Day 20 – Stonehenge and Jane Austen Country

John at Stonehenge

In sequence, we stopped in Bath, Stonehenge, the village of Chawton to see Jane Austen’s house, Winchester to see the cathedral and are spending the night in Southampton.

Stonehenge is kind of a mandatory stop if you are in Britain and so we did the tourist thing and joined the crowd. They have a new visitor center and now they bus you out to the stone circle, but you still have the option of walking and viewing Stonehenge for free from a slighter greater distance. Of course it is about a 3-mile roundtrip walk, so we opted to pay. It was crowded but not really mobbed. It is really in a wide open area with nothing around except the A303 which is close enough to see the stones.

Roman Baths and Bath Cathedral

In Bath we took the Hop-On Hop-Off Bus tour to maximize what little time we had in town. It was a good introduction to the city and we saw the cathedral, the Roman baths for which the town is named and the Georgian architecture of the city of which the Royal Crescent is probably the best example.

Jane Austen House in Chawton

Now some Jane Austen trivia related to our sightseeing today. Jane Austen was born in Steventon in 1775 and moved to Bath in 1800 when her father retired from the ministry. She lived in Bath for about 5 years, until her father died and we saw a couple of the places she lived in Bath. She was reportedly unhappy in Bath and then moved with her family to Southampton (where we are spending the night) in 1806 after her father passed away and her family had to be taken in by relatives. Subsequently she and her family moved to a property owned by her brother in Chawton in 1809 where she lived for 7 or 8 years. She had been working on her novels for years, but it was in Chawton where she finished her novels and published them.

Winchester Cathedral

Austen became ill and was under medical care in Winchester for about a year, where she died on 18 July 1817, at the age of 41 and she is buried in the cathedral.  The cathedral is a huge structure and had maybe the highest ceiling of any cathedral we have been in.

Although all this Jane Austen stuff sounds planned, we really just stumbled on most of it.