watch. In the book illustrations, you can see parts of her house, but in the cartoon you see so much more and it's all accurate. There's also a beginning live-action segment that's filmed on location. You can watch it too if you want your own tour. Be warned, though. The child voice actors for the kittens are abominable.
Samuel Whiskers Video
We then went back to Ambleside, wandered around town for a bit, and then went back to the hostel.
The next morning, we left to head to Edinburgh. Upon reaching the city, we dropped our bags at our hotel and headed up to Edinburgh Castle. It was pretty neat, but it was also very cold. We got to see the Scottish crown jewels, as well as the Stone of Scone, which is where all the Scottish kings were crowned, including Macbeth. I walked around the city with some people after that. To be honest, Edinburgh wasn't really my favorite. It was cool to be there, but it's kind of an ugly city. The natural landscape around the city is gorgeous, but the city itself is sort of dark and dingy and rather confusing. There are streets sort of stacked on top of each other, if that makes sense. Like, there's a street at ground level, and then there's another street suspended above it somehow. I don't really know why or how.
We looked in a lot of shops, but it was pouring rain, so we headed back to the hotel rather early. I was freezing, so I took a shower and read in bed for a bit. It was nice to have a little downtime.
The next morning we headed back to England. Our first stop was Hadrian's Wall. It was very cold and rainy, but at least there were adorable sheep:

The Romans really knew how to build things, let me tell you. It was amazing how much was still standing after thousands of years of neglect.

Next stop was Durham Cathedral. It was too big to get a very good picture of and no cameras were allowed inside, so you'll just have to use your imaginations. Or google. Anyway, Durham is famous for being the final resting place of St. Cuthbert and the Venerable Bede. It's a traditional site for pilgrimages, much like Canterbury. It was really beautiful, but I just don't really have too much to say about it. It's just kind of an odd experience visiting places that are sacred to others, but not necessarily to you. It feels a little sketchy going to places like this as a tourist. I try to be very respectful, but it's just sort of weird.
The last site that we visited was called Fountains Abbey (like Downton Abbey but completely different). This used to be a Catholic Monastery until Henry VIII had it torn down. It's interesting how often that guy pops up, and what he's usually doing when he pops up is destroying things.
I really, really liked this place. It was huge and open and there weren't many people there, so it had just a feeling of peacefulness. The ruins had a definite beauty to them and I loved just walked around and exploring them.

After we left the Abbey, we went to our lodgings for the night. We were staying in Haworth, the city of the Bronte sisters, so it's no surprise that this is what our hostel looked like:

Professor Cutler refers to it as the haunted hostel. It definitely was creepy and I think forever after, this is what I'll imagine Wuthering Heights looks like.
Since we were in Haworth, our next day's activity was to visit the Bronte parsonage. We took a little tour of the house and museum and then walked through the moors, where I met a friendly horse.
I am not a Bronte fan, myself. Wuthering Heights was our assigned reading for our English class and while I found it interesting, I can't say that I liked it much. The Brontes were crazy, man. In the intro to my Wuthering Heights book, it relates a story about how Emily Bronte got bit by a dog with rabies and, without telling anyone, she heated up an iron and cauterized the bite herself. The story only got out when Charlotte noticed the nasty scar. These girls were something else.
But, being in their landscape, where they lived out their short lives, really helped me gain a better understanding of their books. Their front yard was a graveyard. Every day was lived with the background noise of names being chiseled onto gravestones. The water source ran through the graveyard and was contaminated by decomposing human bodies, so everyone in the town was sick and death was omnipresent in their lives. No wonder Wuthering Heights is a little bleak.
The moors, too, are just quite ugly and uninviting.

 The best thing that came out of our visit was that the lady who gave us a presentation on the sisters mentioned a music video of Wuthering Heights in passing and some girls found it and showed part of it in their presentation on the landscape of Haworth in class. I looked it up tonight to see the whole thing and it is either the best or the worst thing ever. Take a peek, if you'd like:
Wuthering Heights
I accidentally started to kind of love it. So there's that.
Our final stop on our trek across England was Chatsworth. It's a mansion that apparently was the inspiration for Pemberly in Pride and Prejudice and was used as the location for the Keira Knightley movie. We didn't have near the amount of time that I would have liked to have spent there. We took a tour through the house, which was very beautiful, but I could have wandered through the grounds for hours and hours.
I just looked through the pictures of the house and realized that I pretty much only took pictures of stuff that I thought was funny rather than pictures of the house's beauty. That's a problem I have a lot of the time. But come on, when you have a painting like this hanging up, what do you expect me to do?

Why that particular section of horse?
Or this:

Is that not the most terrifying desk decoration you've ever seen? I think you can click on it to make it bigger.
Anyway, here's a nice picture of the house:

Here you can kind of see this maze that I got lost in. I ended up going out the entrance, but at least I got out.

And it was all just really pretty. Then I bought some mediocre ice cream and we left to go back to London.
Okay! I'm still a bit behind, but at least I got this trip written about. I'll try to do some more soon.
Thanks for reading!