Day three of our holiday
Today it has been even warmer - 26C/77F - with clear blue skies and sunshine all day.
Today we drove around an hour to visit Audley End, a HUGE house which began it's life as Walden Abbey, but when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in 1538 he gave the building to his loyal supporter, Sir Thomas Audley. He immediately demolished the monastic houses and created an enormous courtyard house. Thomas Howard inherited the house and from around 1605 he remodelled the buildings again (which took until 1614) into one of the most impressive Jacobean houses of the time. Various others have owned the house over time and changed things to suit them (as usual), but it's still an amazing place to visit.
The house that still stands today is only a small part of the original Jacobean building, but still incredibly impressive:
The view from the front of the house across the gardens designed by Capability Brown. Yes, there's a folly in the distance on the right. Brown diverted the River Cam to flow through the landscape...
The view at the back of the house with the Parterre garden
Detail of some of the planting.
Unfortunately we weren't allowed to take photos in the house! It was so frustrating as I'd love to share the amazing plasterwork on the ceilings, the gorgeous artwork and the vast number of rooms. However, I can link you to the English Heritage website which details the timeline (near the bottom of the page) of the house on this page along with some photos right at the bottom of the page of some interiors.
I can also recommend the English Heritage YouTube channel as they have this video about the history of the house with a tour and you can see a lot of what we saw today.
They also have some fantastic short videos called "The Victorian Way" if you want to try out Victorian cookery for yourself which were filmed in the kitchens at Audley end. There is one here about how to make apple crumb pudding. There's also a video to make macaroni and cheese and all kinds of other delicious things!
We really enjoyed the visit and were a bit boggled by amount of art and the fantastic architecture we saw in three hours. By lunchtime it started to feel really hot and we'd been walking for all that time, so after a quick lunch and a find look around, we headed by the AirBnB. This evening we have nothing planned, it's going to be even warmer tomorrow....
Today we drove around an hour to visit Audley End, a HUGE house which began it's life as Walden Abbey, but when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in 1538 he gave the building to his loyal supporter, Sir Thomas Audley. He immediately demolished the monastic houses and created an enormous courtyard house. Thomas Howard inherited the house and from around 1605 he remodelled the buildings again (which took until 1614) into one of the most impressive Jacobean houses of the time. Various others have owned the house over time and changed things to suit them (as usual), but it's still an amazing place to visit.
The house that still stands today is only a small part of the original Jacobean building, but still incredibly impressive:
The view from the front of the house across the gardens designed by Capability Brown. Yes, there's a folly in the distance on the right. Brown diverted the River Cam to flow through the landscape...
The view at the back of the house with the Parterre garden
Detail of some of the planting.
Unfortunately we weren't allowed to take photos in the house! It was so frustrating as I'd love to share the amazing plasterwork on the ceilings, the gorgeous artwork and the vast number of rooms. However, I can link you to the English Heritage website which details the timeline (near the bottom of the page) of the house on this page along with some photos right at the bottom of the page of some interiors.
I can also recommend the English Heritage YouTube channel as they have this video about the history of the house with a tour and you can see a lot of what we saw today.
They also have some fantastic short videos called "The Victorian Way" if you want to try out Victorian cookery for yourself which were filmed in the kitchens at Audley end. There is one here about how to make apple crumb pudding. There's also a video to make macaroni and cheese and all kinds of other delicious things!
We really enjoyed the visit and were a bit boggled by amount of art and the fantastic architecture we saw in three hours. By lunchtime it started to feel really hot and we'd been walking for all that time, so after a quick lunch and a find look around, we headed by the AirBnB. This evening we have nothing planned, it's going to be even warmer tomorrow....