Cirencester

Cirencester, where I stayed over the weekend, is another old Roman settlement...it was apparently the second largest Roman city in Great Britain after London. It's a little smaller than London today.

On Saturday night we went to the Five Mile House for dinner...a 300-year-old English country pub located five miles after Cirencester on the old Roman road from London to Wales. The low hanging entryways caught my big noggin a couple of times when I neglected to heed the warnings to "mind your head." I started with an amazing couple of pieces of toast with brie and cranberries, and dined on a heart pheasant dish with potatoes and vegetables.



A couple at the tiny bar, near the fireplace. Notice the old 5 mile-marker with the Roman V.



No menus - all the food is on chalkboards.

Click here for some better pictures - mine weren't great.

The next day we took a quick look around the rest of the town - starting with the old grass mounds that were once a gladiator-filled Roman Ampitheater.





Cirencester main drag and church.



Feudalism isn't quite as dead as I thought it was in Great Britain. Behind these gates are miles and miles of the Bathurst Estate. While Lord Bathurst, the eighth Earl in a line dating back to the 1600s, graciously allows the public to use this part of his estate as a park, he retains ownership of most of the estate and indeed most of the entire village of Cirencester and surrounding farmlands. He rents out a lot of the houses and fields to tenants. And he's not the only one, on Saturday and Sunday we probably drove by about 4 or 5 similar absolutely enormous estates - all you could see from the road was a giant wall or hedge that formed the property border for miles. It's remarkable to me that a family could hold on to such an enormous estate through so many generations...but I guess the rules of succession to the eldest son apply here as they do in other nobilities.