Slightly subdued

Picture yourself in a boat on a river…

Honeybuns clearly had mixed feelings of concern and “I told you so”. I felt like a decomposing zombie at the breakfast table. Still, let's make the best of the day. We passed the nearby ASDA and bought sunscreen (SPF 50+) for me, no good hats though, but when we got into town I bought myself a snazzy-looking straw hat at the Marks & Spencers—not exactly my size, but when you are a hat size 64, you take what you get. Honeybuns suggested I needed a linen suit as well, but I wasn't up to that much clothes shopping at the moment. Instead we went down to the Brayford Pool to catch the Brayford Belle, a tour boat up the Fossdyke Canal, an (reputedly) originally Roman-dug canal connecting River Witham with River Trent. It was a quite pleasant trip at a very sedate pace (max speed 3 mph in the canal), with occasional comments from a (presumably) recorded tour guide, with the usual humorous quips on the sites we passed—in particular he seemed to be quite unimpressed with the students at the University of Lincoln, who were repeatedly ragged.

When we returned to town, we had a pleasant lunch at the Riverside Cafe and then ascended the hill to have a look at the Museum of Lincolnshire Life, though all too short as they closed fairly early. I still had time to be impressed by all the tractors and farming engines on display. More visits will be necessary.

From there we proceded to the cathedral, where we sat and waited for Sunday Mass to finish and then walked about. We were handed a leaflet on how to make a pilgrimage inside the cathedral, with suitable prayers to say at various points. I thought to myself that if a pilgrimage was a journey of spiritual discovery, they couldn't bloody well know beforehand what prayers would be appropriate for my spirit at that point. There was plenty of reflection to be made at the shrines for the armed forces anyway.

Along one wall of there was a temporary exhibition of wooden sculptures on the Life of Christ, which generally failed to impress me. The artist did not seem to like “representatives of the state”, though. There was restoration work under way at various points in the church, here too with some annoyance expressed at meddlesome Victorian restorers, who'd messed up some items. Then again, I suspect the eroded stone sculptures were not merely due to Victorian sulphur emissions.

I like churches, especially when they are mostly empty, they are good places to sit and relax, or cool down on hot days, and mostly there's always something interesting to watch. So we remained until the church closed, and then walked down the hill to where we found an Italian restaurant by the river and had some very nice salads.

After dinner we continued down the river along what seemed to be the old industrial area of Lincoln. Now there seemed to be some work at turning the old factories into housing. We tried to figure out how the local economy worked. In the city centre there were a number of closed-down shops. Out in North Hykeham there was any number of new housing developments that clearly still had not sold out all houses, but which must have been good-quality farmland just a few years ago. The house prices did not seem very high, especially considering the generally high housing prices in Britain. I wonder if the financial crisis hit recently, just when all these projects had started and the shops had been hit worst and first.

Old and new. Very British.

Honeybuns decided the surroundings felt creepy, so we returned towards more populated areas and managed to catch a bus going our way.

Lindum Colonia

Lincoln has an interesting topology. Most of Lincolnshire is fairly flat, but here there is a fairly high hill. On top of this hill stands Lincoln Cathedral, a very tall building, which accordingly is visible very far away. The modern city centre lies down by the river Witham (downtown, as it were). You go between the two by way of High Street, which continues as Steep Hill.

The Riverside Cafe on the High Bridge over River Witham.

So, this Friday morning we got off the bus by the market square where we wandered around the stalls, to the musical accompaniment of a country & western singer (who actually was quite good), and Honeybuns bought herself an interesting cheese. We ascended Steep Hill, which, in addition to other interesting shops, contained a goodly number of used book shops, which obviously all had to be visited. As we were going to do some walking that day, we couldn't obviously buy all worthy books, but some sufficiently light-weight items found our favour.

This is just High Street, it gets steeper than this.

Eventually we were at the summit of the hill. Not by coincidence, this is where the Tourist Information Centre is (there is another one down at the city centre, but it is currently closed for renovation), so I might as well stick in a bit of tourist information here:
The general area of Lincoln has been inhabited for a long time, but the name and the first stone buildings date from the Romans. There are still a few remains, such as bits of the old city wall, left from Roman times. The next high period for the town came with the Normans, who started on the castle and the cathedral, both of which were greatly expanded in mediæval times; there are also a few Tudor era houses left. The first World War I tanks were constructed in Lincoln and during World War II Lincolnshire was “Bomber county”. All these various historial eras are carefully commemorated with signs, museums and the items themselves, of course, and there are a number of marked theme trails around town, so show off Roman, Norman, etc remains. Even though the town is so obviously prepared for tourists, there didn't seem to be particularly many around, which I provisionally put down to the English school term not being over yet. Swedish tourists were clearly not common here, I suspect they only leave Regent Street to go see Mamma Mia!.

Lincoln Castle in bronze.

Honeybuns descending into the interior of Cobb Hall Tower. Lots of dark nooks and crannies down there.

Anyway, we decided to start with Lincoln Castle. Inside the walls was a carefully tended garden, just made for picknicks. We had a long look at the Magna Carta, went through the prison exhibition and then climbed the walls and the towers. The sky was overcast, but from the Observatory Tower we felt as if we could have seen all the way to the North Sea had it been a clear day. Towards the west we could see another castle tower, which we couldn't fit to any feature on our maps, very strange.

A view southwards from the Observatory Tower of Lincoln Castle.

Finally hunger drove us out and we found a little vegetarian restaurant on Steep Hill, where some rather surly teenagers served us a quite good lunch.

The remains of the Bishop's Palace.

Then we walked a circuit around the cathedral, but decided to see the mediæval Bishop's palace instead. It is mostly a ruin these days, but an audio presentation did its best to bring its old splendour alive to us. I actually enjoyed this audio tour better than the one at the recent Titanic exhibition as this one only played fairly short clips and then waited for the user to start the next clip, thus allowing much better self-pacing.

A rather fancy water tower.

The museum closed, so we had to leave, and decided to set out to find the mysterious tower we had seen. Oh, it was a water tower. Apparently it didn't qualify for marking on any maps, just being public works, as it were. We found a pub for dinner and then descended the hill for the bus home.