It was a little overcast this morning and the forecast was for rain. After our usual cooked breakfast we set off for Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. Located just over a mile west of the centre in the suburb of Shottery.
The cottage is an immaculately maintained, half-timbered affair with a thatched roof. This was the home of Anne Hathaway before she married Shakespeare in 1582, and the interior holds a comely combination of period furniture, including a superb, finely carved four-poster bed.
The garden is splendid too, crowded with bursting blooms in the summertime. The adjacent orchard and Shakespeare Tree Garden features a scattering of modern sculptures and over forty types of tree, shrub and rose mentioned in the plays, with each bearing the appropriate quotation inscribed on a plaque.
By the time we left Anne Hathaway’s Cottage it had started raining, and it set in pretty much on and off the rest of the afternoon.
We set off for Mary Arden’s House, another of the Shakespeare properties, three miles northwest of the town centre in the village of Wilmcote.
Mary was Shakespeare’s mother and the only unmarried daughter of her father, Robert, at the time of his death in 1556. Unusually for the period, Mary inherited the house and land, thus becoming one of the neighbourhood’s most eligible women – John Shakespeare, eager for self-improvement, married her within a year. The house is a well-furnished example of an Elizabethan farmhouse.
We then moved on to Charlecote Park, a grand 16th century country house, surrounded by its own deer park, on the banks of the River Avon Wellesbourne, about 4 miles east of Stratford and 5 miles south of Warwick.
A Grade I listed building, it has been administered by the National Trust since 1946. Built in 1558 by Sir Thomas Lucy. Although the general outline of the Elizabethan house remains, nowadays it is in fact mostly Victorian.
We then headed back foe a relaxing evening in the Van.
Next door, the half-timbered birthplace dwelling is actually two buildings knocked into one. The northern, much smaller and later part was the house of Joan, Shakespeare’s sister, and it adjoins the main family home, bought by John Shakespeare in 1556 and now returned to something like its original appearance. It includes a glover’s workshop, where Shakespeare’s father beavered away, though some argue that he was a wool merchant or a butcher. Neither is it certain that Shakespeare was born in this building nor that he was born on April 23, 1564 – it’s just known that he was baptized on April 26, and it’s an irresistible temptation to place the birth of the national poet three days earlier, on St George’s Day. Despite these uncertainties, the house has been attracting visitors for centuries and upstairs one of the old mullioned windows, now displayed in a glass cabinet, bears the scratch-mark signatures of some of them, including those of Thomas Carlyle and Walter Scott.
A little further down the road is Nash’s House and New Place. Once the property of Thomas Nash, first husband of Shakespeare’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall. The adjacent gardens contain the foundations of New Place, Shakespeare’s last residence, which was demolished by the Reverend Gastrell, who was in bitter 
Just around the corner was Hall’s Croft, Stratford’s most impressive medieval house, Hall’s Croft. The former home of Shakespeare’s elder daughter, Susanna, and her doctor husband John Hall, the immaculately maintained Croft, with its beamed ceilings and rickety rooms, holds a good-looking medley of period furniture. Hall established something of a reputation for his medical know-how and after his death some of his case notes were published in a volume entitled Select Observations on English Bodies. The best view of the building itself is at the back, in the neat walled garden.
We set off for Mary Arden’s House, another of the Shakespeare properties, three miles northwest of the town centre in the village of Wilmcote. 
We then moved on to Charlecote Park, a grand 16th century country house, surrounded by its own deer park, on the banks of the River Avon Wellesbourne, about 4 miles east of Stratford and 5 miles south of Warwick. 
