We put our luggage out at 7:00 am and ate our last (big) breakfast at Mickelton. We then boarded the coach at 8:30 and headed north, leaving the Cotswold Hills and heading toward Chester, which will be our base for the next three days. On the way we again passed through Stratford-upon-Avon and said our final farewell to William Shakespeare. As we continue on, it appears that we have now left the region of ‘ridges and furrows’, remnants of the farming practices from the Anglo-Saxon days. Unfortunately, I was never able to get a decent picture of the still prominent and quintessentially English features.

Our first stop of the day was at Coalbrookdale in the Ironbridge Gorge. The river Severn now flows through the gorge which was created by glacial flows at the end of the ice age. With its timber and its exposed coal, limestone and iron ore deposits, the gorge was really the center of the British Industrial (R)Evolution. In fact, it had been an industrial area since the Monastic times of the 15th century. We visited the small Museum of the Gorge and then took a short walk down river to Ironbridge, the site of the world’s first iron bridge, which opened in 1791. The bridge iron beams were all cast in the gorge itself.

Next we took a short ride to Blists Hill, a Victorian Town where we saw more blast furnaces, steam engine replicas and other depictions of the region during Victorian times.

After lunch we traveled on for a little over an hour to the Farndon Parish church. This was a delightful small church in a very old town. The church was destroyed in the religious wars in 1643 where it was used for billets by the Parliamentarians. The tower dates from this early period; however, the top of the church tower was later ‘vandalized’ by the Victorians with the addition of the cresselations.

We then drove the remaining short distance to our hotel–called the Mercure Chester Abbots Well Hotel, no less. This hotel is located on the outskirts of Chester, very near the Wales border and is very different from the one we left in the morning. Peter gave us a lecture with slides on “Snowdonia”, after which we had another fine dinner and then called it a day.