Quiz: Where is Marissa Going?

Today’s post is an abbreviated one, because I’m presently scurrying around folding and packing and otherwise getting ready to get on a airplane later on this evening. I’ll be gone ten days, so next week’s post will be a “blast from the past” while I’m off gallivanting with my DH. This trip is our belated 30^th anniversary celebration (because we’ve now been married 31+ years!) but well worth the wait.

Where are we going? We’re going to—

Hmm. Nope. Not gonna make it easy. You’re going to have to take a quiz to figure out where we’re headed, partly because it's a fascinating place and partly because I'm a tease. 😉 

Are you ready? Here it goes...

• This place is one of the breeding grounds of a well-known type of bird sometimes called the ‘sea parrot.’
• The name of a certain location in this place, Geysir, has become the word for all other places of a similar type.
• The language spoken here still bears a strong resemblance to its early medieval form.
• One of the world’s oldest Parliaments, the Althing, dating to the tenth century AD, meets here.
• This place is one of the two locations on earth where you can see the meeting of two tectonic plates above the surface of the earth.
• There are no mosquitoes here!

Any guesses?

I'll be back the week after next with lots of pictures of my mystery location...see you then!  😘

Retro Blast: Big White Horses

Although this week is all about shadows (did you get to see the eclipse yesterday? )summer for me summons thoughts of sunshine and green...and, occasionally, big white horses. Enjoy this retro blast from 2011.)

 

Our first summer excursion is to Wiltshire, a county southwest of London about halfway to Cornwall. Wiltshire is home to Salisbury Plain and Stonehenge, probably Great Britain’s most famous prehistorical site; it’s a place of rolling, open hills, called downs, with little farming due to the poor nature of the soil.

But it’s the nature of that poor soil that makes Wiltshire—and other places across southern England—the first stop on our Summer Tour. Forming the hills under that thin soil is chalk—yes, the white stuff formerly used to write on blackboards in classrooms. And at some point back in prehistory, someone figured out that you could cut shallow trenches in the soil to expose the underlying chalk, and create enormous pictures spreading across hillsides…like this:That’s the 374 ft. long White Horse of Uffington, (nearby in Oxfordshire, by the way, not Wiltshire) dating back to about 3000 years ago. But in historical times, chalk cutting became a popular pastime for landowners, and Wiltshire is home to several of them. There’s the Westbury White Horse, carved in the 1770s for a Mr. Gee (though it may have covered an earlier figure—mention of a horse carving there dates back to 1742):
And here’s another, the Cherhill White Horse, carved in 1780 by a Dr. Alsop and measuring about 160 feet across:The somewhat smaller--62 ft--Marlborough White Horse was carved in 1804 by schoolboys from a nearby school, and refurbishing it was a yearly school tradition. These chalk figures require upkeep—weeding and replenishing the chalk—at frequent intervals: So what inspired people to spend a great deal of effort to dig trenches hundreds of feet long to form these pictures? The 18th century was really the first great period of English landscape gardening, and carving chalk figures into hillsides was one way to play with the landscape, if you happened to own hundreds of acres in chalk down country. I am sure our young 19th century tourist misses, on their way perhaps to view the stately homes at Longleat or Fonthill Abbey (which I shall write about later this summer), enjoyed side trips to view these images, startlingly white against the green summer grass.

And enormous horses aren’t the only chalk carvings around; huge figures of men also exist such as the Wilmington Figure (which may also date to prehistoric times) and the Cerne Abbas Giant, probably carved during the English Civil War as a sort of satirical cartoon of Oliver Cromwell! The practice continues even today, as a White Horse was created just in 2003 at Folkestone in Kent, overlooking the terminal for the Channel Tunnel. And they remain a tourist attraction in the 21st century; visit http://wiltshirewhitehorses.org.uk/ to learn more about Wiltshire’s White Horses.

What a Historical Romance Author Does On Her Summer Vacation

Delve more deeply into history, of course!

I love researching, especially when I can do it in person. So when an opportunity arose to visit some very cool East Coast historical sites for two weeks, I couldn’t resist. And getting to go to one with Marissa was the icing on the cake!

First up, Plimouth Colony. Marissa has already shared her thoughts here. I was utterly charmed by this 17^th century village and its inhabitants. The reenactors simply went about their everyday tasks. One fellow and his grown son were rethatching a cottage roof. I interrupted a lady cooking her mid-day meal. One charming fellow with a delightful English accent recounted stories of how the Irish were descended from young boys escaping the sacking of Troy! Wonderful day!

Though this is what can happen to authors who forget to write their pages before journeying out to play.

