Wednesday 4/7

Day three of Wales trip:

For lunch today we packed our leftover pizza, which ended up being supper since we forgot it on the bus...but I'll get to that in a bit. One thing that I noticed while driving to the first site of the day was that the fields here are not marked by stone walls like in Ireland, or by wooden fences like in America, but by hedges. Interesting. I wonder if there's a cultural reason for it.

Our first site was Montgomery Castle. Kieran, the professor, studied in Wales under Jeremy Knight, and actually did his first dig at age 17 at Montgomery with Jeremy. Because he had that connection, we spent half of Wednesday in Montgomery, getting a tour of the castle, cathedral, and museum from Jeremy since he'd spent 30 years researching it. We had a slight hike up the hill to get there, but it was beautiful once we got to the top.

Oh, before those pictures, here's a random ringfort (?) that we saw on the way in.
Once we were in the castle and looking around, Jeremy pointed out that each stone is marked by the mason so he would get paid. Can you see the X?
A brief description to give you some idea of what Jeremy was talking about. He has written many of the guidebooks you can buy about Welsh castles, so he might even have written this.
View from the top.
In the brewery, which all of the Irish people loved.
A view from down in the ditch.

After seeing the castle, we went back down into town and visited the museum, which has several famous artistic reconstructions of the castle and of Hen Domen, a motte and bailey down the road that we visited later that day. There was also a lot of material from the town, like medicinal tools and sewing and A BASSOON and so on that was interesting.
The BASSOON!! Totally thought it was a bayonet at first...my bad.
Our last stop in town was at the cathedral.
The sponsors are buried here, but there's a funny story about that. The husband, whose effigy you can't see because it's behind the wife, died first, so she had this tomb built here to show her everlasting love. Then she got remarried and ended up getting buried with that guy, not here in the tomb next to her first husband...clearly she needs to redefine "everlasting."

Finally, we stopped for lunch for an hour. Everyone split up, with some people eating at the fish and chip shop for cheap, some going to the hotel to get some alcohol with their food, and then Kelly and I coming to this cute little cafe. I got a tuna sandwich, chips, and a salad (whenever you buy a sandwich, it usually comes with chips and a salad...don't know why), but she tried the rarebit. That's slices of bread covered in this cheese sauce and baked. She said it was good, but the rest of the day we pretended we were frogs.
You can see the castle above these houses in town.
Okay: next stop. Offa's Dyke marks the boundary between Wales and England, so we stopped for a couple minutes to talk about why it was built, what it means, and so on. It was funny to see the boundary in the road too--England and Wales use different colored pavement apparently, so there was a line down the road where the two countries stopped paving.

Anyway, this is Kieran falling off the tree branch he tried to climb while we wait for everyone to get over the fence.
The dyke is on the left. It's been taken down in some spots for farming.
Looking at Wales.
And then 180 to see England.
A final view of Montgomery Castle. It's cool how you can see the little wooden bridge that CADW put up in place of a drawbridge.
The final stop of the day was at Hen Domen Motte and Bailey, a really famous site that we studied practically every day in archaeology classes. By studying it and others like it, archaeologists were able to show that unlike what scholars like Leask said, mottes were not simple, but instead had many buildings inside, were heavily defended, and took a long time to build. Leask originally said that they could be put up in a week...yeah, not.

This is the bailey. Oh, did I mention that it's private property, so we had to bribe the farmer with two bottles of whisky so we could go on it? Good times.
Like I said, so legit that we had to climb over fences and through the hedge to get in.
Once we passed through the bailey and several ditches, we could see the motte itself. What you can't see is Kieran and Russell racing to the top shortly after this picture, ending up covered in mud after they fell at the top. It's 3 meters tall, which looks a lot shorter here than it feels when you climb it.
See? Pretty darn tall.
Exploring one the ditch right next to the motte. So many prickers!
That was the archaeology adventure of the day. However, after eating our leftover pizza, Kelly and I went on an hour-long hunt for dessert in town. Since everything closes mad early, we ended up back at Sam's convenience store, buying candy and carrot cake, which we ate while watching the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. That was an experience too--we couldn't find the light switch, so we tried unscrewing the lightbulbs (they were blindingly bright). Unfortunately, they were some special kind that didn't screw in. Oh, good times.

This is a shot from the outside of the hostel. It's the one with the white and brown wooden decoration.
Can anybody tell me what it means when the road lines go all funky like in the picture above? I've seen it all over the U.K., but have yet to understand...

So that was day three! Coo.