Photo Sunday: London

I’m home again after my swing through the U.K., and I’ve finally had time to go through all the pictures I took. Here are a few of the best from our first few days in London:

We got a taste of real English weather on our first day there, but the second day favored us with some sunshine. We walked through Whitehall Gardens in the center of the city near the Thames…

…and then went for a ride on the London Eye.

Looking north along the Thames as we rode the London Eye up.

Westminster Bridge, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, from the top of the Eye.

We also toured the Tower of London. Some of the rooms where enemies of the state were imprisoned had graffiti carved into the walls by their occupants, including this one left by a Catholic priest during one of the periods where the country seesawed back and forth between Catholic and Protestant control. I’m still not clear on how prisoners got access to stonecarving tools.

Tower Bridge, displaying the Paralympics logo.

We took a day trip to Stonehenge. The weather was cold and gloomy, with drizzling rain and gusty wind: perfect, in a way, to contemplate what could have been in the minds of the long-vanished prehistoric people who built it.

More ancient remnants in Great Britain: The ruins of a Roman spa built around the natural hot springs in the town of Bath.

On our last day, we toured the British Museum. Here’s the Enlightenment Gallery, set up to celebrate and recall this age of reason.

Header image credit: geishaboy500, released under CC BY 2.0 license