I woke up to the sound of Tilly yawning and getting out of bed. “Time?” I yawned. “Eight thirty,” Mummy replied. It was half past eight already! We leapt out of bed and packed up all our suitcases. We were going in a new hostel that night! We had breakfast, and quickly got in the car.
We went on a sort of mini hike up to Offa’s Dyke that day. We’ve learnt about it before in history. Offa was the King of Mercia in Medieval times, and he built a ditch to separate Wales from England. To get to the dyke, we had to go through a cow field, where we were all very scared that a cow was going to charge at us! “If one does,” I said to a terrified Mummy and Tilly, “just raise your arms in the air and it’ll go away.” Tilly and I were especially terrified!
There was a brilliant view called Devil’s Pulpit, where we stayed and looked down for ages, with two dogs running about us called Ptolemy and Raven. I was scared of them, but ah well! Let us forget that. There was a rock ledge jutting out from just beneath ground level. I was the first to go down it (and last!) because I stumbled and had to run down the rest of the way. I stopped only a couple of feet away from the end of the ledge! Mummy got a photograph with Tintern Abbey in the distance, with me in it looking a little dazed. The cliff where I was was hundreds of feet from the ground, and Mummy nearly had a heart attack! But I was fine, just a little cream crackered.
We went to Tintern Abbey, a tumbledown, Gothic, 900-year-old monastery with really cool designs. The monks who lived there were Cistercian Monks, who followed the Benedictine rules. He was the one who went to live in a cave who said that there should be no possesions and only praying books. They were called the White Monks because they wore white robes. They tried to live like Saint Benedict, doing manual labour and getting up every day to pray several times day and night. The abbey fell into ruins when Henry VIII ordered it to be abandoned when he was getting rid of Catholic monasteries.
There was a ruined part, just walls and a couple of broken-down stonework pillars, with the base crouching on the sodden turf. We discovered that, from a faraway birdseye view, it did so look like a village. We pretended it was a village and that there was a bakery, butcher, and a very ornate postoffice. It was really fun. We’re going to turn it into a Minecraft Village on Tilly’s edition! In the gift shop I bought a ‘mood ring’ which determines my mood on accordance to the temparature. Unfortunately (and don’t tell the abbey I said) the metal was cheap and it has given a reaction to my finger, and the skin has turned green. Mummy says to give the ring a rest for a few days or so.
We went to Goodrich Castle, where they had a brilliantly interesting audio guide. We spent hours there. The audio guide led us up a dark, narrow staircase with a rope dangling down the pillar in the middle. It was a spiral staircase, which had no windows at all apart from the very occasional arrow slit in the narrow stone wall. The stairs were steep, stone, and most of all seemed to go on forever. When we got to the top, we pressed something-or-other on our audio guides, and it said, ‘There is no commentry here. Take a look at the view and then head down to the ____. Click on the play button once down.’ So we went down again and began to climb the steps on the keep, and run onto the stables platform, and so on. It was really fun. I love audio guides, and these were the best ever! Especially in the gatehouse, the man spoke all about the hidden murder tools..
The castle was blown up during the English Civil War, by a war cannon nicknamed Roaring Meg.
After that we went to our new youth hostel in Leominster (pronounced Lem-ster). It wasn’t as good as the castle. Especially since they only had shared toilets. It would be better with separate girls’ and boys’ toilets like they had at St. Briavel’s, because boys are yucky and grubby and get number 1 and number 2 on every inch of toilet space. There was a particularly disgusting old man who urinated all over the place, and left the lid up, and made particularly smelly and runny number 2s, and didn’t flush the loo or anything! Disgusting! They had made the showers dirty too.
Our room was nice though, and we had a bunk bed and it was very quiet. They had table football, which we loved to play!
