Days Out: Part Three

[smallhobbit]

And so we come to the last of our days out.  I wanted to see both Berrington Hall and Croft Castle, which are close to each other near Leominster.  Since this is a ninety minute drive SM suggested we do both but stay somewhere overnight, which we leave us enough time to enjoy looking round both places.  It would also feel like a proper end of summer trip.  So we stayed overnight in Leominster.

Our first visit was to Croft Castle.  This is not the original castle, which was built as one of a string of castles in the Border Marches to keep out the Welsh.  That castle was replaced by an Elizabethan manor house, which was again replaced by a pseudo-castle by the Bishop of Hereford after Charles II's restoration to the throne.



There is also an old church, which dates from the 1350s, which houses memorials to some of the family.  The tomb is of Sir Richard Croft, who fought in several battles including Mortimer's Cross and Tewkesbury, during the Wars of the Roses on the Yorkist side, and then managed to support Henry Tudor and became Sheriff of Herefordshire.



The flowers in the Walled Garden were stunning.  In addition, there were apples in the small orchard, and the grapes growing on the vines.  I shall make a separate post of the flowers in a couple of weeks, but this is just an idea.



The following day we went to Berrington Hall.  This is a Georgian mansion, with the gardens designed by Capability Brown and the house designed by his son-in-law, Henry Holland.



We were less impressed with this one.  However, we did go on a 'Below Stairs' tour and were fortunate to have a really good guide.  Having seen the first couple of rooms we were encouraged to sit around the servants' dining table, where each one of us was allocated a role in the household (footman, governess, various maids etc).  He explained to each of us what our role involved and as we continued around the lower part of the house he would explain more, addressing the relevant person 'here's where you would store the pickles you had made'.  SM was the butler (who would have had a drink problem, since one of his responsibilities was decanting the casks of wine into bottles) and I was the housekeeper.  I rather liked my role!

The house itself was fairly uninspiring, with the usual pictures on the wall, and a selection of period furniture.  For me, the main interest was the pictures in the dining room, which showed two of the sea battles of Admiral Rodney, who was the father of the second owner of the house.  There was a pond, which we walked round, but it looked rather neglected, which was sad.  However, it was a lovely sunny day, so the walk was enjoyable.

Comments

[prisca]

Again great pictures. I would love to see more flower pics of the Walled Garden ;)

Smart idea to let visitors take over roles of the household while making the tour. I guess this way you can make the tour much more interesting, even if there is not so much interesting stuff to tell.

[smallhobbit]

Thank you. I shall certainly be sharing my flower pics - there are so many of them, they deserve their own post.

It did make the talk very interesting, and quite personal, getting the feel of what it would be like working in a big house.

[solosundance]

Oh I like the look of Croft Castle - I like me a good pseudo castle if it's done well :D And Berrington Hall - yes, I popped in there on the way back from Ludlow once and was rather underwhelmed but then again I didn't have much time so didn't go round the house or have a tour. I think there was a voice-over thingy in a sort of outhouse room the butler (or steward?) was supposed to have slept, but I'm not a big fan of the voice-over technique of explaining things. Or maybe that was somewhere else entirely - it's possible!

Lovely photos!

[smallhobbit]

Croft Castle is a very well done pseudo castle - the rooms are done out so they look lived in.

We saw the room the footman slept in - next to the room where the silver was locked away. The footman was provided with a pistol to keep under his pillow in case of burglars. They are in the process of doing Berrington Hall up, but overall it didn't really grab me.

[margaret_r]

I really like the look of Croft Castle, especially the church, and the flowers are lovely. Having a good guide makes all the difference and the one you had for Berrington Hall sounds like he really brought the place alive for you.

[smallhobbit]

The flowers were gorgeous, and inside Croft Castle they had rooms as they would have been in the heyday of the 1920s, which was different and fun.

The guide was really good - later when I was going round the Hall he was on duty in one of the rooms and he was the one who gave me the details about the paintings, and the background to the conflict.

[vix_spes]

Croft Castle looks lovely ... the Marcher castle are on my list of castles to visit (I will get round to it eventually!)

I'm sorry you were disappointed by Berrington House but the tour sounds fun.

[smallhobbit]

Croft Castle is well worth visiting.

I suspect Berrington Hall also lost out because we'd already been to Croft, and there are certain National Trust aspects which are constant. But I don't feel it was a waste of time, just not as good as we'd hoped.

[aome]

The "Below stairs" tour sounds neat!

Also, that castle looks amazing, and very cool to have a tomb of Richard Croft. It's times like this when US history feels severely lacking, since we weren't populated by anyone making lasting monuments or written records back in the 14th century.

[smallhobbit]

The tour was really good.

Yep, and I was looking round the church thinking one of the churches I go to goes back at least 150 years before this one!