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Shere is a very pretty old world village, and is used for movie shoots all the time!  You may recognize the pub (the White Horse Pub is an actual place) from The Holiday.  Brigit Jones Diary (the second one) was also filmed here, with heavy emphasis on St James Church. 

Off we went in our car, letting Google Maps directions lead us on the way, with Randy doing the driving and our friends accompanying us.  Such lovely countryside, but Google led us down glorified cowpaths to get there!  There were several miles of one lane roads.  When a car came the other way we had to find a spot to pull in off the road so they could get by!  As our friend Steve said, it wasn’t the route he would have taken!  Randy stated that Steve would definitely be navigating the return trip!

First we had to find parking.  There doesn’t seem to be public parking lots like we have in Canada, so you have to find on-street parking.  Weirdly, you can park on the side of the road facing oncoming traffic!  So strange!  So we parked on the right side of the road, facing the wrong way and that was perfectly fine!

We strolled down the sidewalk (which is a pavement here, and it was a bit odd, as there would be a section of walking area on one side of the road, and then it would suddenly end, and take up on the other side of the road, so we had to keep crossing back and forth across the road like drunken tourists.)  There were so many beautiful spots and it seemed our friends were determined to take photos of us everywhere! 

We toured St James Church, which is kept open for visitors throughout the week. 

(Sorry for the epic fail in having this photo with proper orientation)

Such history!  That dark onyx coloured engraved stone I'm standing on appears to be a crypt marker.  I think I'm standing on dead people.  It's a strange feeling, but they have them most of the way up the centre aisle of the church!  You can't NOT walk on them!

The current church was built between the 1200’s and the 1300’s, was refurbished in the 1800’s. https://www.parishofshere.com/Groups/322173/Church_Heritage.aspx  Canada is so NEW in comparison; we don’t have anything like it.  Although our friends laugh at how very many towns we have in Canada which are the names of places in England (Whitby, Cornwall, Ajax, of course London, etc etc!) on account of our English settlers back in the day.

There is a cute spot where Nerms said she used to take her kids to feed the ducks.  There were plenty of ducks swimming around there, but I couldn’t tempt them to come closer (apparently they don’t like shortbread.) 

I was taking pictures of this adorable little shop, the Cuckoo Corner on the corner, where the door frame was shorter than I was!  Were people really that short back then?  Apparently!  Also it was done to help retain heat inside the building. 

I thought maybe the boards available for doors were just the cut off ends, so they made the doorway whatever height the cut-offs were, but nope, that wasn’t the reasoning at all.  Anyway, I headed inside to have a peek, and my attention was snagged, by A HAT.  It was a huge sun hat, with sparkly jewels all the way around the brim.  Since I’m a redhead (when I’m not colouring my hair to be blonde) I have a 15 minute tolerance in the sun before I turn into a lobster.  (Also that is how our friends remember me – first seeing me strolling around a resort in Cuba, with a giant sunhat on and some flowy beach cover up on, which they thought looked quite glamourous!  Hahahaha!  All my friends were encouraging me to buy the hat, that this hat was for me!  However, it was gigantic, not something I could slip into my purse or anything, and believe it or not, mid-February in England isn’t quite warm and sunny enough to need me to wear a giant sparkly sunhat!  We were closing in on our tea time, so I enquired about the hours and discovered they were open until 5, so I could come back after tea and possibly pick it up. 

We had reservations at the Dabbling Duck for afternoon tea at 3pm!  Having a proper afternoon tea was on my wish list.  At a cost of 35 pounds per person, I was hopeful it would be hearty enough to be a heavy lunch.

 

Afternoon tea is available in many of the restaurants and hotels pretty much everywhere.  What people are going for is the ambiance, and the ceremony of a proper tea, in the more expensive ones.  Our budget didn’t run high enough for afternoon tea at the Ritz though, (even though the Ritz is featured quite a bit in the movie Notting Hill, and is a fantastic go-to place).  The cost there for an afternoon tea is 100 pounds each!  And if you happen to go on one of the days where they have live music, there is a surcharge of 55 pounds each on top of that!  Yeouch.  I’m sure it would be fabulous, but 155 x 2 people is 310 pounds, which translates to $552 Canadian dollars!!!  For TEA FOR TWO!!!  OMG!!!

Our tea at the Dabbling Duck was absolutely delicious.  There were lots of triangle sandwiches (crustless, of course), in ham with a spicy mustard, devilled egg, and smoked salmon with cream cheese.  Tiny little savory tarts with some type of fruit centre, a pile of scones in plain and in fruit (no, they weren’t raisins, thank goodness!) with clotted cream and jam preserves. !  I think I also have a bit of an addiction to clotted cream!  That is just not something we have in Canada.  It is made by heating milk until the cream rises to the surface and thickens.  Then it is scooped off.  So it isn’t butter, and it isn’t whipped cream, but it is thick and creamy, a bit like a spreadable cream cheese, and it is just subtly sweet.  Mmmmm.  Too bad I can't bring any home with me (Customs would seize it - it is not allowed to come into the country.)

There were also sweets, with little glass cups of tiramasu, meringue rhubarb tarts that looked like little clouds, layered cakes with apricots and pistachios, and macarons in a variety of flavours.  Of course there was tea, in whatever variety you wanted, with a little cup with both white sugar cubes and brown sugar cubes.  I was able to be a child and order a cup of hot chocolate instead of tea, as I have never quite acquired the taste for it. (I know, I know, I’m in England and I don’t like tea!!!)  It came out with a fancy checkerboard pattern on top of the foam.  Soooo good! After eating all we could there were just a few pieces left, and we were able to take them with us.  We were definitely not hungry enough to go into the White Horse pub after, even to see where the Holiday scenes were filmed. 

Part way through the tea, Dan, the son of our friends, said to me “What is that?  There on the floor?”  I looked down, and saw IT WAS A BAG WITH THE SPARKLY HAT!!!!  He was such a sweetheart!  He snuck back into the shop when we left, and bought the hat for me!  So nice, and so generous!  What a great surprise, and he was so stealthy I didn’t see a thing.  When we met our friends we were at a resort in Cuba, and they have made comments about my giant hat.  I’m just trying not to do an impression of a lobster!  But yes, I’m sure my “style” was very different to what they were used to seeing in the UK.  So they thought it was very fitting that I had a new giant hat to remember this holiday by, and to remember that Cuban holiday by as well!  SWEET!

Needless to say, we took a different route home.  One with WIDER roads, with two actual lanes.  Still lots of corners and hills and valleys, but room to meet oncoming traffic without having to get off the road, for the most part!

And no, we didn’t need to eat any dinner that night...  But I’m afraid that now I’m going to have to go searching for new scones recipies, and mine are just not going to compare.