Short take: another nice free day... but the moors are calling!
Russ and Sally and Marcus again choosing the urban pleasures of Plymouth (although in their defense I feel compelled to add that the visiting plan for the day necessitated having breakfast at 7:30AM, which was clearly totally unreasonable :-), and Suzi and Thomas and Fernando and Jacqui renting a car (although we were to meet them later at Cotehele House), Rochelle and I went off by train to the village of Calstock, from which we walked along a pleasant path next to the River Tamar to Cotohele.
Pronounced Coteel (and not Co-teh-heely as I had thought and had been saying for many months :-), Cotehele is perhaps the least altered Tudor mansion in the country. It was one of the homes of the Dukes of Mount Edgecumbe, but, since they had another wonderful place on the outskirts of Plymouth, they left Cotehele basically empty (although full of the original furniture) for a few hundred years. Sort of like what someone I know is doing with a place in Lincoln, MA.
:-(
It's a lovely house, outside and in, with many staircases and levels and big and little rooms and interior courtyards and much original furniture and artifacts. The gardens are less interesting, but we have been blessed with a surfeit of superb gardens over the past three weeks, so I'm not complaining.
Afterwards we took a taxi over to Buckland Abbey, a converted Cistercian Abbey, first owned by Sir Richard Grenville (he of swashbuckling, glass-chewing (and swallowing) and heroic death fame), who later sold it to Sir Francis Drake. It's an odd building because large parts of it were shoe-horned into the existing Abbey church, with bits added on here and there. A bit of a hodge-podge, to be honest, and not aided by the choice of the National Trust to dedicate much of it to Sir Francis Drake hagiography. Not a must-see.
Another taxi ride (this time with a Romanian driver) back to Plymouth, this blog, and, shortly, dinner (last night's in the Barbican Kitchen was, by the way, excellent), and then bed. Tomorrow we walk from the coast to the moors!
