G & J away from home

Friday, 5 June

This morning we headed back to Sheila's for our planned outing and while we were having a cup of tea before we left Sheila showed us her father's photos from when he was in China in the late 1930s with the RAF.

Sheila's photos

Next door in the kitchen Gavin was getting his cakes ready to deliver and while I watched he decorated this one with melted white chocolate:

Gavin's cake

When we headed out Sheila was our onboard navigator and directed us first for a drive around Sutton Park (absolutely huge!) and then off towards Baddesley Clinton.  On the drive we passed this Spitfire sculpture which commemorates the building of Spitfires in the area:

Spitfire Corner

And then we reached the Baddesley Clinton moated manor house, now run by the National Trust. This house remained in the ownership of the same family, the Ferrars, for 500 years.  Walking across the moat and under the entrance to the courtyard (building on three sides and moat on the fourth).

View of the house from the entrance

The house was lovely, full of low beams and wood paneled rooms or reasonable proportions so that we could imagine a family having lived there for generation after generation.  In the windows throughout the house were details of family marriages in stained glass in the original windows.

The marriages of the family recorded in the windows

Gary found a portrait of Robert Deveraux  (or as it is captioned elsewhere in the house: Portrait of an Unknown Man, miscalled Robert Devereux) and here's a photo of him admiring it in one of the larger rooms in the house.

Gary in the great room

Even this biggest room in the house was on a useful scale, possibly not as big as some open plan living areas in modern houses, and much more believably liveable than, for instance, the library at Alnwick Castle.

The cosy great room

I took lots of photos as I wandered around - and it was great to be able to do so.  At Alnwick Castle no photos could be taken in the state rooms which was a terrible pity as the ceilings were beautiful and I would have liked to have been able to study them, but here the only limitation was that flashes were not to be used.  Of course, because of this many of my photos were a bit fuzzy.

Windows over-looking the courtyard

Another favourite room was the library, with its comfy armchairs and old books.  Again it looked like the sort of room real people could live in - and of a size that the fireplace could actually keep warm.

The library

On the way down the stair I snapped this photo of Gary checking his head wound - caused by the second doorway he encountered in the house.  The door behind him shows exactly what the problem was - Gary is tall and the doorways were ... not.

Gary's sore head

After Baddesley Clinton we stopped at the town of Knowle, which (apart from the three op shops we had to check out) boasts a library houses in a Tudor building.  How wonderful!

The library at Knowle

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