England is riddled with history

Let’s face it, England is riddled with history. You trip over it at every corner.

We went into the Abbey Gardens at Bury St Edmunds today and found children playing on the ruins of the original Abbey, stones that go back nearly a thousand years. Yesterday we went to Melford Hall near Sudbury, and also visited a church that’s some 600 years old. At every point in the flooring, practically, you’re standing on the tombs of people who’ve been dead for centuries. Next to the church was a hospital originally set up for people who couldn’t afford to go anywhere when they were dying – several centuries ago. The place is still being used for the same purpose. Just up the road was another historic home that’s now home to operas, concerts, plays and the like. Furthermore, family members still live in many of these places. They’re people who can trace their family back for generations – as opposed to the Crowls, who can only go back to my great grandfather, or the Hannagans (my mother’s side), who can only go back a generation or so before that.

In the back lanes near where we stayed, we kept coming across churches that have been used by Christians for centuries. In some cases they’re in very good condition (the churches, I mean); in other cases, the current generation is struggling to keep a church functioning that hasn’t had enough work or money put into it for decades. But nobody seems to think: this is too old; we’d better pull it down. Nope, they have great respect for these old buildings, and there they sit on the landscape as they have almost forever, in spite of the dissolution of the monasteries and all the destruction that went with it, in spite of wars and the ravages of time.

Perhaps because we’re not so familiar with it in New Zealand, we're struck by all this history. Perhaps local people take it more for granted. Whatever, it’s great to see it here, and all this viewable.