Rattling On...

Here be Quakers...

On the way back from Cambridge I decided to take a detour and visit Wisbech as there was a National trust house I fancied a look at, Peckover House.

It was a little on the tricky side to find, but well worth it I thought.

It's quite a compact house but there's plenty to see, as usual I liked the cellar kitchens and also the stables with tack room.

The tea rooms are at the end of the garden and there's a rather touching pet cemetery under some big old trees.

The house is in a row of similar Georgian properties, definitely in the good end of town. I went for a stroll around Wisbech itself and it was a bit of an eye-opener. Not what I expected at all. But then that's true of a lot of places these days.

I took out the National Trust membership for another year after deliberating over it for some time. Even the two new places we've been so far probably cover the cost. I bought some memberships as Christmas presents last year and they were very well received, so if you're stuck for a gift it's a good possibility for anyone who likes rooting round interesting places.

I'm struggling to get back into a routine with the blogging, I'm not sure why this is. But it'll come eventually, or it won't!

Curves...

More Kedleston Hall, and tody some rather gorgeous curves. The house has crescent shaped wings on it, or at least that's how it seemed.

The floorboards were beautifully cut to echo the curve. It would have been so much easier, I imagine, to simply lay them the other way round and spare the work. But it was worth the effort.

Even the doors in the half-moon alcoves are curved, this must be very difficult to do. Unless you live here and the average softwood front door looks like that after its first winter!

The doors are all beautiful, if you like that sort of thing. Even the back bits that have the hinges on them are curved and not flat. They roll into place. Magnificent.

I am not here today and for a couple more days. I've taken the opportunity to have a break. Somewhere with lots to see. A few days R & R. So if your comments don't appear for a while you'll know why, I may not even take the computer, I haven't decided yet! Meanwhile there will be ghost posts with more KH pictures.

How the other half lives...

This is one of the formal staircases at Kedleston Hall. Very elegant with nice shallow steps so the gentry wouldn't have to strain themselves getting upstairs in all their corseted finery.

Contrast it with one of the servants' staircases.

Spartan to say the least. But mercifully still shallow steps as the poor servants were corseted as well as probably knackered at the end of an average day.

I think it's splendid in its simplicity, but the most interesting part (for me at least) needed to be looked down on.

Look how many times the steps have been repaired over the 260 odd years since they were put there. That's some serious climbing, and the repairs were getting worn down as well. I found myself wondering how many times a day a single servant, say a housemaid, would have had to climb up to the top of the house. Probably carrying coal, laundry or cleaning tools. Not to mention the water that was hauled upstairs before plumbing was invented.

These days we probably wear out a stair carpet over the course of a lifetime, we don't get down to the wood. How lucky we are.

Duchess for a day...

If you've seen the film The Duchess you may recognise where we went yesterday. Kedleston Hall, which stood in for Chatsworth in the film. Due to the terrible weather the river was very high and racing along.

You notice the similarity to Chatsworth as soon as you arrive, even the drive up to the house is reminiscent.

In the entrance hall the four massive fireplaces contained crackling fires and it was surprisingly warm. I've often wondered how those mansions fared in cold weather. Basically, if you light big fires all over the show it does the trick.

Here's just a little tour...

The bathroom was put in for a visit by the King in the 1920s, he slept in the rather impressive four poster with the feather dusters on top. I think most people these days would be dismayed to have an ensuite that is so spartan, but it was the height of modernity once upon a time. The tiles are like little pieces of glass.

The disappointing part of the visit for me was that we only went round the impressive showy parts of the house and not any 'downstairs' rooms. I asked a guide about this and he explained that the tour we did was almost exactly the one that would have been offered to visitors in the 18th century. Think Elizabeth Bennett turning up at Mr Darcy's crib and wanting a lookie round. They just showed her the good bits.

The old kitchens and scullery are now the restaurant, which is very good. The blue theme, which is all over the house, continues even in there. It could be considered either classy or a bit too much, the jury's out on that.

There's also a lovely little church that dates back to the 17th century but I'll save that for another post. Good to see even a stately home could do with the windows cleaning.

In fact there are a few interesting little things I've decided to save for other posts. The weather is so bad (hailstoning today) that photo opportunities are few and far between!

Written in stone...

Hard to believe that almost 350 years ago these lovely little cottages were the scene for so much suffering.

Several of the cottages have plaques outside detailing the losses in 1665/66, they're lived in now of course and it seems intrusive to stand and take pictures, though I'm sure it just comes with the territory.

During the time the plague struck Eyam was isolated and food etc was left outside the village at a boundary stone. The graves are also outside the village, rather than in the churchyard. Interestingly the gravedigger survived despite being in close and prolonged contact with the bacterium. Roughly a quarter of the residents were left standing, and amongst these there was found to be a significant incidence of a specific gene resistant to the plague.

St Lawrence church , with its natty blue clock face, has a fascinating graveyard. If, that is, like me you are fascinated by that kind of thing.

