Today's been a day of history and journeys, friendly faces, beautiful places and roads newly travelled. Today was the start of one of my bigger tasks, and one I set myself.
As I think I said on an earlier post (feel free to check!), HV Morton is one of my fairly newly discovered and favourite authors. He wrote a number of travel books, mainly UK but some overseas as well, and was quite well known in his day. His day was early and mid 20th century and you can read all about him here.
I fell in love with his books a couple of years ago, along with other writing from the 1920s/30s that was about people going out and exploring their country, now they had the means to do so. It makes for fascinating reading! And while I was in Wales having some down time I read I Saw Two Englands, a tale of two journeys in 1939 around England, one before war broke out and one after. He felt he wanted a last look at the England he knew and loved, before everything changed. And it occurred to me at the time that it would be interesting to retrace his steps and see what is still there, and learn a little at the same time. [HV Morton's biography is called In Search of HV Morton, and a number of his books are titled In Search of..., hence the name of my blog!]
Today was the first day of that first journey. It took me to Westerham and Quebec House, and to Hever and the beautiful Hever Castle. I learnt about the legendary General James Wolfe and about Anne Boleyn. I heard stories about tactical warfare and the power of the monarch. I wandered around gardens and churchyards, and I loved every minute of it!
I'll be writing a more detailed journal as I go along this journey, and taking many more photographs than are in Morton's book (and will try to replicate the ones he did take - the one above is the first). Quite what I'll do with it all when I'm done I'm not sure, but I will have seen much more of beautiful, rural England along the way...
