Into April

We've been busy pottering both in and out of the garden.  We went to the local garden centre yesterday to buy potting compost, grit and bird food.  This was after going into the town centre to Boots to pop empty blister packs from medications into the recycling bin.  I was glad to find out about the recycling project there as I was loath to put the empty packs into the ordinary waste.

On Wednesday we visited Biddulph Grange Gardens for a walk around.  There was lots of work being done to resurface the entrance way and also the cleaning of stone edging in the Dahlia Walk.  

The Woodland Walk is now called the Wellbeing Walk and many grassy areas had been roped off to allow for re-growth and re-seeding.

The Chinese Garden was looking wonderful in the sunshine.

The Stumpery has recently been made larger with funding from the Blue Diamond Garden Centres Group.  

It is supposed to be the oldest Stumpery in the UK and it is now as large as the original one created by James Bateman in the early 1800s.

At home in the garden the Tulips are flowering.  

Well one pot is the other has been foraged by badgers, our fault as we took the protective sticks away too early.

What a mess.  One or two have been saved and I hope they will flower.

The Spirea Bridal Wreath is in flower as is the Amelanchier

In the wilder area at the top of the garden both Wood Anemone and Wild Garlic are doing well.

Right, time to think about lunch.  All for now.

Into July

 It's July already and days are racing by

The garden is needing more water although we did have a very wet Monday, Tuesday was back to warm and sunny weather which was great for butterflies.  I'm pleased to say that when we walked over the fields the air was full of them, joyfully flittering and spiralling in twos and threes over the tall grasses.  We must have seen at least thirty of them as we walked, I lost count so it may have been more. They were mostly small brownish ones,  perhaps Speckled Woods and Gatekeepers plus the occasional small tortoiseshell and a Cinnabar moth or two.  You just can't miss the bright red as they flutter by.  There were also lots of little silvery moths that disappeared when they landed on a blade of grass and jumping grasshoppers. Paul always says 'just listen to the grasshoppers' but of course, I can't hear them,  all I can hear is the hissing in my ears from the Tinnitus. 

 

 

There are no photos as I didn't have a camera (the photo above was taken with my old camera before it packed up on me.) I doub't I'd have got many images anyway as they all moved around so quickly hardly settling at all. It was just such a joy to see them.

 

Since then I've had a new camera.  it's a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ80.  It was a reduced end of stock one.  I'm learning how to use it. It's quite complicated. I will get there. The photo above was taken with it - and the ones below.

Of course we had to visit somewhere interesting so I could play with the camera.  A sunny morning, a garden walk and coffee and cake.  What could be better? 

 

Five Things for the First Week in February

1. This week has been 'Tinnitus Week  2021' to raise awareness of this sometimes quite debilitating condition. 

 I can't remember when I last heard silence and I can't remember when I suddenly realised that my ears were making noises it just sort of crept up on me.  I'm guessing about six years ago now.  I thought at first it was high blood pressure but it didn't go away.  As I type this post I have what I can only describe as steaming/hissing kettles in my ears, when I go out and about it seems to reduce in scale but the worst aspect is the way loud noises make me anxious and sometimes tearful if they make me jump.  Generally I just 'get on with it' I can ignore it but sometimes it makes me feel fragile and unable to concentrate.  I have my first Covid 19 Vaccination on Monday, I expect the tinnitus will reach high peaks for a couple of days afterwards just as they do after my ordinary flu jabs.  I have to go to a Methodist Church for my jab it was either that or the Scout Hut.  How strange life is!

 

2. The new National Trust handbook arrived in the post early this week.

  I wonder if, when things get back to some kind of normal, we will be able to use it?  I hope so.  I've missed visiting our local National Trust places like Biddulph Grange, Little Moreton Hall and Shugborough.  As well as walks at non National Trust places like Trentham Gardens and Westport Lake.  Paul said to me the other day that he just wanted to visit somewhere interesting and sit drinking a coffee looking at a view, I agreed but also said I wanted to be able to visit a museum or historic house, I do miss being able to do that.

3. A New Be-Ro Book

We've had both of the two older books for years.  The larger one is dropping to pieces.  The blue one I bought from a Be-Ro stand in a supermarket over twenty years ago to replace the larger one,  but both still get used.  Many of the pages of both have been stuck together over the years and when separated parts of recipes have disapeared. It's a good job I know the most popular ones by heart.  I sent for the new one from the Be-Ro website.  It has the old favourites and some new recipes in it too.  The coffee and walnut cake recipe I use each November  to make a cake for a friend's birthday is still inside.  Recipes for Lavender Highlanders and Heart Shaped Lemon Puffs are new.  I'm looking forward to using it.

4. Reading

 I've enjoyed reading  'Down in the Valley' by Laurie Lee.  I loved his descriptions of the countryside of his childhood in the Slad Valley in Gloucestershire. 

 

" Just down here by the stream there used to be a gathering place for us kids from the village to come and play on Summer evenings.  This was where the sheep wash was, a stone bath, cut from stone and a stone bridge"

 

This reminded me of the Derbyshire village I grew up in and the sheep wash down the lane, past the vicarage, over a field and  just into the edge of the daffodil woods.  In the summer, during the long school holidays, we would sit on the stones chatting and laughing and dangling our bare feet in the water which ran in from the brook. 

