Seaton Delaval Hall, Northumberland

Posted on 9 January 2025 by Katrina

Seaton Delaval Hall is a National Trust property in Northumberland which we visited back in October when we went on a north of England road trip. Parts of the house are really just a shell as there was a fire there in 1822, there was some reconstruction work done but there is no furniture in that part.

The rest of the house is grand though, I liked the staircases, there are two like this one. below. I took this from the bottom looking up.

We walked along this colonnade to get to the habitable part of the house.

Some unusual wall decorations in the shape of mirrors and eyes which reminded me of Elizabeth I’s dress which was embroidered with eyes – and ears too.

There’s a portrait of Henry VIII and …

Catherine Parr is close by.

I think that the National Trust uses the property as a sort of repository for many of their treasures. There are some cabinets like the one below, displaying early porcelain.

Warkworth Castle, Northumberland

Posted on 30 November 2024 by Katrina

So here we are back at Warkworth Castle in Northumberland, it’s a great place to visit but isn’t so accessible for disabled people like many of these places. It’s owned/run by English Heritage, it was owned by the Percy family in Tudor times. You can see my previous post here.

Parts of it are covered but others are open to the elements. I must say that the stonework looks in really good shape.

Below is quite a grand staircase.

But the stairs below aren’t for the faint hearted.

Below is a really lovely part of the castle which is roofed, it’s a sort of ante room and I can imagine people millling about in it chatting, and sitting on the window seats.

I really admire vaulted rooms although I’m always a wee bit nervous of them, I have to remind myself they’ve been good for centuries so are unlikely to fall on me!

I spotted this teeny wee iron lion rampant badge from the bottom of a flight of stairs, it seems to have been set above what looks like a stone sink, but it might have been a cupboard. The lion rampant was the Percy family’s emblem/badge, but is of course better known as Scotland’s emblem.

Below is a view of Warkworth village taken from just outside the castle. It’s a lovely wee place with plenty of eateries, but we were on our way further south so didn’t have much time to spend exploring the place, we spent so much time in the castle.

Hill Top, Beatrix Potter’s Garden, Lake District

Posted on 29 October 2024 by Katrina

The garden at Hill Top isn’t huge and I suspect that the vegetable garden hasn’t changed much over the years, although there are some decorations in it for children to spot. I think that Beatrix used her garden to illustrate some of her books, but most of my Beatrix Potter books had to be put into the paper/cardboard recycling after they were badly water damaged a few years ago, so I can’t compare them with my photos. If you click this link you will see some photos of the garden and house. As you can see from the photo I took back in early September the garden plants to the side of the house were more or less over.

I love the gate below which leads to the walled vegetable garden.

The two photos below were taken from the path which leads out of the property, going towards the shop. So you can have a sit down on one of the benches, if you are that way inclined.

These give you a bit of an idea of the surrounding area but if you click on the National Trust link near the beginning of this post you’ll get more of an idea of what the neighbouring houses look like.

Hill Top, Beatrix Potter’s home – part 2

Posted on 24 October 2024 by Katrina

So here we are upstairs at Hill Top and as you can see this four poster bed is very ancient looking.

There’s also a fireplace in the room so it could be quite cosy, despite the harsh winters in this rural area of northern England.

Below there’s what looks like a Tudor chest to match the bed and lovely drawings of birds on a William Morris wallpaper design.

Hill Top is full of pretty things, Beatrix was a collector although it’s fair to say that it was the fashion to have lots of ‘stuff’ on show. I particularly love that perfect miniature chest of drawers in the photo below.

Another bedroom below.

I now can’t remember which room the photo below was taken in! That’s just about all of the photos that I took, apart from some photos of the things in Beatrix’s display cabinets. There are so many reflections on the glass though, I’ll have to see if I can get rid of them.

The house isn’t large, what is open to the public anyway, but as there were only two people in it, plus a couple of servants maybe, it’s a nice size for comfort. We visited outside the school holidays and it was very busy, we booked up ahead and also reserved a parking space, it would have been a bit of a nightmare if we hadn’t I think. The car park is about 200 metres away from the house, so that’s a short walk to it, past a few houses which are right by Hill Top, I can’t help thinking that the people who have those houses must at times be cursing the popularity of this National Trust property.

I have a few photos of the garden and surrounding countryside, but I’ll leave those for another time.

Hill Top, Beatrix Potter’s home

Posted on 23 October 2024 by Katrina

While we were in the Lake District last month we visited Hill Top, Beatrix Potter’s home. We tried to visit it about ten years ago but didn’t realise that it doesn’t open on Fridays for some reason – and guess who visited it on a Friday! It was very busy as you can see from the photo below. Beatrix gifted the house to the National Trust, along with a lot of land when she died.

As soon as you get through that doorway you are in the room in the photos below. These china plates were painted by Beatrix’s father, you can see where she got her talent from.

This fireplace/range is on the opposite wall from the photo above. As you can see the ceiling has wallpaper on it too. The door to the right of the range is what we in Scotland call a press, a built in cupboard.

Another cupboard below.

The next room opens off the first room and strangely it has a door knocker on it, as if it was a front door.

Beatrix loved collecting pretty things, she certainly enjoyed what was the first home of her own as her parents objected to her having a life of her own. When her books became so popular she was well able to buy this house outright, at last she could do what she wanted. You can even look at what she had inside her little desk.

Then we went back into the first rooom again to go up the stairs. I must say that from the photos you don’t get the impression of how dim the light is in this room, in fact the photo that I took of the dresser to the right of the clock didn’t come out at all, annoyingly. Beatrix used some of her own furniture in her illustrations.

