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Day one of the holiday began in blazing sunshine and ended in the garden, under the stars and over a rather nice bottle of wine.

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We managed to get into our painted church and spent a good long while with the medieval wall paintings, the ancient books chained to the lecterns and the glorious jewel coloured stained glass.

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Then, of course, there was a pub… a 17th century  coaching inn, in Woburn, after a landscape full of hundreds of deer.

And eventually back to pasta in the garden… with a rich, red wine sauce that I had left brewing all day, a wonderful Fleurie, a lemon meringue pie.. and a small dog, hugely excited to have a captive tennis ball thrower.

We talked till the wee small hours, watching the bats and the stars… and the dog still played ball.

But one of the highlights had to be the sign on the ancient tomb….

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HEART OF ALBION

Stuart France & Sue Vincent

Unwittingly drawn into the mysterious and magical landscape of The Initiate, Don and Wen pondered the visual language of symbols, stumbling across revelations and realisations that would alter their perception of the age-old stories they thought they knew… tales that entwine across the tapestry of time.

A hilltop steeped in tragedy, a child whose eyes see too much… a Word-Weaver’s birth into darkness… strange forms shimmering on the edge of vision. They learned to walk the Living Land, listening to the whispers of Earth memory and the ghosts of the most ancient past. And from those tales, another line of communication opens as they explore the folklore, legends and traditional tales handed down, from heart to heart, over the millennia.

As the two friends travel between the sacred sites of Albion, they discover stories that tell how the leys were made, the true origins of the hill-forts and the reason why Father Fish had breakfast in Slug Town.

Striding across this landscape of myth are the giants. From Cerne Abbas to the top of the Beanstalk, from Camelot to the Castle of Maidens, how and why is their presence stamped on the Living Lore of the land by their seven-league boots?

Join Don and Wen as the adventure continues, un-ravelling its mysteries and the magical relationship between Albion and its people.

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