Yarnbury Castle TP7095 - a quick bag off the A303 if anyone is interested. Best approached from the lane to the east in a 4x4. As you can see it was pretty windy up there which was a warm up for the Beijing blasts we faced later that week.
Governing Council was fine. On the Tuesday afternoon we had some site visits so a group of us visited the Bird's Nest. What an iconic building. We had a tour guide but unfortunately she hadn't been sufficiently briefed on who we were so we had the standard tour. What most of us were really keen to know was how the building was designed, built, maintained etc.
There were signs around depicting some of this information but surprisingly, considering this is now a tourist attraction, all the signs were in Chinese only. A missed opportunity me thinks.
Conference was Wed and Thurs morning. Lovely to meet up with so many geomatics colleagues.
On Thursday afternoon, Gethin Roberts, Ken Hall and myself headed off for our geomatics treat - a trip to Beijing's Old Observatory. It was built in 1442 and is one of the oldest observatories in the world.
Most of the 'relics' there have been moved to the Purple Mountain Observatory but there are some originals (just a bit hard to spot). Anyway, I'm always very at home amongst sundails, sextants, orbs, armillaries etc.
The Chinese were awesome astronomers, mathematicians etc working out the length of the day to over 5 decimal places of a day with great accuracy whilst us Europeans were wandering around in the Dark Ages.
Plenty to see (and more photos here).
How's this for an awesome skyline?
And, yes, it was windy!
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