First Outing for a While…..

After a summer of other things stopping us getting away, we’re finally on the road again in SOK. The first few days of our trip took us to Carsington Water, Wollaton Hall (Nottingham), Bosworth Battlefield, Bletchley Park, Wimpole and Audley End.

Carsington Water

We’d planned to set off on Friday 01 October but had delayed our departure for a few days due to the UK fuel “crisis” (panic buying does seem to be a UK national pastime these days). Given that our itinerary had all been lined up so that we reached attractions on days when they were open (always a bonus!), setting off on a Wednesday gave us a couple of days to kill between home and our first stop near Nottingham.

We booked ourselves onto the Caravan & Motorhome Club site at Carsington Water for three nights.

We had a nice relaxed time during our stay. We both jogged round the lake (8.3 miles), Mark cycled round the lake, and we visited nearby Ashbourne – a very nice and clearly quite prosperous little town. They have butchers (plural), a fishmonger, multiple “cute” shops etc – a far cry from the empty shops and tumbleweed on the High Street where we live. The butcher Mark visited was clean out of small pork pies, so he had to buy a large one:

Wollaton Hall, Nottingham

Saturday morning saw us driving about an hour from Carsington Water to Wollaton Hall on the outskirts of Nottingham.

Wollaton Hall was built in the 1580s for Francis Willoughby and remained in the Willoughby family until the 1920s when it was sold to Nottingham City Council. It later became the city’s natural history museum.

It’s believed to have been designed by the same architect responsible for Longleat and Hardwick Hall.

We came across the Camelia House in the grounds, which is apparently the largest cast-iron glasshouse in Europe, built in 1828 and supposedly the inspiration for the design of the Crystal Palace for the 1851 Great Exhibition:

Set in a large deer park, this place is clearly very popular with dog walkers, families etc and the car parks filled up fast.

We had no clue about any of the above when we arrived at Wollaton Hall; we were here because it promised the first exhibition of a “real” T-Rex in England for over a century (well, 20% of a real T-Rex if you want to be picky about it).

There is also an Industrial Museum on the site, open at weekends and run by volunteers. We really enjoyed this; £4 each was a real bargain.

Not so Titus the T-Rex. The dinosaur was good, the exhibition was good, but no way did we feel it was worth the £13 price of an adult ticket. I’d been expecting a much more in-depth exhibition to justify the ticket price.

Perhaps that’s why there were hundreds of people outside in the grounds but very few inside looking at the dinosaur? We couldn’t help feeling that if they halved their prices they might double their revenue….

Overnight: The Paddocks CL near Earl Shilton in Leicestershire

It’s a pity that the Caravan & Motorhome Club sign is next to the wrong entrance! We pulled up into something that looked like Steptoe’s Yard! Things improved once we were directed back out onto the main road and in through the entrance for King Richard’s Lodges (seen in the background in the photo above) to the CL field. All very tidy though not exactly a bargain at £20 a night.

Battle of Bosworth, 1485

On Sunday we drove the short distance to the Visitor Centre near the site of the 1485 Battle of Bosworth (between the armies of Richard III and Henry Tudor).

We both thought that the exhibition in the visitor centre was very good, with a mix of basic information and some really interesting exhibits on the various theories as to where exactly the battle took place and the conclusions drawn from archaeological excavations.

One thing it didn’t explain to my satisfaction is how Richard III supposedly fought a battle with a crown perched on top of his helmet? (the crown does play a part in the story as it was allegedly found in a hawthorn bush and used to “crown” Henry Tudor after his victory in the battle):

In the afternoon, we did the guided walk from the visitor centre, which was very informative and entertaining. It’s a pity in a way that the accepted location of the battlefield moved about ten years ago and is now a couple of miles away from the visitor centre. Luckily, the visitor centre was built on top of a hill from which there’s a good view of the surrounding landscape, so the guided walk does still make sense. The guide could point out where in the landscape each army is thought to have camped, which direction they then took to what is now thought to be the actual site of the battle, and so on.

Overnight: The Old Dairy Farm near Milton Keynes

We had a drive of about an hour and a half from the Bosworth Battlefield down to Milton Keynes where we’d booked onto the Old Dairy Farm for two nights. This is an independent camp site and it was busy, so it must be doing something right. We’re not sure what – it cost £24 a night, there’s a small unisex shower block that does get poor reviews online (Mark went to take a look and said the best he could say was that it was “adequate”), and the camping field is probably best described as a marvellous example of medieval ridge and furrow on the side of a hill.

