Bath

COMING SOON

Edington

Edington is the site where Alfred the Great decisively beat the Viking army under Guthrum and recovered his lost kingdom. The Vikings had driven him out of Wessex and his realm now consisted of basically a swamp and the fortress of Athelnay inside it. For him to come back from that was incredible. For him to go on from that to drive the Vikings out of his kingdom for good and to begin claiming all England as his kingdom was just draw-dropping. The man had balls. And none of it would have happened without this battle. So basically this is the most important place in England. If this is really where it happened of course.

Lacock

COMING SOON

Winchester

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Nîmes

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Les Grands Jeux Romains à Nîmes

Pont Du Gard

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Avignon

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Carcassonne

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Antonine Wall

 For my final day in Scotland we decided to go and visit the Antonine Wall. It was my relative's idea actually, since I didn't think that there was enough left to be worth visiting and I certainly didn't realize it was so close. Rough Castle was in Falkirk which is only about 40 minutes from Stirling. The entire wall is actually to the south of Stirling and just north of Glasgow. It's kind of funny to realize that I had been outside the area under Roman control for days without realizing it.

The Antonine Wall is less well known than its southern neighbor Hadrian's Wall. There's a good reason for it. There's nowhere near as much left of this wall as that one. First off, it was never built in stone. The 'wall' is actually the very opposite of a wall. It's a ditch with a slightly higher hill on the southern side. The original embankments would have been built of earth and wood. The wall was never built from stone. It is in fact very similar to the way that Hadrian's Wall was constructed at that time. Large sections of Hadrian's Wall were originally turf and wood just like this one, with only the parts that had ready access to stone built out of it. It seems unlikely that Hadrian considered Roman expansion to be permanently at an end. He was well known for shoring up the Empire's defenses but this does not mean that he never intended it to expand again. At any rate his successors abandoned his wall and pressed northward into Scotland. Antoninus Pius pushed the line to just north of Glasgow and built the wall that is named after him. This wall was not as easy to defend as the southern one even though it's only about half as long. The area that it's built in is pretty flat and any hills are not utterly unscalable. It was abandoned within twenty years only to be reoccupied later by Septimius Severus and then abandoned again.

Edinburgh

COMING SOON

Stirling

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Loch Achray

This was a nice little church on the Loch.We couldn't get in but it was a wonderful location. Loch Achray was a nice loch about half an hour from Stirling in an area known as the Trossachs. We went there hunting down Monty Python filming locations. There's one in an abandoned Victorian quarry about three miles from this spot.

Doune Castle

COMING SOON

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56°11'6.17"N, 4° 3'0.21"W