Rye Part 1

I took so many pictures on our trip to Rye that I will need to several posts (considering I just loaded up this post with pictures of one street).  

But first we started our day with fire. 

 These pictures are AFTER we got the wood stove door open - -which took approximately 90 minutes and many texts to the cottage owner.

  Observant readers will notices that there is no wood log - only kindling!!  But we were so cold that we figured it would be nice to have a little kindling fire going while we ate our breakfast. 

 Rye is so beautiful - even in January.  This is Mermaid Street - probably one of the most picturesque streets in England. 

And of course, Jana makes it even more beautiful!

 The houses are hundreds of years old and they all have names.  I'm not sure what this name refers to…maybe it was the first house on the block to have indoor plumbing?

 This is the Mermaid Inn.  There are Norman cellars dating back to 1156 (I googled that) but the building only dates back to 1420.

 

 The Mermaid Inn is so iconic that the house across the street is simply named "The House Opposite".

 Anyway, we had to have lunch at the Mermaid to see what it was like inside.  We sat in the bar in front of an enormous roaring fire.

I probably should have done an entire photo shoot of the inside of this inn - there were so many nooks and crannies and timber ceilings and crooked doorways…it was fantastic.  When we move home even the oldest building in Boston is going to look "mod" to me.  England knows how to do old.

Back in December I went to the screening of the first episode of the BBC's new adaptation of Mapp and Lucia.  Rye was the home of author EF Benson and he modeled fictional Tilling after Rye.  The show was completely filmed in Rye using Benson's home (Lamb House) as Mallards - the house where Mapp lives but she rents it to Lucia for the summer.  These shots are all prominent locations from the production which I highly recommend when it comes to the US.  Sadly Lamb House was not open for tourists in the winter.  And of course - they filmed in summer.  It was all a little more colorful on the show.

Oh yeah… Henry James lived in that house too.