 

Last week there was a piece on 'Winter Watch' about bird song being local to specific areas as the generations of birds mimicked each other.  We noticed when we first came here there was a particular set of notes that the same blackbirds sang year after year.  Laurie Lee wrote about this in the book.   He returned to the Slad Valley after twenty years away and when he woke on the first morning home he thought he heard a Gloucestershire blackbird, then realised he was in Gloucestershire.

 

"and then, when I was fully awake, I realised it was a Slad blackbird, it was a Gloucestershire blackbird. I had not heard it for twenty years but it was instantly recognisable because they mimic their fathers and mothers."

5. Snowdrops

 

February is the month for Snowdrops.  Last year just before lock down I bought a couple of snowdrop plants and a bright yellow winter aconite from the covered market in Leek.  We planted them togther in a large pot as we've never been able to get them to grow in our heavy clay soil.  The snowdrops have grown again this year and seem to have spread but there is no sign of the aconite which is a shame.  Both flowers remind me of the fact that last February we should have met with my cousin and his wife at Hopton Hall in Derbyshire.  It was heavy snow and the meeting was cancelled.  A month later lock down happened and my cousin had been diagnosed with cancer and undergoing surgery and chemotherapy as well as coping with the pandemic.  Unfortunately he has to undergo more treatment and things don't sound so good.  Snowdrops are I think for most of us a sign of hope so I've added some more photos from a previous visit below.

 

Hopton Hall, Derbyshire,  February 2018
 

 Take care everyone.

An Early Morning Walk

Last week we made a long overdue visit to relatives and we decided that now we don't have to dash there and back in a few hours in order to look after Max we would treat ourselves to an overnight stay and visit some of our old childhood haunts as well.  We grew up in the same area and our parents took us to the same places even though we didn't know each other at the time.

Which is the reason we found ourselves early one morning walking in Clumber Park  a Grade1 listed park now owned by the National Trust.

The Chapel was built in the time of the 7th Duke of Newcastle whose family lived on the estate.  Construction started in 1886 and it was opened three years later.  It was designed by G F Bodley. 

The Serpentine Lake

My favourite geese - Greylags

You can see the outline of the old house next to the chapel in front of the stable block.  It was almost destroyed by fire in 1879 and rebuilt.  The house was finally demolished in 1938.

It was very quiet down by the water's edge, there were very few people out and about so early.

We walked towards and over the bridge.

Unfortunately it was vandalised last year and is still being repaired.

It is a beautiful bridge.

 After our walk it was time for tea and toast in the cafe which had just opened at 10a.m.  We sat in comfy chairs beside this fireplace which was decorated ready for the Easter weekend.

After breakfast it was time to move on so there was no time to see the walled garden, the Discovery Centre and inside the chapel.  Maybe we'll go back again.

In my next posts we'll visit Creswell Crags and Sherwood Forest.

Contrasting Lifestyles - Part Two

Quarry Bank House which stands at the side of the mill,  opened for the first time to visitors last week.  We saw it on the second day of opening which was a real treat.  I'd been watching out for when both 13 Oak Cottages and Quarry Bank House would be open so we could visit both at the same time.

I'd often looked at the house as we walked from the mill up into the garden and wondered what it was like inside.  I think it was owned privately until fairly recently when the National Trust were finally able to take it over.  I've just realised that with not going into the Mill itself this time and also with it pouring with rain we didn't take the usual path around the mill into the gardens and therefore I didn't take a photo of the house as a whole.  You can see what it looks like - here

 What impressed me most inside was the symmetry of the design, everything curving with no harsh edges.

In the entrance hall the doors to the rooms of were curved as you can see from the photographs below.

It was light and airy and the softness of the curves felt very soothing and peaceful.

At the moment the house is sparsely furnished which adds to the rather minimalist elegance of the rooms.  It is all very tasteful and very much a Georgian rather than Victorian home.

On the left as you enter is Samuel Greg's office and study, right next to the mill so he could look out over it.  Samuel and Hannah Greg lived in Manchester but spent holidays with their young children at a farm near the mill and Hannah in particular wanted to leave Manchester and live nearby so Samuel began the building of the house near the mill in the neo-classical style.

The first part of the house was completed by the 1800s and in 1803 Samuel had more rooms added to the smaller house.  At the moment there are only the three rooms open to view but they are rather splendid ones.

The volunteer we spoke to said that it had been intended to open the upstairs rooms but the staircase proved to be difficult.  It is a wooden, cantilevered staircase and it was found that even with just a few people going up and down each day cracks had appeared in the structure so it was decided not to allow people upstairs at the moment and as the house is listed a lift couldn't be installed either.

There is a wonderful curved bay window in the dining room overlooking the gardens.

As you can see it was very wet outside!

