Diorama of conditions inside mine 1843 Existing buildings from Huish Mine
October 7 Wednesday I left Draper and took a Delta flight at 3:00 p.m. from the Salt Lake City International Airport and met my brother, Chris at the Atlanta airport in Georgia. We flew into the night arriving in London the following day.
October 8 Thursday We arrived in London, England and drove a rental car to Radstock way over in Sommerset County in southwest England where we stayed at the Glebe House Bed and Breakfast.
October 9 Friday We visited the Huish coalmine location. It had been capped off. This was where our direct paternal ancestor, William Jefferies, worked at age twelve pulling coal out of the bowels of the earth. He worked there for a year and then went to work on the farm of William Flower, a cousin. This same day we went to Kilmersdon, the parish where William Jefferies's family attended church. We saw the Jack and Jill Hill of nursery rhyme fame in Kilmersdon. Next we went to the location of the Goodeaves Farm where William was born. The farm is gone. A Goodeaves subdivision with side-by-side townhomes having taken the farm's place. Down the hill from Goodeaves is Coleford, where William likely attended school . We drove to Glastonbury, England, in the Somersetshire. There we visited Tower Hill, legendary location of King Arthur's Camelot. There are legends of Christ appearing there after His resurrection. Then we visited Wells Cathedral in the city of Wells. We ate dinner at an inn where Thomas Paine, writer of the letters Common Sense, preached from the second story to people in the crowded market place below. Stayed at Glebe House again.
October 10 Saturday We drove to Bristol in a diesel- using Ford and found the Pip & Jay Church (Saint Philip and St. Jacob Church) where William and Mary Francis Ould were married before their journey to Utah. We went to Siston, a suburb northeast of Bristol, where William's father, George was before he went to Goodeaves. There are Jefferies Family headstones all around St. Anne's Church in the graveyard. We next went to the Radstock Mining Museum to see the conditions that William worked under as a child in a mind. There was life-sized diorama depicting coal mine working conditions in 1843, just one year before the Prophet Joseph Smith was martyred. We visited Stonehenge and walked around but not between the stone monuments. Then we went to the town of Wantage to stay the night in the Bear Hotel, built in the early 1800s.
October 11 Sunday We attended Sunday services in Oxford Ward in Oxford. Afterward, we visited a distant cousin, Roy Crowton, who earlier found Chris on the internet. He is younger that us, and is living in nearby Newbury. We visited with him for a couple of hours and got information on our mother's Crowton line... that would be my Grandfather George Crowton's history. We stayed at the Foxcombe Lodge, a bed and breakfast, in the outskirts of Oxford.
October 12 Monday We visited Cuddington, a little village, where the Crowtons lived anciently. We saw the Church of England's Saint Nicholas Church in Cuddington . This building dates to the 13th century (1200's) We went inside, but it had been modernized, plastered, and remodeled from ancestral times. They were having a bazar and were getting ready for a harvest program. They use it now for community events in this tiny little village. We spent time looking for Crowton headstones in the adjacent cemetery. Later that day we went to Blenheim Palace which is modeled after Versailles. It is expecially known for Churchill's connections... he may have grown up there. The state took over this extravagant palace and made it into a museum. We went back to Foxcombe Lodge for bed and a breakfast the next morning.
October 13 Tuesday We visited White Horse Hill & Huffington Hill Fort. Earthen ramparts date from the Iron Age. Many forts have been on this hill since then. The white horse is a work of art made from trenches filled with white chalk. We visited an earth and stone barrow a few miles away that also dates from the Iron Age... before Roman times and before the birth of our Savior. Visiting the city of Oxford we walked among the buildings of the great college of Oxford where some of the Harry Potter movies were filmed. We saw the room used for the infirmary in the movie. We saw a lot of the places the Inspector Morse BBC TV series was filmed.
October 14 Wednesday. We visited Warwick Castle in the town of Warwick. It has been added to, destroyed partially, added onto again. Now it's more like a palace. In Stratford-On-Avon we explored places made famous by the presence of William Shakespeare. We saw the resting place of Shakespeare's bones and the warning not to disturb them. We stayed in the Mary Arden Inn that night across the street where Mary Arden, Shakespeare's mother was born.
October 15 Thursday We drove all day to the port city of Dundee, Scotland where we stayed the night in the Landmark Hotel, a five-star hotel where they had Scottish shortbread cookies on the pillow. We dined at Papa Joe's Restaurant in the city where I ate haggis stuffed chicken. This city was mostly destroyed during WWII. Now it is a blue-collar and industrial town with mostly newer buildings. The restaurant looked like it had been an old department store.
October 16 Friday We found the Leyshade Farm north of Dundee where James Fraser, ancestor of my mother's mother's father. My Grandmother's name Emma Fraser Crowton Clark. We went a ways up the coast to Aberdeen and visited the nearby Fraser Castle. We took a self-guided tour through this castle where it is doubtful that our more recent ancestors did not live. Stayed the night again in the Landmark Hotel and had an Indian Buffet dinner elsewhere in the town. I was able to avoid hot food.
October 17 Saturday We visited an "earth house" north of Dundee built by the Picts, the civilization found by the Romans as they invaded and conquered Scotland. This house was discovered by a farmer. It was constructed as a semi-circle in the ground lined by big stones possibly for a storage area adjacent to a thatched-roofed house. Proceeding west to the City of Sterling and visited the Sterling Castle famous for its 3.5 hour tour. The Scottish leader Wallace, played by Mel Gibson in the movie Bravehart, fought here. This castle lies at the heart of Scottish history. A well within the castle walls supplies water to preserve life during seiges. At the convergence of two valleys and two rivers that flow into the Firth of Forth, where the main highway to northern Scotland passes, this castle lies at a most strategic location to control the territory. The Stirling Bridge is the site of a famous battle in 1297 where Wallace defeated the British. This battle is celebrated even today. We returned to the Landmark Hotel for the night.
October 18 Sunday We attended the L.D.S. Dundee Ward which was as big as any one of our Draper wards. We drove many hours that afternoon to the town of Haltwhistle in northern England near the Scottish border and Hadrian's wall , pop. 4,000, on a train line, and booked into the Aschroft Bed and Breakfast where big English breakfasts with eggs, cereal, toast, hot chocolate, ham and fried tomatoes are served. After checking in we drove out to see the Hadrian Wall built by the Romans to keep the Scottish out of their Roman Empire.
October 19 Monday After a good breakfast, Chris and I walked upon Hadrian's wall. Romans were there for almost four hundred years. We inspected one of the forts on the wall. We visited the Roman Soldiers Museum where we saw relicts found during excavations along the wall: Roman coins, old shoes of leather preserved in mud, weapons of divers kinds. buttons, tools and implements... We drove the rest of the day back to London and landed in High Wycombe where we stayed at the Clifton Lodge Hotel near Heathrow Airport.
October 20, Tuesday We got up at 7:00 a.m. packed and ate our final English breakfast. We turned in the car at the Heathrow Airport, checked in our luggage, ate lunch at an airport restaurant, and departed at 1:20 p.m. for Atlanta and thence to our homes in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, arriving at Salt Lake City's International Airport at 11:00 p.m.
Kimlersdon, Somersetshire, England Jack and Jill Hill
