Highclere Castle – Battle Proms

Highclere Castle Battle Proms is an event that definitely shouldn’t be missed! Unless perhaps it’s raining, which luckily it wasn’t yesterday evening! Enjoying live music, live air displays and fireworks with over 9,000 other people is quite something else!

Highclere Castle is known more famously as Downton Abbey as this was where the series was mostly filmed. It’s a beautiful setting, and one that’s very hard to get close to these days given the increased popularity.

I’ve been lucky enough to have the site on my door step, give or take twenty minutes! And therefore can recall lots of trips when I was younger, to the Battle Proms or to the various castle exhibitions that were being held there. But I’ve never had the photography interest before, coupled with a gorgeous sunset and night time lighting!

It was well worth the ticket cost, to be able to sit in the sunshine and enjoy music and good company (we didn’t take wine glasses like the image above though!) and just in general relax after a tough week at work!

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Day 368: (Really 364) Stonehenge

“Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I’ll tell you that.”
― Bill Bryson

What better way to -almost- round the 365 blog off by visiting Stonehenge, starting the new year with cold ears and a gust of wind – blowing away the cobwebs! It’s the penultimate day of the 365 challenge, and I’m almost ready to hang up the daily blogging hat – almost!

Stonehenge is so accessible to me, that I’m surprised I haven’t used it more throughout the past year. It’s literally a ten minute or so drive down the motorway, and as you crest the hill and look down on the stones – is the most awe inspiring view within easy reach. In my opinion anyway.

I used to pop there all the time, capturing the stones in the morning or at night, when the sun is setting or when it’s pouring with rain. I’ve wandered around them with friends, family, on my own and with lots of random tourists…but I hadn’t gone at all in 2012!

So there we go. It’s an incredible sight, and if you go on a day like today, (the first day of sunshine since before Christmas Eve) then it’s nice and quiet and beautiful all at the same time. I was surprised it was even open, but glad that it was.

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