A spinner of tales

The room we are staying in at the Bedford Arms is a relatively newish addition to the original building. They must have had some feedback before building them suggesting that the rooms needed more power points… there are hundreds! There are also switches that turn everything on and off and switches that don’t do anything. Then there’s this switch…. Any guesses?

Today was another perfect blue sky, crisp air sort of day. You are welcome England… I just hope we packed enough for everybody!

The perfect sort of day for a drive and a little look around the village of Penn, Buckinghamshire. This is where Me Jenny’s paternal Great Grandfather was born before moving to Tasmania and hence us being Australian.

It’s also the birth place of nearly all of our ancestors before Jen’s paternal great GF on both his paternal and maternal sides… and the tree just climbs – all the way back to the 1600s in this one little place.

I had found through my obsessive hours of research that Jen’s 4th G GF was buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church in Penn, so that was our first stop.

There were some super old headstones there where the engraving had worn away. There were also grassy mounds with no headstones. Luckily the church was being decorated with flowers by the church ladies for ‘Harvest’, so we were able to go inside and they showed us some folders with lists of who was buried there.

We came across some family surnames from our tree but alas, not the people we were looking for. There were also a lot of ‘unknown’s in the list and I have a feeling he was one of those.

We wandered around reading some of the names that could be made out and came across this one… I love it when people write something a bit different on their tombstone.

“Alison Utterly – A spinner of tales”… I wonder if she chose those words herself or if she just told so many lies, they etched that fact in stone – literally!

This area at the back of the churchyard had a mix of old and new graves. I thought, any minute I’m going to see the name we were searching for…

When this happened…

We googled what it means when a butterfly lands on you and one of the meanings is that a spirit is trying to give you a message. I want to believe that it was Jen’s 4th G.G GF trying to say ‘keep looking, I’m right here’, but it could also have been because it was attracted to the flowers on Jen’s shirt.

Thoughts?

After a lot of looking and not doing much finding, we treated ourselves to a cream tea at the Wotnot Vintage Cafe in the village of Chesham.

A cute little place with Trivial Pursuit placemats – it couldn’t have been more perfect! I love me some trivia.

There has been a lot of driving through these little windy roads/lanes that fit 1.5 cars across, so there’s a lot of stopping and starting… I have to say that the drivers we’ve encounted thus far in these tree tunnels have all been really patient and respectful. No obvious wankers so far, and… How pretty is it!

This is not my photo because, driving.

Then is was back to the Bedford to sit out the front in the sunshine for an afternoon bevvy and listening to a couple call her parents on speaker to let them (and the rest of the beer garden) know that they had just been for a walk and they had to climb this hill, and there was a beautiful view and then he dropped to one knee and proposed. They were really excited.

We’ve been passing this lovely little 17th century pub each day as it’s only 50m from our pub, so tonight we popped down there for dinner – delicious!

Tomorrow, we head west.