Lakeside Cottage: a beautiful holiday home set in #Cumbria has hosted a hen-party, a family Christmas, a writersβ retreat and a tearful reunion. Their frolics and mayhem make for an entertaining guest book!
https://t.co/mVjjupaLvE
Today, I bought a house! Cash payment. It needs some work on the exterior and a tidy up inside but worth every penny. Beatrix Potter owned a dollβs house and now, so do I! π π
#DollsHouse
The first time you turn a corner in Florence and the cathedral appears in front of you, it does not look real.
This is Santa Maria del Fiore, the cathedral of Florence, and it is one of the largest churches ever built.
It stretches 153 meters long and rises 90 meters from the floor to the base of the lantern. When it was completed in the fifteenth century, it was the largest cathedral in all of Europe, with room inside for tens of thousands of people. Even now, it is among the largest churches on earth, surpassed in size by only a handful of others in the entire world.
But the real marvel is the dome.
Filippo Brunelleschi built it between 1420 and 1436, without the wooden scaffolding everyone believed such a thing required, laying over four million bricks in a self-supporting double shell in a herringbone pattern he devised himself. It weighs tens of thousands of tons and it rises to nearly 115 meters.
600 years later, it remains the largest masonry dome ever constructed anywhere on the planet. Nothing built since, in brick and stone, has ever surpassed it.
'Layers' I'm missing the view from the top of Glastonbury Tor so here is one from a few weeks ago on a misty morning. Hopefully not too much longer before I can make it back up there.