Datchet

Datchet from our hotel room.
The tower of St. Mary the Virgin is visible
behind the Royal Stag.

Datchet is a village on the Thames a mile and a half from Windsor. Stuff around the Thames is old. The river is life, a barrier, and a highway.

Datchet has its roots in Celtic times, if not earlier. It used to have a ferry to take kings and travelers on the road from London (north side) to Windsor Castle (south side). If they weren't taking a boat or the train.

Queen Victoria protecting Windsor Castle
from tourist busses.

Datchet is the location of the hotel we booked online for our first two nights in Britain so we could visit Windsor. It's the Manor Hotel. The desk clerk told us it is three hundred years old. Maybe people were smaller back then because our corner room was small. Like the vaudeville joke, the room was so small even the rats were hunchbacked.

It rained last night. Shari woke me up when she gasped, then cursed. Drops on her face. We had left the windows open. But the drops came from the ceiling onto the bedstand next to her and splashed on her face.

The night clerk feined surprise and explained that they had had no rain for a while. That did not explain the mold on the ceiling, or the pretty stainless steel jug standing on the floor in a doorway where we went for breakfast. That is in the middle of the hotel building. The roof is two levels up. The jug was catching about half of the drips from the ceiling.

Three hundred years old, you say? i believe it.

We got a new room this morning. Much bigger. This hotel advertises its facilities for weddings. I think we got the wedding room. It's not really a suite, but it's almost three times bigger than our first room. Which says much more about the first room than the second.

We still have our view of the little village center with its church steeple peering out above a giant tree by its entrance. The church is surrounded on all three sides by weathered gravestones. No landscaping. Just graves that, far as I can tell, go back to the early 1800's.

After our visit to Windsor Castle, I had to visit that church. It is named St. Mary the Virgin. It is a charming place, not just because of its age and Gothic style, but its human scale (compared to Windsor Castle), and the obvious fact that it is very much a working church. Folding chairs set up for meetings and prayer groups. Collection plate still had coins in it, out in the open. Bulletin boards, children's drawings. A box with donated reading glasses. Beautiful stained glass windows from the early 1800's. And a plaque with names and dates of its early rectors and vicars. Earliest date? 1239.

If a graveyard surrounds three sides, what is on the fourth? The Royal Stag. look it up on the web. The pub dates back to the 15th Century when it was an ale house. We headed there for dinner. I had its signature dish: beef and ale pie on mashed potatoes. Great. The carrot coriander soup was excellent, as were Shari's ribs.

And the pub itself? Imagine a community living room.