Not precisely warm outside though - the forecast was 15 degrees and no rain, but it was windy and always seemed to be on the verge of rain, so overall quite cool.
First stop was the King Richard III Visitor's Centre. This is built right beside and over the place where they found his body again in 2012. There are displays firstly about his life and his reign, and then about his death, and about the rediscovery of his body, and finally you can see the place where they found his body. It's a fascinating story. They have volunteers on site to answer questions and give talks, and one of them explained and showed us a fair bit of the detail.
There's a statue of Richard outside the visitor centre, with fresh white roses left at his feet just recently.
Next we went to the Cathedral, just a look from the outside:
Close by is the Guildhall, an ancient building including lots of explanations of its history.
Then, on to the Jewry Wall and Museum which despite its name has nothing to do with the Jewish people - they think that despite the spelling, the original meaning was actually 'jury'. Regardless of that, the wall is actually the remains of a Roman bath house - one of the tallest remaining pieces of Roman masonry in England. Some of the other walls also remain, but only in the bases of them in the way that's more common for Roman ruins:
We then went into the associated museum which has lots of displays and artifacts from the Roman and Saxon times. Unfortunately it also contained many, many school children doing planned lessons, so we didn't spend an awfully long time there.
Final stop was at the Newark House Museum - this is a nicely done museum about various aspects of Leicester history, but the main reason we went was to see the small but moving World War I display.
And of course, we took an opportunity here to take a photo of Paul with a gun:
This is actually one of two that were brought back from Sebastopol.
No comments:
Post a Comment