The Old Dairy Farm did serve its purpose though, being about an hour’s walk from Bletchley Park, our next destination.

Bletchley Park

From the Old Dairy Farm, we could get straight onto the towpath of the Grand Union Canal. This took us about half way to Bletchley Park, with the remainder of the walk along suburban roads through Bletchley itself.

I’ve been wanting to visit Bletchley Park for a long time. We got 20% off the admission price with our English Heritage membership (full marks to Bletchley Park for clearly displaying this at their ticket counter).

It’s a full day of a job and if your brain isn’t going numb when you come out, you haven’t been paying attention!

I did find that there wasn’t really a clear chronological story as you go round the mansion and the various huts (and indeed it would be difficult for them to present it as a chronological story rather than focussing on the work that was carried out in each hut) so it really did help to have a little bit of an idea about what happened at Bletchley Park before actually visiting.

It’s a pity you can’t see inside the cottages in the stable block. Of course I managed to take a photo such that the most famous one (where Dilly Knox worked on Enigma) is the one you can’t see at the far end!

The featured image for this post shows part of a replica of one of the “bombe” machines used later in the War to hunt for Enigma settings.

Wimpole Estate

We left the Old Dairy Farm on Tuesday morning and drove for about an hour to the National Trust’s Wimpole Estate. I’d been here before but it was Mark’s first visit. A lot of work had been done since my visit: the car parks are now absolutely huge (we had a whole section of the car park all to ourselves) and the National Trust has created a 5.3 mile “multi-use path” around the estate, suitable for walking, running, cycling, wheelchairs etc. We did a lap of the multi-use path and then returned to SOK for some lunch before tackling the house:

Wimpole’s an interesting one. The National Trust almost didn’t take it on in the 1970s when it was left to them by the previous owner, who was a daughter of Rudyard Kipling. The impression we got from the information provided was that they took it on in the end as a kind of “moral obligation” purely because she had expected them to!

It’s a nice mixture of “modernisations” from the 1880s through the mid 20th century. The wall-to-wall encaustic tiling in the main hallway certainly puts ours at home to shame (in sheer yardage at least; Wimpole has the exact same colours as us so maybe their tiles came from the same manufacturer?).

The first floor was closed when we visited due to “lack of volunteers”, so we were left with the ground floor and the basement. Love the huge tins:

Overnight: Hill Farm CL, Newton, Cambridge

We’d booked two nights at Hill Farm CL, a few miles south of Cambridge.

What a lovely little site! It’s on a nice flat camping field (no hardstandings) and there’s no electric hookup, but it’s a beautiful location and, unbelievably, they only charge £8 a night. Fabulous – Hill Farm definitely wins the prize for the best site we’ve stayed at in this post….

Great Chishill Windmill

As we were driving from Hill Farm to visit Audley End this morning, we came across a windmill and stopped to take a look. The Great Chishill Windmill is a postmill built in 1819 on the site of (and reusing some of the timbers from) earlier mills. At first sight, it looked very much like some of the windmills we’ve seen in Scandinavia:

The information sign next to the windmill informed us that there are only seven such open trestle postmills left in the country and that this is the only one that has a fantail for automatic turning to wind. We could certainly see the circular track on the ground where the wheels under the fantail have moved around as the windmill has turned.

Audley End

English Heritage’s Audley End is another site that I’d visited before but that was new to Mark. Unfortunately there is no photography allowed inside, but the visitor route through the house is extensive and there’s a lot to see. Mark was particularly enthralled by the truly vast collection of stuffed animals and birds left behind by a previous owner.

Overall impression: Very Good Indeed – English Heritage have “out-National Trusted the National Trust” at Audley End…

The cottage gardens at Audley are also impressive, with no shortage of grapes in the vinery:

We’re now back at Hill Farm for our second night before continuing on our tour of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk. One last thing to mention – as well as being ideally positioned for visiting both Wimpole and Audley End, Hill Farm CL is also close to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford. A Spitfire has flown over SOK twice as I’ve been typing this….