Friday afternoon I drove up to Stratford-upon-Avon for a preview performance of the RSC's Hamlet with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart. That's another story (and one I'll write at some point). I stayed overnight nearby (a fine manor house converted into an OK, and relatively cheap, Best Western) and after breakfast was away from the hotel just before 9am for a day of church-going on my way back to London.
It was a beautiful sunny morning and there was a wonderful range of churches to choose from -- I eventually visited 8 new ones, plus one I'd been to before and one that was closed, but where I could peer through the window. So that equalled my best day in my collecting of those in Simon Jenkins' book England's Thousand Best Churches. I thought I was going to make 9 but 8 is a good tally, and it's a good focus for an entry that tries to capture something of why I like this activity so much. Which by way of an outline of the day, with some photos, is what I'm attempting here.