Next, Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia (the tower of Independence Hall is at the top of this post). I found it surprisingly stirring to hear about how the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution came to be hammered out and signed. It gave me a little thrill to see the ranger show the crest that had originally sat above the judge in the adjacent courthouse and recognize it as belonging to George III, father of our beloved Prinny. We in the U.S. think of ourselves as Americans now, but then most were struggling to stop thinking of themselves as British!

Then Valley Forge. I’m not sure what I was expecting from this historic site where George Washington camped with the Continental Army in the winter of 1777/1778. As a child growing up, I remember hearing that it was the cold weather that had caused so many deaths while encamped. Turns out it was more of supply problem, with food and clothing not arriving when expected (or at all!), that nearly did the army in. If not for the stalwart determination of our forefathers and mothers, we might yet be English citizens.

On to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, to visit family. We wandered downtown one day, where plaques and statues proclaim the town’s origins. What I found interesting was that Benjamin Chambers, who had received a land grant from William Penn to start the town, was too old to fight in the American Revolution, but his son James distinguished himself on the battlefield. So too did his grandson, who left to fight when he was only 11 and returned a battle-hardened young man of 17. What a sacrifice!

Finally, Gettysburg. I have toured the battlefield many times over the years, as it lies within an easy drive of my maternal aunt and uncle’s house. But again I was struck by how many sacrificed, on both sides, what a cause they passionately believed in. I’ve seen stories recently that many did not want to enlist, but the bits of diaries I read on display showed men determined to right wrongs and redress issues that were splitting their country in two. And then there’s Rose Greenhow, who was such a successful spy during the war that she was commended by Jefferson Davis.

Oh, but the ideas are spinning in my head! So. Many. Stories. So little time!

And if you have time, do stop by next Tuesday for Marissa’s post. We will be off Friday, July 1, and Tuesday, July 5, for Independence Day holiday, for which I have a whole new appreciation after my travels! Look for a new post from me on July 8.

Blast from the Past: What I Did on My Summer Vacation: Visit the Homes of the Rich and Famous

[Five years ago around this time, I was with Marissa on my way to visit Newport and Cape Cod. Today? I'm on vacation, having stopped to tour Plymouth with Marissa! More on that soon. But for now, enjoy this blast from the past.]

Anyone ever bought a map to the homes of the stars in Hollywood? Or driven by the biggest house in town just to dream? In the same way that Marissa and I ogled the Newport Mansions of America’s Gilded Age, so young nineteenth century lads and lasses traveled during the summer to visit Great Houses of the wealthy and titled. You may recall that in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet travels with her aunt and uncle to visit the north of England and ends up touring Pemberley, the home of Fitzwilliam Darcy. Some think the inspiration for Pemberley was Chatsworth, home of the Dukes of Devonshire. In the nineteenth century, the house was open for people to tour, and once a month the staff even served dinner to all who were there.

Chatsworth is a stunning home, remodeled and contoured over several centuries even by the nineteenth century. It boasted a conservatory made from wood, iron, and glass that covered nearly an acre and was filled with exotic specimens from as far away as the Americas and the Orient, contoured gardens designed by the famous landscape architect Capability Brown and improved upon by Joseph Paxton, and a statue gallery with works from Greece and Rome. It was also filled with priceless artwork, pottery, and other collections. So, allow me to give you your own mini-tour:

The sculpture gallery

A dining room

The formal gardens


However, one of the other attractions for a good part of the nineteenth century was Chatsworth’s owner. William Cavendish, the 6th Duke of Devonshire, was called the Bachelor Duke. He rose to his title at the tender age of 21 and was handsome, charming, and generous. I can’t help but wonder how many young ladies wandered through his home hoping for more than a glimpse of the eligible gentleman. Their hopes were dashed for two reasons: the duke owned seven other stately homes and a thriving political career, so wasn't often in residence, and he never married. Some say he was in love with Caro Lamb, Lord Byron's infamous mistress. On his death, his estate passed to a cousin.

Ah, the lifestyles of the rich and famous!

What I Did on My Summer Vacation, Part 4: Fonthill Abbey

As Regina mentioned in Part 3, a popular vacation pastime for 18th and early 19th century people was the visiting of the large country estates of the rich and famous. Though it seems odd to us today, back then it was considered perfectly permissible. A lot of those houses are still open for viewing today…but today we’re going to visit a popular stately home that alas no longer exists, yet was quite famous in its day for its sheer…well, over-the-top-ness.

The Beckford family of Wiltshire was a fabulously wealthy one, thanks to its extensive plantation holdings in the West Indies which gave it a preeminent place in the sugar import market. Young William, heir of the family, got nothing but the best growing up—piano lessons from the young Mozart, for example—so when he came of age in 1781, he threw himself a party that cost ₤40,000. Um, wow.

