Day 26 - The Canadians who went up a hill and came down into a mountain of food

There is the expression "eight ways to Sunday" which comes to mind this Sunday morning...our options for how to spend the day and the choice of walks in the area are wide open. We decided on a walk to a village with an intriguing name: Bourton on the Hill. In actuality, it should really be called Bourton on the side of the Hill.  

We left Morton in Marsh, heading out through green fields and across a recently plowed field with a well worn path through the middle. A field of sheep completely ignored us, except for that one lone wolf (ha!) who thinks he/she (I don't look that close) can stare you down. 

We skirted the edge of the Batsford Arboretum (for another day), then took the road up into Bourton. It's a beautiful, small village with very pretty homes of Cotswold stone lining the streets. Closer to the bottom of the hill lies Bourton House Garden, closed today, so we'll have to return. 

The village of about 300 has a parish church, St. Lawrence, which originated in 1157 AD. That kind of timeline never fails to leave me in awe. I read the book At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson (highly recommend). Bryson was visiting a country church with an archaeologist, who asked Bryson if he ever noticed how churches always appear to be sinking into the grown. The reality is that the ground around the church has "grown" up due to the number of people buried there over the centuries. A village church cemetery may look like a few hundred people are buried there based on the tombstones you can see. But the archaeologist stated that if you have a village "with a population of around 250, that amounted to at least 1,000 adult burials per 100 years, plus a thousand more who didn't make it to maturity. If you then multiply that figure by the number of years the church had been standing then there could have been up to 20,000 burials on the site. Thus the ground was rising, rather than the church sinking." I've never looked at a churchyard the same way since.

The gorgeous view over the rooftops of Bourton on the Hill back down toward Moreton in Marsh

Then it was back to Moreton in Marsh along the main road.

Over 70 km walked this week...and all
ruined by this Sunday Lunch! It was divine:
roast pork, applesauce, buttered cabbage, carrots,
green beans, cauliflower, roasted potatoes,
crackling, sausage stuffing, Yorkshire pudding,
and gravy.

This allowed us to pass all the pubs in town and determine which one we were going to try for Sunday Lunch. This week's winner was The Bell Inn. The Bell is a gorgeous example of a former coaching inn, where the well-to-do would spend a night when travelling by coach through the area. The Bell's claim to fame is that it is thought to be what inspired JRR Tolkien’s Prancing Pony pub in Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings. 

I wonder what the day will inspire me to write?