Barefoot and chained to the garden

After our escapades with monkey charming we went one mile up the road to Trentham Gardens to try the Barefoot Walk.  Both girls have been before, with my intrepid cousin.  It was a first for the rest of us.

For all five of us to get in cost £26.50 for a family ticket.  Considering how big the acreage of the gardens are, and how well equipped and cared for they are, I didn’t think this was too bad at all.  You can get a yearly ticket, which works out very reasonably if you plan on going more than four times a year.  We have so many things still on our UK wish list that we decided against it for now.  If I lived nearby I would certainly get one though.

There is a huge lake, and you can hire boats, I believe.

There is a fantastic children’s play area which has a zip wire, which is always a hit in our house. I was more impressed by the tiny, asphalt roads and miniature cars that children could drive round in.

There were a series of small gardens, much like the ones you see at Chelsea, all showcasing a different kind of garden from a potager:

To a beach garden:

and an eco garden.

Where they had used lots of coloured glass in a kind of homage to Dale Chihuly, which didn’t entirely work, but did make for some quite trippy photos.

The highlight for the children was the barefoot walk.  I confess to being quite disappointed with it myself.  So disappointed that I didn’t even join in.  It was too cold to strip off for anything less than perfection.

I had been hoping that it would be beautiful, and there would be things like patches of chamomile lawn to walk on, or moss, or other more natural surfaces.

I was also hoping there would be interesting, sensory planting down the edges of the paths so you could also touch, and feel and smell your walk:

Instead it was a raw path through the trees, and the surfaces you walked on were things like wet straw, foam coated in plastic, wooden shingles and various types of block paving.  It seemed, to my untutored eye, a painful, cold and soggy experience:

The highlight of which was wading calf deep in soupy mud trekked through previously by thousands of strangers:

According to the girls, this was the best bit.  Oscar agreed with me that it wasn’t, and got ankle deep on one leg and then abandoned the whole experience as ‘icky’.

I cannot say I blame him.  We were both more impressed by this very gory statue of Perseus slaying Medusa.  You cannot really see properly here, but he is holding up her severed head, and standing on her headless corpse, with wriggly neck entrails poking out of her stump.

Now that’s rock ‘n’ roll.

After this exciting morning we were in need of a little lunch and tlc, and as the Bridgewater factory was only four miles away it seemed rude not to pop in, relax in the kitchen garden, make a few minor purchases and eat our packed lunch.

It more than made up for the mud.

Advertisement