However, scandals within a very few years drove him from England and his popular place in society. Despite his vast wealth, his life was not a happy one. He lost his young wife in childbirth while in exile on the continent, and spent the next several years traveling, writing (among his works was a well-known Gothic novel, Vathek) and collecting art. In 1796, much to everyone’s surprise, he decided to return to England and build himself a new house to house his art collection…in the form of a Gothic cathedral. He had the former Beckford home, Fonthill Splendens, torn down, and hired the brilliant but troubled architect James Wyatt to build it for him.

What emerged was one of the largest private homes in England. Fonthill Abbey featured 50 foot high windows, three-hundred foot corridors, staircases of enormous height and width…and a 50 foot table in the dining room, which seemed odd as no one would visit or even speak to Beckford (remember that scandalous past?) Yet alongside this excess, most of the bedrooms were small, stark, and bare, and over a dozen of them didn’t even have windows. Up to five hundred men were at work on the enormous house at any given time, and due to Wyatt’s frequent absences (he was notoriously unreliable, and often disappeared for months at a time on alcoholic sprees), Beckford himself did much of the directing of the building and landscaping of his monstrous home.

The process did not run smoothly. The main tower, planned to be three hundred feet tall, collapsed twice before finally staying put. The house was finally completed in 1813…which year also saw Wyatt’s death in a carriage accident.

Beckford lived alone in the gloomy splendor of his house for the next ten years, only entertaining once when Lord Nelson and Emma Hamilton spent Christmas with him. Unfortunately, the outrageous cost of his building (not only the Abbey itself but a twelve foot high wall extending for twelve miles around his lands) combined with a drop in the price of sugar and the loss of some of his Jamaican plantations led to his needing to sell his white elephant abbey…which he did in 1823, amazingly enough, for the tidy sum of ₤300,000.

The new owner of Fonthill Abbey, gunpowder magnate John Farquhar, rarely visited his new acquisition, but happened to be there at Christmas 1825 when, for the third and final time, the 300-foot tower of the Abbey collapsed, demolishing about a third of the house with it. Farquhar himself died the following year, having neglected to write a will, and none of the relations arguing over his fortune was interested in taking on Fonthill. It was torn down, and only the gatehouse and a small portion of the once enormous house remain.

And Beckford? He took his money and moved to Bath, erecting a shorter (only 120 feet tall) and much more solidly built tower in which to house some of his art treasures. Though Fonthill is long gone, you can still visit his Lansdown Tower today…just as inquiring young ladies might once have done.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation, Part 2: The Queen’s Doll House

Today’s Summer Vacation activity is about twenty years after the 19th century…but it’s just so amazing and fascinating that I’m going to talk about it anyway…and the neat thing is that if you happen to be in the vicinity of Windsor Castle, you too can see it.

What “it” is is Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House. Queen Mary (born 1867, married Prince George of York 1893, became queen 1910, died 1953) was a noted collector of art and trinkets—objets d’art—with an especial fondness for miniatures. In fact, hostesses often put away their trinkets when the queen was coming for a visit because of her well known habit of staring longingly at an object and commenting on its beauty until its owner felt compelled to give it to her.

Her friend and cousin, Princess Marie Louise (one of the daughters of Princess Helena) was inspired in 1921 to create a dolls’ house for her as a gift, both personal and public. The Queen had been a tower of strength during the hard years of World War I, and such a gift seemed the perfect thank you. The princess enlisted the help of well-known architect Sir Edwin Lutyens to help organize…and the project snowballed, with Marie Louise calling on her extensive circle of friends and acquaintances in the arts (and on their friends and acquaintances) to help create a perfect miniature palace featuring three years of work and the labor of thousands...and the results are amazing:

Hundreds of well-known artists contributed, painting amazing tiny murals in the house or creating miniscule watercolors for the royal portfolio. Writers like Rudyard Kipling, Edith Wharton, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Conan Doyle, and hundreds of others donated work for the library, some of it unpublished elsewhere, and often handwriting it themselves in tiny 1” by 1 ½” blank volumes provided to them which were later bound in elegant gold-tooled leather (Ernest Shepard, the illustrator of Winnie the Pooh, designed the bookplates). Composers like Delius, Holst, and Bax contributed musical scores. The wine cellar contains hundreds of tiny bottles of actual vintage wines, from champagne (Veuve Cliquot 1906) to fine Madeira from 1820. The linens are all monogrammed. The tiny gramophone in the nursery actually works, and there’s electricity and hot and cold running water. There are working motor-cars and motorcycles in the Royal Garage, and the gardens were designed by famed designer Gertrude Jekyll.

The Queen was, of course, delighted. The house was exhibited to the public at the British Empire Exhibition in 1924-25 and later to raise funds for charities; now it’s on permanent display at Windsor. Want to see more? Check out this interactive website, which includes information on a new book just published about the Dolls' House, The Queen's Dolls' House by Lucinda Lambton (don't worry, it's available in the US as well). Fancy a visit? Go here for more information. I know that the next time I go to England, this will definitely be one of my stops!

