Trinity Cathedral, Columbia, SC

Front Door

Our house, close to the middle of our street, built in 1934 for a mother and her daughter's family. An over and under double residence, it was designed by Swedish-born architect J. Carroll Johnson.

Roseneath Farm

The old home place, once a farm, now in the middle of the small town that grew around it. The house was built in 1919 by a timber man, who, from his tree farms, picked the pines to be used in its construction. My grandparents moved there in 1934. My mother lives there today.

My grandmother named the place Roseneath Farm after the peninsula in Scotland from which her g-great grandmother, Catherine Campbell had come. A highly romanticized account of Catherine Campbell's immigration and life in the New World is given in Gerald Johnson's By Reason of Strength. Johnson was a cousin of my grandmother's, and took a few liberties with Catherine's lineage. Though the book has Catherine as the daughter of the Duke of Argyle, in fact her origins were more humble, closer to those of the family into which my grandmother married, the McLeods. I told a bit of that story in a previous post titled Over the Sea to Skye.

Paris, the Dordogne, and Bordeaux 2017

Paris 

Hotel view overlooking courtyard

Hotel view overlooking Rue du Faubourg du Temple and Place de la République

From beneath the Eiffel Tower

Sarlat

Hotel view overlooking Rue des Cordiliers and Place de la Petite Rigaudie

          




Medieval buildings in Sarlat

Bordeaux

Hotel view looking northwest from Rue de Montesquieu

Statue of Francisco Goya in the Place du Chapelet

Roman Ruins at the end of Rue du Colisée

Almost Heaven

Went to Maryland/ Virginia/ West Virginia for a wedding this past weekend.  It is a beautiful area with an endless density of villages and historic structures.

Potomac River and Highway 15 bridge from Point of the Rocks, looking southwest. This is just east of Harper's Ferry and along the historic route of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.

From the porch of King Street Coffee in Leesburg, VA, looking north.

Wedding venue at The Barn at York Hill. The farm is still run by the same family that established it in the mid-eighteenth century. Originally a tobacco farm, it converted to hay production in the early nineteenth century. The barn sketched above was built in 1812 for hay storage. Vertical slits in the stone walls aerated the hay to prevent heat build up and spontaneous combustion. The wedding reception was held inside the barn, and the narrow slits letting in daylight had an almost modern effect.

The farm today is a productive apple and peach orchard and small vineyard.

  

Inside the barn during toasts.

Another flight home