Ancient Scotland Tour

Dear friends, here we are with our diary's last page (sigh, sniff). We are now writing from home, back to Italy and back to Trevignano Romano, our village by the lake of Bracciano, a few kilometers North of Rome. It's summer here! And guess what: after 54 days of Scottish and English temperatures we had some problems to get used to the extremely hot Italian weather (38 degrees Celsius, that's 100 degrees Fahrenheit)! Just arrived, Diego even caught a kind of heatstroke with very high fever for one night. Now we are both all right: we took all our 134 film rolls to develop (in the shop they were bewildered for a moment), we enjoyed our first real cappuccino and a deluge of bills to pay and our washing machine is working hard.

But back to our tour: after Uley we went to Oxford, where we spent a pleasant time in its beautiful streets and wonderful bookshops and a not so pleasant time in its very expensive car park (£3 up to two hours) and in a huge and noisy crowd of tourists. We even found a little publisher/Internet & computer point, called Daily Information where a nice bearded giant allowed us to connect our Mac to the Net (and send our last page of the diary). Daily Information is a messy and busy place where you can send e-mails and faxes, surf the Net and use a scanner, hire a computer to take away and much more. They also publish a daily brightly-coloured A2 broadsheet full of details of what's going on in Oxford, local meetings and gigs, small ads, restaurants and cafés.

Then we drove towards Chipping Norton, where Diego wished to visit the Rollright stone circle and the nearby King Stone and Whispering Knights. This is a special place for Diego, because it was the first megalithic site he ever visited in his life, more than fifteen years ago. So it would have been nice to finish our ancient stones tour just there, where somehow it began years and years ago.

The place is very interesting and there are several beautiful legends around the stones (have a look at our stone page on King Stone). There we also had the pleasure to meet Karin Attwood, one of the smart people that last year created The Rollright Trust to conserve the stones and preserve their unspoilt character. Karin and her husband John are doing a great job there, promoting conservation, access, education and research at the megalithic monument. If you want to know more about, have a look at their interesting website. We also spent some time with Paul Bennett, a brilliant and very nice Yorkshire rock art and megalithic expert, who is working as a custodian at the Rollright Stones until next October and who knows a huge amount of things and legends about megalithic sites.

After meeting these very interesting people we had to leave. We drove to Folkestone and took the tunnel under the Channel (the so called Chunnel) and then crossed France and Switzerland and reached Milano (Italy) at 4 a.m. We rested a little, got angry with the first wrong Italian things we met on our way and finally enjoyed the wedding of two dear friends of us, Fabio and Luisa, where Paola was witness and Diego photographer. Then on Sunday we covered the last 610 km of our journey back home.

Our Ancient Scotland Tour is really over now. It has been an incredible and unforgettable experience for us and we would like to say goodbye to all of you, dear friends who have patiently followed us during all these weeks. And we especially would like to thank:

All the nice Scots who helped us in one way or another
All the Scottish bulls that haven't gored us
The EvangeList and all the Mac users who have travelled with us on the Net
Our little Twingo car that has taken us back home safe and sound
All the British toilets. After drinking so many cups of tea, Paola was so happy to find generally clean toilets everywhere, almost even in open moorland
Our precious gumboots (Diego's green ones and Paola's bright red ones), that we forgot outside the car at Uley on our last English day. We realized that we had left them back when we were already miles and miles away. We'll buy some new ones, but we'll miss them, those special ones. Thanks and goodbye forever, brave wellies that trampled on tons of sheep droppings!

Don't forget to keep visiting our main website, the Stone Pages, where sooner or later we will announce our 1999 megalithic tour... In the meantime, these web pages will be always available online and they will (slowly) be added to our Stones of Scotland section.

Ciao!