What I Did on My Summer Vacation, Part 1: Big White Horses

Our first summer excursion is to Wiltshire, a county southwest of London about halfway to Cornwall. Wiltshire is home to Salisbury Plain and Stonehenge, probably Great Britain’s most famous prehistorical site; it’s a place of rolling, open hills, called downs, with little farming due to the poor nature of the soil.

But it’s the nature of that poor soil that makes Wilstshire—and other places across southern England—the first stop on our Summer Tour. Forming the hills under that thin soil is chalk—yes, the white stuff formerly used to write on blackboards in classroooms. And at some point back in prehistory, someone figured out that you could cut shallow trenches in the soil to expose the underlying chalk, and create enormous pictures spreading across hillsides…like this:That’s the 374 ft. long White Horse of Uffington, (nearby in Oxfordshire, by the way, not Wiltshire) dating back to about 3000 years ago. But in historical times, chalk cutting became a popular pastime for landowners, and Wiltshire is home to several of them. There’s the Westbury White Horse, carved in the 1770s for a Mr. Gee (though it may have covered an earlier figure—mention of a horse carving there dates back to 1742):
And here’s another, the Cherhill White Horse, carved in 1780 by a Dr. Alsop and measuring about 160 feet across:The somewhat smaller--62 ft--Marlborough White Horse was carved in 1804 by schoolboys from a nearby school, and refurbishing it was a yearly school tradition. These chalk figures require upkeep—weeding and replenishing the chalk—at frequent intervals: So what inspired people to spend a great deal of effort to dig trenches hundreds of feet long to form these pictures? The 18th century was really the first great period of English landscape gardening, and carving chalk figures into hillsides was one way to play with the landscape, if you happened to own hundreds of acres in chalk down country. I am sure our young 19th century tourist misses, on their way perhaps to view the stately homes at Longleat or Fonthill Abbey (which I shall write about later this summer), enjoyed side trips to view these images, startlingly white against the green summer grass.

And enormous horses aren’t the only chalk carvings around; huge figures of men also exist such as the Wilmington Figure (which may also date to prehistoric times) and the Cerne Abbas Giant, probably carved during the English Civil War as a sort of satirical cartoon of Oliver Cromwell! The practice continues even today, as a White Horse was created just in 2003 at Folkestone in Kent, overlooking the terminal for the Channel Tunnel. And they remain a tourist attraction in the 21st century; visit http://wiltshirewhitehorses.org.uk/ to learn more about Wiltshire’s White Horses.

Don't forget--through July 12, all Nineteenteen commenters will be entered in a drawing to win Regina's Irresistible Earl beach tote. So what are you waiting for?

Summertime!

Well, temperatures have already zoomed up to the high nineties--unheard of so early in the season for New England!--so I think summer is here, even if the calendar says it’s still officially spring. And so it seems to be a good time to let you know what we’ll be up to this summer at Nineteenteen…and I’ll save the best part for last.

First, we thought it would be fun to launch a series on what a proper 19th century miss might have done after the Season was over…so look for posts throughout July and August on What I Did on my Summer Vacation from both me and Regina. We’ll explore the great vacation destinations around England back in, say, 1820 (so jaunting to Legoland® Windsor or popping across the Channel to Disneyland® Paris is out of the question!)

But before that, we’ll be having our annual trip to the Romance Writers of America’s National Conference, held this year in New York City. We’ll blog our adventures there which will include The Beau Monde's (Regency writers’ special interest chapter) annual conference and Soiree. Look for a lot of interesting photos from this year’s Soiree (she said mysteriously…!) But this year the adventures will continue as Regina comes to visit me on Cape Cod post-conference for a few days (hey, she isn’t on this side of the continent very often!) Look for pictures of two proper YA historical fiction writers spending a lot of time on the beach!

And now, the best part I promised…Regina’s latest book, The Irresistible Earl, arrives in bookstores this week!! To celebrate, we’re holding a contest…anyone who comments on a Nineteenteen post between now and July 12 will be entered in a drawing to win an Irresistible Earl totebag containing a lovely scarf and a sandalwood fan (an assortment of items our 19th century miss would have wished to have with her on vacation!) and of course a signed copy of The Irresistible Earl (which she definitely would have enjoyed!!).

So it’s shaping up to be a busy summer…and we hope you’ll be here to enjoy it with us. Make sure you stop by on Friday when Nineteenteen will be interviewing Lady Phoebe Dearborn, who’ll have a thing or two to tell us about her brother, the Irresistible Earl. And don't forget to comment on posts to be entered in our contest!