I already posted a picture of Paula and the cows at Chadbury Lock on Facebook, but here’s a couple more to start with.

Poppy left us this morning at Pershore, and we picked up Nick and Margaret in Evesham. They used to have some whalebones in the park in Evesham, and now they have a statue of a whale and gates shaped like whales.

By now you are probably sick and tired of hearing about abbeys, so I’m going to skip most of the remains of Evesham Abbey, apart from this 13th century statue of Moses with horns.

This was the result of a delightful mistranslation. The original Hebrew describes Moses coming back from talking to god with his face shining. It used the word qaran or keren which can mean a ray of light or a horn like a goat’s. When Jerome translated the Old Testament into Latin, he chose the second meaning instead, and used the word cornuta, or horned, to describe Moses.

Oh, and one of the two parish churches has a dragon on top.

There were two churches, one for the pilgrims and one for the locals, so that if any of the pilgrims were carrying plague they would only infect the other pilgrims and not the locals.

The local museum is in a rambling and leaning 14th century building.

Inside is a jumble of exhibits: Fossils, sculpture, metal detector finds, a plan of the Battle of Evesham (which I will spare you the details of), stuff from the old abbey and the old jail, tools, and whatever else they could cram in there. Here’s a first hand account of the dissolution of a monastery written in the margin of an old Bible.

… in the yere of our Lorde 1539 the monastery of Evesham was suppressed by King Henry VIII, the XXXI yeare of his raygne the XXX day of Januer at evensong tyme, the Convent being in the quere, at thys verse, “Deposuet potentes”, and wold not suffer them to make an ende. Phillypp Ballard beying Abbot at that tyme and XXXV relygius men at that day alive in the seyde monastery…

Here’s the abbot’s chair.

That was one fat abbott. One imagines him being not so much dissolved as rendered down for fat.

Here’s the vintage police equipment…

… and a cannon from the Crimean War…

… and of course they have one of those metal cages that stop zombies crawling out of the grave.

Evesham wins out over Pershore and Tewksbury by having pedestrianized the main shopping street. Not having to deal with traffic noise and being able to cross the street at will are big advantages. There are some fine old buildings of a non ecclesiastical nature as well. This is the local National Westminster Bank.

The fact that it is called The Round House rather than, say, The Square Bank, I can only ascribe to a massive popular delusion brought on by eating too much whale blubber.