Becket's Well, Northamptonshire, England, UK

See for yourself: Google Street View direct link

I've spent a lot of time lately looking at various towns and cities in the UK, and I noticed that many of them have major roads encircling the city center. In many cases, these roads mark out roughly where the old city walls once stood, back in the days when having a wall was generally a good idea. If a city has a road pattern like this and one or more of the roads radiating out from the center is called Somethinggate, then chances are you're looking at where the city walls once stood. In some of these places (Coventry, for example) there are gates still standing, even if nothing else is left of the original wall.

While exploring Northampton, I found a road called "Derngate".  Naturally, I followed it out to where it intersects the street which follows the old wall. Derngate continued on from there as Bedford Road.  I didn't see anything that looked quite like a gate, but I did find this intriguing structure about a hundred feet away.

At first, looking at it from this angle, I thought it might be a
very small gate for foot-traffic, but it didn't look quite right -
plus, it was facing the wrong direction. 

A bit closer now. Definitely not a gate, and clearly built
much more recently.

Looks almost like a shrine, but no religious iconography.
Some sort of memorial, perhaps?

It took me a while to track this one down. I finally learned that it's called Becket's Well, for Saint Thomas à Becket, who was imprisoned in Northampton Castle in 1164 and escaped. This structure was built in 1843 to preserve the spring (which used to be in the middle of the carriageway), but it's been called "Becket's Well" or "St. Thomas Well" for centuries.

The following excerpt from "The History and Antiquities of Northamptonshire" in the London Quarterly Review, 1857, proves that a snobbish distaste for "modern" architectural fads is nothing new!

This video provides a much clearer look at the drawings on the wall. I don't know about the claim that Becket took Bedford Road when he was being taken for trial. There weren't all that many roads into and out of the town at that time, so it's certainly a possibility, but it also sounds like the kind of local urban legend a tour guide might rattle off.

Introduction

I'm addicted. It's terrible, I know, but it could be worse.

I'm a web developer and a mom with 4 kids at home. I also enjoy reading (SF/F and historical fiction mainly), singing (especially filk music), and, on occasion, writing. 

Oh, and travel. I love traveling. I grew up in a family that traveled every chance we got. I want to travel all the time. I also have 4 kids, a full-time job, and a husband who does not enjoy exploring new places and getting lost as much as I do.

See the problem here?   I do get to indulge myself once in a while, but nowhere near enough to satisfy my wanderlust.

Enter Google Maps Street View.  Want to know what it's like standing inside the Roman Coliseum or Stonehenge? Well, there you go. These two top tourist attractions are the exception, rather than the rule, in that you can actually use Street View to go inside and look around, but any seasoned traveler knows that the real joy in visiting a new city comes from walking the streets and exploring the lesser-known places, and that's where Stre... (You know what? I'm just going to call it SV from now on.) That's where SV excels, at least in those places where it's available, and they're adding new locations all the time. They're even adding a portion of the Great Coral Reef later this year.

Is SV as good as being there? Hell, no! For one thing, in most cases the camera is mounted on a pole on top of a vehicle being driven around, so it gives you a good idea of what everything would like if you were 7 or 8 feet tall. For another, it works so well once you get used to it that when you bump into one of the limitations (like not being able to walk right up to the Palace at Versailles), it's a bit disconcerting, not to mention disappointing. And, of course, you don't get movement, sound or smells. So no, it's not like being there at all.

Still, it's better than a sharp stick in the eye, as my husband likes to say. It goes a long way toward satisfying my urge to explore - and now we get to the reason for this blog.

When I'm exploring, I'll often come across an interesting building or structure and want to know more about it. With SV, I can indulge my curiosity almost immediately. (Google's working on ways to do that in real life, but I'm not holding my breath for augmented-reality glasses under the tree this year.) I've stumbled upon some places with what I consider to be fascinating histories. With the help of Wikipedia and a myriad other websites, I'm able to learn far more about a place than any tour guide could tell me.

I've started this blog as a place to share screencaps and information about some of the interesting spots I find - usually by accident. I'll also post some tips and tricks I've learned to improve the SV experience. I hope there are others out there as geeky as I am about this sort of thing.