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ellarienIt's been a while since I last posted, I know. Well, let's see. On Friday we ran errands in the morning and in the afternoon walked through the woods over to Graves Park, a high and windy place where there are highland cattle and rare-breed sheep and a few leftover semi-exotic waterfowl, as well as woodland and rolling lawns and an overgrown and abandoned open-air theatre. On Saturday my sister and her family came to visit, and we did the Whirlow Park walk again, in rather better weather and enlivened by the antics of the two boys -- aged almost-seven and ten. There was a wedding reception going on at the park, and a small band playing, which made our sojourn there rather pleasant. Sunday was Sunday, a very fine thing in itself but not especially bloggable.
Today we went to Chatsworth, which is a very fine stately home, park and garden only a relatively short bus-ride away. We spent the morning walking in the woods that cover the hillside to the east of the house and gardens, where the lakes are that feed the fountains. We first discovered those walks last year, when we wandered without benefit of map and discovered the aqueduct -- a pre-ruined bit of landscaping -- as a delightful surprise. That was a wet year, and the waterfall over the end of the aqueduct was quite impressive. Today we had a map, and found the points of interest much more efficiently, but the flow over the aqueduct was a mere trickle. We ate our lunch overlooking a tranquil little tree-lined lake, and then climbed back down the hill and went into the gardens proper.
The gardens of Chatsworth are one of the wonders of the area. Bits of the landscaping go back to the seventeenth century, though most of it is nineteenth-century, with twentieth and twenty-first century improvements. We go there nearly every summer, and always find something new to enjoy. Today, due to a water shortage, the fountains were only playing part-time. We made sure to be in the right place when the mighty Emperor fountain was playing. It's a single jet that in ideal conditions can shoot well over a hundred feet; wind and the vagaries of individual droplet trajectories spread it out into a feathery, ever-changing plume. The high point of this visit was the magnificent display of dahlias at the southern end of the maze that was built on the site of Paxton's Great Conservatory: huge, intricately folded balls of pink and red, yellow and white and orange. I was rather pleased with the peacock butterfly that posed for me on a flower-head, too, and the white waterlilies in the Ring Pond.
Today we went to Chatsworth, which is a very fine stately home, park and garden only a relatively short bus-ride away. We spent the morning walking in the woods that cover the hillside to the east of the house and gardens, where the lakes are that feed the fountains. We first discovered those walks last year, when we wandered without benefit of map and discovered the aqueduct -- a pre-ruined bit of landscaping -- as a delightful surprise. That was a wet year, and the waterfall over the end of the aqueduct was quite impressive. Today we had a map, and found the points of interest much more efficiently, but the flow over the aqueduct was a mere trickle. We ate our lunch overlooking a tranquil little tree-lined lake, and then climbed back down the hill and went into the gardens proper.
The gardens of Chatsworth are one of the wonders of the area. Bits of the landscaping go back to the seventeenth century, though most of it is nineteenth-century, with twentieth and twenty-first century improvements. We go there nearly every summer, and always find something new to enjoy. Today, due to a water shortage, the fountains were only playing part-time. We made sure to be in the right place when the mighty Emperor fountain was playing. It's a single jet that in ideal conditions can shoot well over a hundred feet; wind and the vagaries of individual droplet trajectories spread it out into a feathery, ever-changing plume. The high point of this visit was the magnificent display of dahlias at the southern end of the maze that was built on the site of Paxton's Great Conservatory: huge, intricately folded balls of pink and red, yellow and white and orange. I was rather pleased with the peacock butterfly that posed for me on a flower-head, too, and the white waterlilies in the Ring Pond.
