Day 56 Chigwell - last day (Sunday 13 May)
After an hour or so of frustration last might, this morning I managed to check in for my flights on Monday night, and to assure myself that the aisle seats promised were indeed mine.
The latest irritation from the BBC website, which persists in using ungrammatical terms (most frequently [countryname] for [countryinhabitant]): how's this for an indecipherable link headline: "Limerist Edward Lear gets plaque"? limerick writer/populariser, thank you. To be quite fair, the actual article is headed "Plaque to honour artist Edward Lear unveiled in London".
A lovely day, as forecast (though a wind got up later), so we went out. inamac took me to Ingatestone Hall (which my brother and I never managed to see when we were last in this district, because it opens so seldom). It didn't open until noon, so we could take our time in the morning: most helpful, after yesterday's exertions. We set out nearer to 2 pm.
It's a 30-minute plus drive, so I saw quite a bit of countryside and village en route. Ingatestone Hall is Elizabethan (the Georgian renovations were carefully removed in the early 20th C), and human-sized. I really liked the fact that it has been restored to what it had been. The family was Catholic when the public servant checking over religious properties for dissolving by Henry VIII arranged to buy the estate and build his own house (obviously a very pragmatic Catholic), and is still Catholic. It also has a history of being useful to the government: the founder got through four reigns before dying peacefully in his bed. Though the house has good water supplies (and a very pleasant garden), fortunately it doesn't have a moat, so ambient temperature is fine (and the house got mains water in the 1990s, wow; their tenants had it long before).
The house has two priest holes (one only discovered when a child's toy fell through the floorboards in the earlier part of the 20th C), but there's little evidence that anything more than mass paraphernalia were (very sensibly) concealed. The priest holes struck me as less claustrophobic than some I've seen, but still… The house is lived in, so we saw not only the tracks of the children's cycles in the mud of the garden walks, but even the odd pair of slippers discarded by a door to a private area. You go through in a tour group (six in ours, which is pretty good); in busier times people can go through by themselves, which would give more time. Maybe another summer. We were able to admire the linenfold panelling in many rooms, and lots of architectural and other details, but there was plenty of other stuff we didn't get a chance to examine carefully. We finished up with a pretty decent cream and strawberry jam and tea-of-choice afternoon tea.
Alas, I am not going to get all of lil_shepherd's Patricia McKillip novels read before I leave here! Next time.
I need, I need, to go to bed!
The latest irritation from the BBC website, which persists in using ungrammatical terms (most frequently [countryname] for [countryinhabitant]): how's this for an indecipherable link headline: "Limerist Edward Lear gets plaque"? limerick writer/populariser, thank you. To be quite fair, the actual article is headed "Plaque to honour artist Edward Lear unveiled in London".
A lovely day, as forecast (though a wind got up later), so we went out. inamac took me to Ingatestone Hall (which my brother and I never managed to see when we were last in this district, because it opens so seldom). It didn't open until noon, so we could take our time in the morning: most helpful, after yesterday's exertions. We set out nearer to 2 pm.
It's a 30-minute plus drive, so I saw quite a bit of countryside and village en route. Ingatestone Hall is Elizabethan (the Georgian renovations were carefully removed in the early 20th C), and human-sized. I really liked the fact that it has been restored to what it had been. The family was Catholic when the public servant checking over religious properties for dissolving by Henry VIII arranged to buy the estate and build his own house (obviously a very pragmatic Catholic), and is still Catholic. It also has a history of being useful to the government: the founder got through four reigns before dying peacefully in his bed. Though the house has good water supplies (and a very pleasant garden), fortunately it doesn't have a moat, so ambient temperature is fine (and the house got mains water in the 1990s, wow; their tenants had it long before).
The house has two priest holes (one only discovered when a child's toy fell through the floorboards in the earlier part of the 20th C), but there's little evidence that anything more than mass paraphernalia were (very sensibly) concealed. The priest holes struck me as less claustrophobic than some I've seen, but still… The house is lived in, so we saw not only the tracks of the children's cycles in the mud of the garden walks, but even the odd pair of slippers discarded by a door to a private area. You go through in a tour group (six in ours, which is pretty good); in busier times people can go through by themselves, which would give more time. Maybe another summer. We were able to admire the linenfold panelling in many rooms, and lots of architectural and other details, but there was plenty of other stuff we didn't get a chance to examine carefully. We finished up with a pretty decent cream and strawberry jam and tea-of-choice afternoon tea.
Alas, I am not going to get all of lil_shepherd's Patricia McKillip novels read before I leave here! Next time.
I need, I need, to go to bed!