I’ll do another blogpost about the rooms upstairs.

Branklyn Garden, Perth, Scotland

Posted on 1 May 2024 by Katrina

Last week we drove to Perth to visit Branklyn Garden again, it’s a lovely National Trust for Scotland location.

It was a lovely warm (ish) sunny (ish) day, well it didn’t rain, and the rhododendrons were looking their best.

This garden was donated by John and Dorothy Renton, a couple who had designed the two acre hillside garden after building their house on the plot in 1922.

In the photo below you can just see the house which I think is privately rented now. There is a cafe of course, with a ‘sitooterie’ where you can have your coffee and cake at a table outside .

This place is well worth a visit if you like gardens and plants, photographs never do the place justice. They also have a lot of plants for sale, many of which have been propagated from plants in the garden. That’s very unusual, most places just buy plants in from somewhere, which just isn’t the same at all.

Lamb House, Rye, East Sussex

Posted on 28 November 2020 by Katrina

I was about to start doing my ironing the other day so I had to decide which DVD to watch whilst doing it as I absolutely must have something to distract me from the task, yes the ironing does suffer and I often end up ironing in even more creases but it keeps me semi-sane! Anyway, I plumped for the Mapp and Lucia series by E.F. Benson which I’ve watched several times before but more than anything I just wanted to re-visit the lovely wee town of Rye in the only way that I can at the moment. Lots of Rye locations were used in the filming of the series and they’re all very recognisable. It occurred to me that I had never shown any of the photos of the garden before, not that they’re all that exciting, I hope it was better when the house was owned by E.F. Benson and before him by the American author Henry James, or the several other authors who seem to have lived there in the past. I can see why people love the place despite it being a bit of a tourist Mecca, it was a well known haunt of smugglers in the past, as well as French invaders and the whole place is very atmospheric – and it has a secondhand bookshop!

Jack’s posts about Lamb House and Rye are here. You can read more about Rye here.

Falkland Palace Garden, Fife, Scotland

Posted on 19 September 2020 by Katrina

Although we’re members of the Scottish National Trust we haven’t been able to visit any of their properties this year as they’ve obviously all been closed due to Covid. Some of the bigger castles have opened up again, such as Edinburgh Castle and Stirling Castle, but last week we decided as it was a beautiful day we’d visit nearby Falkland Palace, just to walk in the garden, the palace wasn’t open. You can just walk in and there’s a box for donations.

Falkland Palace was the hunting lodge of the Stuart kings and queens. Built in the 16th century by King James IV and his son James V and modelled in the French style it was also a favourite with Mary, Queen of Scots as it reminded her of the French chateaux of her childhood.

Much of the palace is a romantic ruin, but in the 19th century the third Marquess of Bute had it partly rebuilt.

We quite often just go for a wander around the gardens, there’s a pleasant orchard, although a lot of the trees have been fairly recently planted. In normal times you can have a nice wee sit down on a bench and admire the views, but I believe they’ve been removed due to Covid 19.

Anyway, here are some of the photos I took while we wandered around.

The gate below is obviously modern, it leads through to the orchard some of which you can just see in the background. The apple crop was not nearly as good as usual due to the weather.

Although Falkland has always been popular with tourists it has become even more so in recent years as the village and palace have been used as a location for Outlander. Click on the photos if you want to see them enlarged.

Calke Abbey – again

Posted on 6 December 2019 by Katrina

Back at Calke Abbey, you can see from the amount of clutter around that some of the rooms are very Victorian, I suspect that these were the ones that the family used most themselves. Why have one fire screen when you can have three?!

I love the nurseries in these old houses, more than anything a doll’s house and push along horse makes you realise that no matter how grand they were in their heyday they were still family homes. Mind you, it’s a very grand doll’s house.

But it’s a very long time since any children ever played in this nursery/schoolroom which obviously became a bit of a dumping ground for ‘stuff’. I think it was a good decision of the National Trust’s to leave things just as they found them for once. I like all the soot stained ghostly outlines of whatever hung on the walls.

I suspect that the children were bathed in a tin bath in front of the nursery fire and not in the shower in the photo below. Surely there must have been some sort of oilskin curtain around it to keep the water in. I think that the water must have been stored in the cistern above and when it was empty your shower was over. You would have to be fast, unless it was little more than a trickle.

Calke Abbey, Derbyshire, England

Posted on 27 November 2019 by Katrina

At Calke Abbey in Derbyshire I was surprised by how crowded the place was, well, I suppose it was a Saturday and a lovely day, far too hot for the end of September but I suppose we can blame global warming for that.

On entering the hall Jack spoke to the guide who asked him to repeat himself – which he did, speaking in his very best clear English with far less accent than the ‘locals’. She still said she couldn’t make out his accent. So I said in strident tones – he’s from Glasgow – which is a slight exagerration as I’m the Glaswegian and he comes from 15 miles north of there, but as I expected, it did the trick and amazingly she had no problem after that. Maybe she was worried about getting a ‘Glasgow kiss’.

As you can see it was nigh on impossible to get photos without people in them, except of the upper parts of the very high walls. Someone was obviously very fond of stags’ heads.

The rooms are so cluttered, just as they were left to the National Trust, that it’s sometimes difficult to see what the room was originally for. Below is probably a drawing room but it also has a lot of specimens of fossils and just things of interest to collectors of ‘stuff’.

I’m so glad that I don’t have to keep on top of the housework in here.

I’d love to have the library/study though.

The Jacobean coat below is a real work of art, but the Chinese silk bed is amazing. I’ll show you that tomorrow.

If you’re interested in the history of Calke Abbey have a look here.

Pining for the West

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Category Archives: National Trust