Part of our introduction to English customs included attending the Farnham Bonfire festivities
“Guy Fawkes Night, also known as Guy Fawkes Day, Bonfire Night and Fireworks Night, is an annual commemoration observed on 5 November, primarily in Great Britain, involving bonfires and fireworks displays…” (see more at Wikipedia).
Click any image to see them all full size (from the browser). Note the effigy of the Guy in blue, who took a long time to finally catch fire.
A couple of miles’ walk along the North Downs Way brings you to the Waverley Abbey ruins
One weekend we took the bus to Guildford a larger town nearby with a vibrant, pedestrian shopping district, an ancient castle ruin, and more. Click any image to see them all enlarged.
Outside the castle you can see Farnham Park stretching into the distance. It’s approximately half the size of Central Park in NYC, delightedly less crowded and with much more varied natural landscapes instead of Central Park’s many entertainments. Click any image to see them all enlarged (if you’re seeing this directly on the site – from email, click through to obBLOGato).
Farnham has been host (so to speak) to the church since as early as the 7th century.
This one’s for Endla who exhorted me before leaving NY to capture pictures relating to the recently deceased Elizabeth II’s interment. We arrived in time for the Friday preceding a bank holiday weekend declared to observe her burial. I confess I was surprised to see how widespread was the recognition of the event: in shop windows, publications, web sites – everywhere. The last picture shows a bit of her funeral someone was watching on TV on Monday the 19th of September.
Click any image to see them all full sized (you can’t do this if you’re seeing it in email – you must first click through to the web site).
Walking up Castle Street to the Castle grounds we passed the Windsor Alms Houses, with the Teddy bear in the window. The ashtray was much farther up the hill on a lamp post by the arbor near the Blind Bishop’s Steps. Click any image to see them all full-sized (from the browser – if seeing this in email, click through to obBLOGato first).
Here are the first touristy images from my new home in Farnham, Surrey in the UK. The castle, about 20 minutes’ walk from our apartment, is about 900 years old and we took a walk around the Keep and the grounds (the castle itself wasn’t open the day we went) and you can perhaps get some sense of it. I took many more pictures but, especially after all my ruined Irish castles I frankly found them a bit boring. You can see the flag at half mast as we arrived here in the days before Queen Elizabeth’s burial.
I don’t know how many of these were actually Dubliners and how many tourists, but I did try to photograph those who seemed like they maybe were local. Click any image to see them all enlarged (unless you’re seeing this in an email, in which case click through to https://islerweb.com).
Click any image to see them all full-sized (if you’re seeing this in an email, click through to https://islerweb.com first).
