Hilltop et al continued

Monday, our last day in the Lakes, the weather was very threatening.  It dawned bright, but while Mom was kindly helping me with some laundry and I was at the cyber café uploading the last chapter, it turned dark and rainy with bouts of sleet.  We had already heard a forecast of this, so we had tentatively planned on a sightseeing rather than an outside day.  We drove (on main roads) to Sizergh Castle – built and built onto since the 13th century, traditional and current seat of the Strickland family. 

 

The weather really worked well for us.  It rained while we were in the car, but had largely cleared up by the time we got to the castle and started walking the gardens.  Like a lot of these stately homes, the house and gardens have evolved together very nicely.  I figured out that the scenic value of this whole area (to some extent this whole country) is based on the collective pressure of hundreds of generations of people looking around and deciding to pretty things up a bit. 

 

The grounds at Sizergh (pronounced “Sizer” by the way) include many of the standard castle garden features.  There’s an herbaceous border, a wild flower bank, a rock garden, a lake, a sort of strolling garden with a terrace that has access from the hall so people can sneak away from dances to cool off and flirt.  My description wouldn’t do any of it justice, so I won’t try too hard.  Particular features that stick in my mind are a long hedge that was sculptedinto a complicated pattern of waves that looked just gorgeous as seen from a bench across the little lake and the rock garden that only took up a fraction of an acre but easily had a quarter of a mile of paths twisting around it.

 

While we were in the rock garden, there was a fellow in medieval dress telling ghost stories from the castle’s history.  They were really grisly stories, but the props he used and the way he told the stories made it clear the presentation was pitched primarily for children. 

 

The castle itself is nicely decorated.  The info sheets in the various rooms help point out how the whole place evolved.  Mom picked up a guide that anyone who knows her could borrow to get details.  For me, the most interesting thing was seeing how different visitors mixed different roots of interest in being in the castle.  The ingredients were:  1) interest in the Strickland family, just as a kind of reflexive interest in nobles.  2) Interest in the architecture.  3) Interest in the art and antiques.  4) Interest in filling in these scavenger hunt questionnaires on clipboards (this was mostly kids, although some adults were helping their children to the extent of eliminating the child’s involvement.)  5) Interest in pointing out how garish and built on the back of the working poor everything was and wondering when the family gets booted from the house now that they’ve given it to the National Trust.  Different visitors blended these ingredients in different ways.  The range of variation was fascinating. 

 

From a décor perspective, the glory of the place is the woodwork, including carved wall panels, furniture, and some very elaborate ceiling ribbing.  It was just beautiful.  There’s one bedroom that was bought years ago by the Victoria and Albert museum.  The V&A took the whole place apart for a show then, when the trust acquired the castle, brought it all back and reinstalled it on indefinite loan.  One of the docents had seen the reinstallation process.  He said the elaborate support work they had to build to reinstall the panels was nearly as impressive as the paneling, and it was a shame people didn’t get to see it.  It struck me that if this style could come back into fashion for the quite wealthy, there’d be a lot more work for some of my friends who work in the crafts.

 

Some Strickland also collected a lot of nice art glass and a few good oriental ceramic pieces.  On the down side, generations of Stricklands had clearly fallen prey to the mania for small china ornaments and knick knacks.  Collection included the requisite cream pitcher in the shape of a cow.  They always puke the milk rather than having it come out the udders.  Icky when you think about it.

 

There were supposed to be some nice walks from the property, including some that would have given us views of Morecombe Bay, the bit of water that keeps the North of England from getting tangled up with Wales, but the weather was closing in again.  We headed back to Keswick, but decided to take the park roads again – by this time.  I was feeling much more confident, evenwithout a pint in me.  It was just as pretty the second or third time as it had been previously.  We had a little time and ambition to spare and so stopped at a car park between two lakes and took a little mile and a half or so walk to stretch out from all the driving and let mom say goodbye to the landscape. 

 

The light was wonderful and bright after all the showers during the day.  The paths were a mix of rocky scrambles and smooth gravel paths.  We were paralleling one of the fells for much of the walk, and could see other people walking or running at different levels above us.  There were scattered woods with the ground carpeted in reefs of bluebells.  All in all, a good way to say goodbye to the lakes.  We even got a view of Dove Cottage from across Grassmere, so Mom got a last fix of poet worship. 

 

Back in Keswick, we walked around a little looking for a house that Coleridge had lived in (the Rime of the Ancient Mariner guy).  We couldn’t find the place, and it isn’t promoted as a tourist attraction; so I’m pretty sure it must be long gone.  Although, we realized we’d been so busy, we’d missed most of the Keswick based attractions.  I felt no remorse for missing out on Cars of the Stars (The Batmobile!  Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang!), but I was a little disappointed that we never made it to the pencil museum.  I’m pretty sure it’s the only one there is.  However, I can’t think of anything we did that I’d rather have cashed in to see how they get the graphite into the middle of a pencil. 

 

We had dinner at the Dog and Gun.  We ran into a couple from southern California who had been touring around Scotland for a few weeks and had just started the England part of their tour.  We shared enthusiasm for the scenery and fear of driving the narrow roads.  Talked for a while about making a living in acting, since many of my friends are actors and one of their nephews is thinking about trying to act professionally. 

 

We finished the evening with another visit to the lake and the sheep in Crow Park.  For me, it was a great close to the first volume of my visit, and for Mom a good coda to her trip.  I’m so happy I was able to bring her along and wish she could have stayed longer.  To some extent, this whole trip is about making sure that when I’m old and feeble and I start thinking “If only I had . . .” I’ll be able to tell myself “Well, I did!”  Sharing a hunk of it with Mom made it all the sweeter.  I wish more people had taken me up on the invite to join, and if anybody has a last minute flash of interest, I could probably score another room in Wiltshire from the 17th to the 23rd of May.

 

Tuesday morning (this morning as I’m typing this in the bar at the Rambler in Edale) I drove Mom to Manchester airport.  She should be flying over Newfoundland or thereabouts by now.  I dropped the car at the airport and planned to catch a cab to the train station.  As I was talking with the driver, I decided I didn’t feel like wrestling all my luggage around on the train, so he and I both pulled out road atlases to figure out how to get to Edale.  He’d never heard of it before.  We

negotiated a rate and drove off.