Luvverly

The kids and I went to Staunton Harold today.  It’s a country estate just inside the borders of Derbyshire, about forty minutes drive from our house. I think I have blogged about this place before.  If not, I should have. It is one of my favourite places in the world.  It came up for sale a few years ago. I wanted to buy it.  Sadly they sneered at my offer of 50p and a bag of grapes.  No vision some people.  Anyway, it looks like this:

You can just make out the enormous house, peeping through the trees between the church and the gateposts. The pretty poor website says that the majority of the buildings that are currently on the site were built between 1760 and 1778, which makes them Georgian, and very Georgian looking they are too.  The estate itself has been around considerably longer than that.  The church that you can see on the banks of the lake was built in 1653:

as it says on this door plaque, which you probably can’t read:

I love this church.  It is very unusual in its design, particularly the interior.  When you go in and look up at the roof, instead of elaborate frescos on plaster, it shows a William Blakeish painting of chaos and the heavens swirling around on wooden roof beams that rather resemble the bottom of an upturned boat.  The whole thing is done in deeply dramatic browns and creams and thunderous blacks. Some of the clouds of chaos have Hebrew characters painted into them, and it is a truly spectacular and dramatic thing to see.  I tried to get a postcard of it, but they didn’t have one, and there were lots of guides about, so I couldn’t take photos inside.  If you click on this link however, you can see a great photo of it.

I heard somewhere that the church was spared during the Reformation through some tricksy behaviour on the part of the Estate owner, and that the wealth, in terms of relics and candlesticks and the like, were saved by being hidden in a tunnel that passes under the church.  Whether this is true or not I really can’t say.  It is a fabulous story though.

When I first started visiting Staunton Harold you could go into the main house as well.  The top half was a Sue Ryder Hospice where the terminally ill saw out their days in glorious splendour, and the bottom was a charity shop and tea room style affair.  Now it is privately owned, although you can still wander freely round the grounds and lakes:

like so:

We had a great time, climbing hills, looking at the old ice house, feeding moorhens and rolling around in goose pooh.  Well, the children rolled around in goose pooh and I laughed, until Tilly slipped on a stray bit of goose pooh and nearly ended up in the lake.  First I was mama ish and told her off.  Then I laughed some more.

The other good thing about Staunton Harold is that at the back of the main house is what they call The Ferrer’s Centre.  In all the old outbuildings they have now created some gorgeous shops, a tea room and a garden centre.  There is a deli, a pottery, an art gallery, a black smith, a model maker, a painter, a photography studio, a jewellers and even a hair dressers, although I have been millions of times and never seen it open.

Most of the shops are based around a courtyard which presumably used to be the old stable blocks.  There are tables and chairs where you can sit and drink tea.  There is a giant chess set where you can play chess with giants.  Sometimes they have sculptures there.  It is a lovely space:

and:

and:

We had lunch at the cafe, and pottered around the shops, stopping to buy salted caramel truffles and milk chocolate with sour cherries in.  We sat eating them in the sunshine watched over by this fellow:

We finished the day off with a trot around the extensive garden centre, which sits in the old, walled vegetable gardens that used to belong to the house, and which contained beauties like this:

 and this:

 and these:

And I resisted spending £160 on a fabulous bench in the Bothy shop, which is new, and sells vintage garden things and hand turned wooden furniture, and even with the self denial it was quite the nicest bank holiday Monday I have spent in a very long time.

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