This weekend clan Cooke gathered at a farm at St. Radigunds Abbey, near Dover.  As you can see there were some fabulous ruins of an old medieval monastery that was destroyed by Henry VIII.  I always find ruins rather romantic and poignant, and somehow more interesting than whole buildings.

This pile of bricks is the visible remains of so many different peoples’ stories.  We all have stories and some leave visible reminders, others are less easy to spot.  Everyone is the sum total of their past experiences, and we can read some of these in much the same way as an archaeologist can interpret the history of these ruins. 

If you want to understand who someone is today, then you need to spend a little time ‘excavating’ and studying their past.  It is interesting to wonder what bits of ours might be visible and what story they might tell…

“To excavate is to open a book written in the language that the centuries have spoken into the earth.”