Fun and Fiends!

My friend Wendy has been visiting England, and we'd arranged to meet up and for her to vist me for the first 2 days of her trip, so last Sunday I met her at Heathrow, and we drove back to Wiltshire via Stonehenge and Avebury.

It was very, very cold - there was snow on the ground when I got up, and it kept trying to snow on us all day.

We had a bracing walk around some of the stones at Avebury, then visited the Manor,which has recently been done up by the National Trust, by reproducing (rather than preserving) furniture and fittings, and have arranged different rooms as they may have been at different periods, ranging from a Tudor Hall and Bedroom, to a 1939 living room (complete with zebra-skin chair, and cocktail-shakers.)

Tudor Bedroom, Avebury Manor

Because almost everything is reproduction rather than  original (things like the fireplaces, the ceilings and plasterwork etc are original), visitors are encouraged to touch and try - I didn't lie on the Tudor style four-poster because it has a feather mattress, and I am allergic to feathers, but I could have done, had I wished!

They have a tea-shop in the library, too, where Wendy was able to sample her first English cream tea :-) And we were both able to warm up enough to escape hypothermia. There were some very *bracing* breezes going on out among the stones..

And then, after visiting the Avebury museum (small; contains a lot of flint axes) back to my house, to defrost ourselves a little more.

More Gardens, and More Tea

We found that, sadly, the weather forecasters continued to be correct, so on Tuesday we mostly stayed indoors and read, although we did have a brief, damp, walk during the afternoon, and a trip to go ringing and to the pub in the evening.

Wednesday was scheduled to be showery, so we decided to go to Arlington Court, which is another National Trust property, on the basis that between the house, the Carriage Museum, and the Gardens, we should be able to dodge the worst of the rain, which we duly did

Victorian Garden, Arlington Court

 Arlington was the home of the Chichester family, the last of whom was a very eccentric maiden lady who lived there for over 50 years, and who kept a pet parrot which was allowed free range of the house, and destroyed much of the plasterwork of the ceilings!

 

The house has a large collection of model ships, the earliest being ones made by French prisoners of war, during the Napoleonic wars, the latest being models of the family's own yacht, and the 'Gypsy Moth' in which Sir Francis Chichester (Who was a member of the same Chichester family, but a cousin, not one of the owners of Arlington) became the first person to sail single-handedly around the world.

We also spent some time in the Carriage museum,  looking at the various carriages, all of which were most impressive, but didn't look, even the best of them, as though they would have been very comfortable to travel in!                                                          

We also met some of the horses (Percherons and Shires) which they keep to give horse-and-cart rides at weekends, and (Naturally) visited the tea-rooms, where we found a coffee cake of truly epic proportions and delectable flavour, just as the heavens opened and it poured with rain.                                                      

I think we got the last available seats before the surge of people getting in out of the rain!

As I am leaving on Friday morning, I had made a request to bring forward Sunday lunch, so the day ended with Sunday roast - local beef, accompanied by Yorkshire pudding, local runner beans and carrots and a very nice bottle of red wine, followed by a floating lemon pudding.

All in all, a most satisfactory day!

In Which There Are Friends, And Tea

I love Bank Holidays, especially this one, which for some reason crept up on me and felt, as a result, lke an unexpected gift.

And a second pleasure, a couple of weeks ago E, a friend of mine from university, got in touch to say she'd be visiting the area with her hsband this week, and suggested we meet up. Which I felt was a perfectly splendid idea. We don't see each other often enough.

We met in Bradford on Avon, which is a lovely little town, and has what may be the country's best tea shop. Having successfully rendez-voused, we started with a quick wander down to the Tithe Barn, and into the various little shops selling charming frivolities, then walked back along by the river, up into the town (Mainly to point out the bookshop, which was closed for the bank holiday but will no doubt be a point of call for E when it is open tomorrow...) and went into The Bridge Tea Rooms, which is one of my favourite places to go as a treat.

It's a "Victorian" tea-room - full of knick-knacks, old, sepia toned photographs and suchlike, with open fires and waitresses in mob-caps, in a 17th Century building, and it serves glorious teas - by which I mean both leaf tea (they have a selection of over 30, including white & green teas), and afternoon tea. They even provide sugar-tongs, for those wishing to preserve properly genteel Victorian manners.

On this occasion, as it was three in the afternoon and we had not lunched, we decided to really indulge ourselves and ordered the "Prince Albert's Tea" which provided sandwiches, scones* & cake, served on a three-tier cake stand.

Which gave us the opportunity to settle down for a long chat (and, as it happened, to avoid the ferocious hailstorm which interrupted the mostly-sunny afternoon.

And then (having eaten to excess) we went for another amble along by the canal.

A most enjoyable afternoon.

[*It should have been meriengues, not scones but we don't much like meriengues, and they let us substitute the scones) ]