Hills of Bath, Somerset

Writing about all of our experiences in Bath in one post would take too much time, so for the first post in the series, I’d like to focus on a short countryside trip that we took on our second day.

We woke up early and went to a neighboring village, a small and sleepy settlement with empty, narrow streets, overgrown hedges, and old, beautiful buildings. Though at first sight some houses looked decrepit, it was clear that they were tended to and kept as close as possible to how they looked when they were built. After a walk in the village, we went into the hills. Shrub walls became higher, hiding farms and livestock, and the air smelled of horses and cut grass. We ascended the slope uphill and entered the open. The wind picked up, and I could see foggy ravines and a few sheep here and there. We walked through the hills for some time but eventually had to turn back.

This was quite an intense emotional experience because, of all the places I’ve been, only England looks and feels exactly the way I had imagined it. I thought about how cool it would be to live in a small village and go up into the hills every morning while the air is still cold, giving names to sheep and cows, birdwatching, and drawing landscapes. This could be a future I’d really like to have.