A house, just to the left of the blue oak leaf & house icons middle right on the illustration left, with a famous landscaped garden with lakes stretching from there to the left. Complete with a fine range of classical follies, follies which are not at all like the sort of thing that the heir to the throne has in his Gloucestershire garden. These last being things which an 18th century Whig would have been appalled by.
The garden had been contrived in the bottom of the valleys which contain the head waters of the River Stour - hence the name of the house - waters which flow south, eventually making their way to Christchurch and joining the River Avon just before they get to Christchurch harbour, just behind the Hengistbury Head on which I used to climb during the course of family holidays in and around Bournemouth. And which now seems very much smaller than it did when I was a child.
A garden arranged, as it were with rings. Beech woods on the crests of the hills above the valleys, lakes on the bottoms, arranged on various levels, and gardens in between. The gardens being mainly notable for the rhododendrons in the spring and the exotic pines all year round. There were some western cedars which were particularly striking, a bit like outsize inverted umbrellas. At least I remember them being called such, but google talks about western red cedars as large, single trunked forest trees, whereas these had half a dozen or so subsidiary trunks springing from the roots of the main trunk, this last not always being present.
A house with a lot of fancy plaster & paintwork and a lot of not very good pictures. One rather amusing room containing, inter alia, a number of semi-naked girls on the walls, all very fluffy and tasteful, with someone clearly having had a taste for this sort of thing, nicely complemented by a photograph on the desk of one of the daughters of the house, done up St. Trinian's style with a rather short skirt.
A newish café, a simple pitched roof affair, not like the fancy glass affair at Anglesey Abbey at all.
Lunch at the 'Spread Eagle' pub (see reference 1) which seems to be part of the estate, along with the quite old parish church and some estate cottages. A decent tomato soup followed by a substantial ham sandwich. Ham adequate rather than good and I failed to get them to dispense with all the trimmings. Good service, although we got into a great old muddle when it turned out that someone had paid our bill rather than his own - a rather careless someone as our bill was half as much again as his.
A well stocked second hand book shop (far superior to that at Polesden Lacey), where I was glad to pick up two volumes of the memoirs of the Comtesse de Boigne, something to do with an Irish adventurer in the French service, reporting from the second half of the 18th century to the first half of the 19th. So far lots of pleasant anecdotes about the silly goings on in the dying days of the ancien régime. No wonder they got chucked out. Sturdy, properly bound paperback from Mercure de France. I think what they call broché, not something we do over here.
Unusually for a National Trust place, unusual at least in my experience, not very keen on dogs, which are only allowed at certain times and then only on short leads. We could only think that the garden experience being essentially a fairly narrow path around the lakes, dogs would be a pain for the people who did not own them.
Reference 1: http://www.spreadeagleinn.com/.
Group search key: stb.
No comments:
Post a Comment