Peterborough Cathedral, 1

Peterborough Cathedral is one of the great Romanesque (aka Norman) cathedrals in Britain, nearly as old as Durham, and something we wanted to see. Peterborough itself was new to us, the new market center in the east, not at all a small city.

An abbey church first, of course, then a cathedral

Damn! We missed both the gin and rum festival and the prosecco and gin festival!
Hopefully we'll be back in May for the Everclear and absinthe festival! 

Pano of the beautiful old yard west of the cathedral

Nave view

Painted wooden roof; last painted in the early 2000s, after a
nearly disastrous fire

Elevation; the usual huge gallery we are getting used to in
these English churches

Old Scarlett, the beloved town gravedigger, who buried two
generations and three queens: Mary Queen of Scots, Katherine
of Aragon, and his own wife, Margaret; he remarried the year
after she passed away, when he was 89; lived to be 98;  in the
cathedral's interpretive program, you're always "digging deeper"
with Old Scarlett 

An aerial of the church, in its educational center

Love the entwined arches

And other possibly Celtic bits

Quire

Crossing

Still pretty Romanesque, right? 

But then you get to the eastern-most and, behold, it's not Romanesque anymore!

So not Romanesque!

Peckover House And Wisbach

Peckover House was another that did not spark joy. In fact it was at this point we began to re-assess our goal of seeing all the National Trust's estates and houses and gardens. Nonetheless, the compact gardens at Peckover were of interest, there was a special exhibit on Mr. Peckover's book collecting, and an especially interesting exhibit of book art by one of the volunteers. The Peckovers were a prosperous Georgian merchant family that rose to some eminence in the 1800s. After the house and gardens, we spent another hour or so in Wisbach, mostly looking at the numerous charity shoppes.

Peckover

From the garden

Family travels

Late 15th century book of Ptolymaic maps

Peckover library...widely dispersed at auction, much being reassembled for an
exhibition

And the book art, by one of the volunteers; pretty interesting, we thought

Into Wisbach and the River Nene

Low tide

Walpole St. Peter, 2

Continuing our visit to the "Queen of the Marshlands," St. Peter's in Walpole.

East end glass, not terribly old, but nice

A griffin in the quire

A dozen 14th century paintings of saints before the altar

On the south (starboard) aisle, these pews, facing the main section...strangely
weird

But nice carving

Candidly, there were droppings everywhere, concentrated mostly in the chancel;
does survival of the species mean that every @#$%&? individual has to survive?!
Why not build a few bat-houses? I would not permit my children to enter this building...

Outside

To the greater glory, etc.

So, I thought He [sic] created the whole @#$%&@# universe;
so why is this little bat-shit-infested acre holy? Just sayin'

Outside, here's the chancel, rising up...notice how the windows get smaller...
anyhow, lower right is the "bolt-hole," a covered passage-way beneath the
altar; speculation has it there was an important processional path around this
way, and they didn't want to move it with the building of the extended chancel 

Inside the Decorated bolt-hole, 10 or 12 bosses, etc.; prior to 1348, these people
didn't do anything on the cheap

The usual...