The drawing room too is light and elegant.  Here Hannah Greg ruled.  According to the volunteer we spoke to Mrs Greg, who was a great believer in education for all and who made sure her daughters were as well educated as her sons set up a literary and philosophical society for her children and as part of this each child had to write and submit a paper which was placed in a box and one chosen at random which would be read and discussed.

Apparently there was a service wing added in 1814 to house servants and also the nursery for all the children of which I think we were told there were thirteen.  This part of the house doesn't exist anymore as it was demolished in 1963.  Still in the cellar of the main house, although again not available to view at the moment, are the kitchens, laundry and other service rooms.

I hope you have enjoyed just a little peep into both  newly opened houses.  I think we will go back again next Spring to see how things have progressed.  I have put links over the names of both Hannah and Samuel Greg above so you can find out more about them.  Hannah in particular is very interesting to read about.

Contrasting Lifestyles - Part One

I promised in my last post to take you inside the two newly opened residences at Quarry Bank Mill.  As we visited the worker's cottage first that is the one I will write about first too.  All information is from my memory of what the guide told us on our tour and from the information boards and film in the hub plus information gleaned from their own website.

The cottages is known as the 'pickled' cottage as it has been kept just as it was found after the last, elderly resident left in the 1960s.   The cottage was one of many built in the 1820s by the Greg family to house their workforce .  Before the mill was built in the area Styal was a small agricultural village. You can see from the photo above that there was a cellar below the main cottage.

 Shall we look inside?  There are only about a dozen people allowed on each tour and only two at a time on the staircase.  We had a lovely guide who told us a lot about the cottage and who had lived there.

 Through the front door and into the living room.  Much of the research done has been into the first occupants of the cottage and I think plans are afoot to recreate the cottage as it would have looked in the 19th century but for now we were looking at the kind of dwelling that was familiar to many of us on the tour, all being of a certain age. Seven layers of wallpaper were found in this cottage showing that the families who lived there cared about how their houses looked and kept them clean and tidy.  An early 19th century wallpaper with bright green patterning was found to have arsenic in the green dye.

 We all remembered gas mantles and meters, coal ranges and lino covered floors. In the early days of the cottage this would have been the room where all the cooking, eating, sewing, darning and mending would have been done.  The first family recorded as living in the house in the 1841 census were Peter and Ann Nicklin a couple in their 50s.  There were no children living with them at that time but there were two lodgers who shared the back bedroom upstairs a Catherine Burn age 26, a dyer at the mill and later a Mary Brown who was a spinner at the mill.  The two women would have shared the bedroom, probably had their meals with the Nicklins but the etiquette of privacy and morality would prevent them from washing and mending their clothes, especially stockings and undergarments or washing themselves when a man was in the house.

 In the scullery was a sink and drainer, there would also have been a copper providing hot water in the opposite corner.  In here was a large hook on the ceiling used for either hanging meat or a dryer for laundry, no one was sure which.  There was also a cupboard under the stairs.  Outside, beyond the window, was an outside privy shared only by the occupants of the one cottage.  This was seen as a great improvement on the housing in the larger towns and cities where one or two  privies would have been shared by lots of families.

 The upstairs back bedroom which was rented to Catherine Burn and Mary Brown in the 1840s was small and had no heating. Whereas Peter and Ann Nicklin's bedroom had a small fireplace.  In the cellar there was a two roomed residence which was, at the time of the Nicklins, lived in by  William and Mary Bradbury and two children.  The cellar was closed as there were still safety issues with it but we could peer through the window and see a large brick fireplace with parts of a black range in it.

If you compare the two photos above and below you can see that over the fireplace new wallpaper recreated from the pattern on the old has been placed on the walls.

 On the floor were the indentations of a where a bed had stood with its head against the wall above.  The window on the opposite wall looks over the small allotments in front of the cottages where families like the Nicklins could grow their own vegetables, usually root vegetables, to supplement what they could afford from the shop which was provided by the Greg family.  This was run on the 'truck' system which meant that everything a family had from the shop during the week was tallied up and the amount stopped from their wages.

 The Gregs also built two chapels and a school for their workers so all of their daily lives were catered for.  Mrs Greg, especially, believed in education for all and later adult classes were available too.  I didn't take a photo of the school as it is still a primary school and children were playing in the playground but it is just a couple of doors away from 13 Oak Cottages.

 

The village shop became a Co-operative Store in 1873 and was run by the workers rather than the owners.

Above is Norcliffe Chapel one of the two chapels (the other a Methodist Chapel) built by the mill owners.  It is still used for services.

 Working at Quarry Bank Mill must have seemed a lot better than working in the huge cotton mills of cities like Manchester, working conditions may have been better and there was less disease caused by insanitary living conditions, plus the fresh air of the country around especially in the early days of the factory when water power was used to work the machinery in the mill.  But, there is always a but isn't there?  As our tour guide pointed out there was also a loss of personal freedom as workers were tied to the mill, chapel and the shop, if you joined any kind of group or society which promoted the rights of workers for example the Chartist Movement you would lose your job and therefore your home as well.  Some people may have found the choices and freedoms of a larger city more appealing. 

Shall we go and visit the owners now? Perhaps as this post is so long we'll visit next time.