The school buildings were at the top of the park, with the hall itself on the crest of the slope looking down to a large lake. Beyond that suburban housing and the M23, with the odd plane going in or out of Gatwick.
Through the hall to collect our tickets from what we took to be parents on volunteer duty, then out onto the terrace and down into the gardens, where there were indeed some snowdrops although not as many as we had been expecting. It turns out that the gardens and park had been rather neglected for some years and were only now being brought back to something like the original intentions. With the park as a whole showing its age with rather a lot of rather old trees.
But while there might have been fewer snowdrops than expected, they did manage a bed full of winter aconites - which have not come up in our garden at all and which do not seem to have done very well in Hampton Court (on which matter I shall be further reporting in due course). Their ponds also had plenty of duckweed - unlike our own ponds in which the stuff has mostly died back for the winter. Or to be more precise, sunk to the bottom in the form of spores or seeds or something, ready to surface when the weather improves.
Through the gardens and the rather more elaborate willow weaving than I had managed on my allotment before I abandoned it, and down the slope to the large lake, off the right hand side of the snap above, through the horse paddocks, with rather more horses than the grass could decently support. A common failing with suburban horses.
Down the western edge of the big lake to the pretty small lake, the main subject of the snap above, called the Serpentine, running north west, vaguely back towards the big house, rather ugly from the bottom of the slope. A bit of a barrack block perched on the top of the hill - on which Pevsner does one of his slightly pompous hatchet jobs - which made me think of the Professor Ullman whom we saw in a Morse recently. Perhaps that was the idea of the adaptor.
Some handsome pine trees on the way back up to the house. Passed on tea & cake voluntarily and passed on the church - described by Pevsner as a museum of a Grand Tour - involuntarily - which was a pity as others have said the interior was well worth a visit. A pocket church, more or less the private property of the owner of the Hall, complete with a covered way between the two so that he did not get wet on his way to Divine Service. There was also a pocket town hall, perhaps a Whig joke about what fun it was to have a Gatton Hall with two members of Parliament and more or less no electors.
We shall be back.
I thought that the place had the smell of a special school, that is to say a residential school catering for children with special needs - something which the people we asked denied. However, the admissions policy inspected later talks of priority being given to 'any child who has a statement of Special Educational Needs or Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP)', which I believe is the current jargon for special needs. I suppose there is a fine line to be drawn between promoting the image of a normal school with normal aspirations & expectations and explaining that a proportion, perhaps a large proportion, of the pupils do in fact have special needs - particularly when, as I understand it, current policy favours integration rather than segregation. I imagine that the head of such a place needs - and no doubt has - special qualities.
Reference 1: http://www.gattonpark.com/.
Reference 2: http://www.raa-school.co.uk/.
Group search key: gpa.
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