Sunday 22 February 2015

Day 53: The Tower ravens

L(a) is finishing her revision and asked for some willing volunteers to visit The Tower of London and be guided. My tube decides to malinger so I miss the meeting time and wander around, in out out if various buildings waiting for the party to emerge and keeping an eye out for the ravens. It's a miserable day, relentless rain and the ravens are sensibly taking shelter. I'm doing the same sitting on a bench against one of the ancient walls thankfully under a stone arcade. I'm looking up a the white tower silhouetted against the bland sky and I espy one of the elusive ravens perched on top of one of the large cage averies. Luckily it remains there long enough to capture a rather gothic shot.

There purports to be six ravens plus one spare living at the Tower. I spotted two on Tower Green overlooking where some of the infamous beheadings took place. Henry VIII anyone? The ones on the green are very puffed up and look rather indignant by the inclement weather. One is close enough to be identified as Hugin, or Hugine as she turned out to be female. I'm not sure if the raven I spotted earlier has followed me to the green or these are two new ones. There's also a crow strutting around, looking so small compared to his pampered cousins.

When I finally make contact with the rest of the group, we head into the crown jewels again. We are not supposed to take photographs inside but on my first pass through I'm surprised to see a lot of camera phones out. I did try and grab a few shots of the sparkly stuff whilst we travelled on the conveyor belt but the guards spotted me, round on me and sternly asked for me to remove them from my camera. Whoops! I'm guess I'm lucky they didn't lock me in the tower.

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