Going to be a bit of a short one today as it was a bit of a personal day. One side of my family is from the Chester area, so naturally I have some ancestors buried here. Today’s main objective was to visit some of the churchyards in the area and see if I could find their graves. For the most part I succeeded, but it’s not really the sort of thing I want to write about publicly. Fortunately, I have a couple of nice photos of the churches to share, and I did do one other thing today – visit the Chester Military Museum. 

Housed inside Chester Castle, the Museum chronicles the formation of the Cheshire Regiments in the late 1600’s, and the battles they’ve been involved in in the centuries since, right up to the present day. One of the regiments associated with the museum is the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, who counted among their members Capt. Lawrence Oates. Oates served with the Guards during the Second Boer War, but is more famously known as being part of Robert Falcon Scott’s expedition to the South Pole in 1910. The expedition was, in short, a disaster. Amundsen had beaten them to the Pole, and the entire expedition perished on the return journey.  According to Scott’s diary, Oates, suffering from severe frostbite, told the remaining members “I am just going outside and may be some time” and walked out into a blizzard, sacrificing himself in the hope that the others, no longer slowed down by his wounds, would survive. Though his sacrifice was in vain, his final act, and especially his final words, have become known as a fine example of the ‘stiff upper lip’ British mentality. 

After the museum it was back to the hotel to pack – tomorrow I’m on the train to Inverness, and finally back into Scotland!