I like a bit of freestyling in a graveyard, adds character and style (the large cross is 8th century Celtic). Here in town you have to have a uniform size and colour, no statues, angels, books or crosses, just a plain grey rectangle. It's very disappointing to find this out when you want to have something else, as I know from personal experience.

I agree things should be subtle, but really why should there be such draconian rules? No need for church yards to be gloomy places, hopefully people go there to celebrate and remember good things as well as mourn. Maybe you have different views?

It's a beautiful day here, which is incredible luck as there's a Spring Fair on all over town. There will be stalls in the streets for heavens' sakes, what is the world coming to? We are almost modern. I'm hoping someone will be selling plants as I feel the need to plant things in some bare spots. 

I've been gardening like a mad woman, partly on the basis that I can consider it a free gym workout, partly as the garden was over-run with the usual weedy culprits. Three wheelie bins of butter burr roots have gone to composting heaven, consider that amount. They took some sweat to remove, and still the damn things rear their nasty little heads by the pond.

Such takes the form of my own personal pergutory.

A 17th Century day out...

I have been busy, very busy this past week. Which is the reason (excuse?) for the dearth of blogging. I also dropped and broke my phone. The one where everything from phone numbers and passwords to appointments is carefully stored. A right royal, fur lined, ocean going pain in the unmentionables. Oh and I went on a course, to Rotherham.

But first... Last weekend (I told you I'd been busy) we went to Eyam Hall, not far from home and somewhere we've been several times before. But now it's being run by the National Trust and entry is free to members, so we thought we'd go and see if anything had changed.

The house was lived in until very recently and it's a strange conglomeration of very old and very new, you can sit in the fitted kitchen the family used!

The floors are sloping and incredibly creaky upstairs.

Thw walls are hung with tapestries and the wood is dark without being gloomy

I love windows in old houses, and this was built in 1671- the windows don't disappoint, they even have 18th century graffiti scratched on them

 

The National Trust have started work on the garden, it looks like it may be a cross between formal and cottage, bits of each. The espaliered apple trees against the old, old walls were possibly my favourite things there. I can't get enough of old walls and I love the way nature can be trained a little to give pleasing form to a garden. The French have this down to a fine art in public spaces as well as gardens.

Tomorrow I'll show you the plague cottages and the graveyard. I know how to live it up...

The Apprentice, Victorian style.

Following on from yesterday comes the Apprentice House. This is up a steep hill from the mill itself, which seems like a cruel turn of fate, having to haul yourself up there at the end of a hard day, clogs scraping on the road.

There's a working garden and outbuildings that house the produce, this is pretty much how the garden has always been.

You go into the house via the schoolroom, which was cosy and warm on our visit, I'm not sure a real Victorian tutor would be so welcoming and smiley.

Then you go upstairs straight into what was the boys' dormitory...

Sixty boys slept in here, which to my reckoning is at least three to a bed. Spartan is the only word that springs to mind.

Back down the other set of stairs into the small and cosy kitchen...

It was difficult to get in this part as there were loads of people crowded round the coal fire warming themselves. It was a roarer and very welcome.

Out side the back door were the less cosy aspects of a Victorian kitchen...

And no farm kitchen is complete without the mouser...

Take a look at that ear. This one takes no prisoners!

The miller's tale...

Today we went on a sort of festive National Trust day out. Quarry Bank Mill was having its Victorian Christmas day and the weather was absolutely beautiful when we got there.

This mill is a perfect example of what the Industrial Revolution was all about. getting this...

To this...

But before you get to the heavy machinery there's a little gentle introduction to cotton spinning the 1700s way.

Bearing in mind what my own spun wool looked like the other week, look how fine this thread is. The woman was turning the wheel with one hand and pulling the roll of cotton and everything else with the other. Oh, and giving an explanation as well. She made it look unbelievably easy. Then she moved on to the loom...

She explained that old cloth was narrow as the shuttles have to be thrown across by hand, thus determining how wide the loom could be- arms' reach. If you wanted broad cloth then two people had to operate a wider loom.

This was, of course, until We invented the spinning jenny and that led to all manner of things like this...

There are also mock-ups of mill workers' cottages.

And at the end there's the mule room. This was the notorious loom that so many children were maimed or killed servicing. It looks so innocent.

There's also lots of interesting machinery for those of us who like industrial stuff, and a magnificent water wheel that powered the whole mill.

I know mills were dirty, dangerous and exploititive places (have you watched this excellent drama?), so noisy everyone went deaf, so dusty everyone's lungs gave up eventually.

But today the rhythm and throb of the odd machines that are on for visitors to see is very soothing (cloth is still spun on these at a rate of five metres an hour), or at least I found it so. Because of modern extraction and lighting it didn't seem so threatening, or maybe we just don't want to imagine the horror of being a small child scrabbling round under a loom fast enough to get out before we were crushed in the rollers.

Tomorrow I'll show you the other part of the visit, the Apprentice House, where the small boys who were destined to work the mill lived.