It was getting colder by the minute.
We hoped that the house would appear soon. And it did.
Chatsworth is a grand old house, and very popular with visitors. There were quite a few in the house and in the grounds, and it was a weekday in the dreads of March. I imagine that there would be twenty times that amount on a nice July weekend.
We passed through the golden gates.
And into the inner garden, where there were lots of little things of interest.
Next, we enter the house proper.
We passed yet more sheep grazing in snowy pastures.
But some of these sheep were definitely on the move to (not quite) greener pastures.
The grass near the river seemed to be a bit more inviting.
Although the water looked very forbidding in the cold weather.
The landscape opened up the further into the park we went.
We were greeted by open parkland with grazing herds of sheep and deer. The latter might have been kept exclusively for sport in the old days, but now they are also farmed, like the sheep. The produce is sold at the estate’s impressive farmyard shop.
We didn’t have too much time to get used to the sun before it disappeared again.
Luckily, the sheep were there to show us the way to the house so we really couldn’t get lost.
We walked through the snow to the nearby town of Matlock. The cottages looked so pretty in the snow.
We took a bus to the town of Bakewell, home of the Bakewell tart and pudding. A market was in full-swing in the square, despite the snow.
The town’s architecture was quaint, with no power lines in sight. It was like being in a period drama.
But the weather got to us, and soon we were in a tearoom, drinking tea and eating the famous pudding. Incidently, the tart and pudding don’t really resemble each other at all, aside from the smattering of jam at the bottom of the case. The tart has a short pastry crust and an almond filling, while the pudding had a puff crust and a custard filling.
From our window, everything was white – the front yard, the stone fence, the footpath, the park…
I went out straight away to explore. Luckily the fresh snow wasn’t slippery, yet. The B&B and the hillside behind looked like a classic Christmas scene.
The River Derwent flowed in the gully below. On a summer’s day, it would be a nice place to sit, but not on a frozen, snowy day.
Still, there were many details to savour – snow on the branches and trunks, for example.
Snow on the leaves and ground cover.
It was all so fascinating for me, even if it was freezing cold, so it won’t surprise you that I have plenty more snow scenes to share.
We stayed at The Cables B&B, with homely cottage rooms, great breakfasts, and even greater dinners. It is half-way between the towns of Matlock Bath and Matlock. Matlock Bath is a tourist town that was quite forlorn out of season, while Matlock is a working town.
The B&B sits under High Tor, a granite cliff that towers over the river Derwent. This was our view in the afternoon upon arriving.
But we got a shock the next morning… snow!
More snowy adventures soon.
We are heading now to the north of England, where it was distinctly colder than the south! After visiting some relatives in Lancashire, we took the train across the Pennines, the ridge of hills and mountains between the counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire.
The ride took us from the old Lancashire town of Accrington, to the Yorkshire city of Leeds. Along the way, we passed through many villages.
Many were built from local stone and dated back to the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century, when many were mill towns.
And we passed many pastures, moors, and snow-covered hill-tops. Spring-time snow, that’s a novelty for a Sydney-sider!
In the middle of Middle Temple stands Temple Church. Like all the other buildings in the area, it is taken care of by the law fraternities, but its roots were once again with the Knights Templar in the 13th and 14th Centuries.
It is a beautiful, light old church, modelled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. It had wonderful stained glass windows and a round vaulted ceiling that made the interior so bright.
The founders of the church were also buried here. Their final resting places still maintained even after 800 years.
The law was also a subplot in the novel Our Mutual Friend, and some of the action was focused on the Temple area. Eugene Wrayburn and his friend Mortimer Lightwood had their chambers here, and it was where school master Bradley Headstone stalked Wrayburn night after night. The gate below leads from the river into Middle Temple.
The Inner and Middle Temples are now filled with law chambers, but there was a time when the area belonged to the Knights Templar, hence the name. Consequently, it’s one of the oldest lanes still existing in London today. In the late afternoon, it’s a peaceful place for a stroll.
The lawyers seemed to all be making a beeline for the Royal Courts of Justice, the equivalent of our Supreme Court, I suppose. It’s a mammoth building that faces Fleet Street, and where Dickens, as a young journalist, used to ply his trade. We didn’t go inside, but I’m sure the inside would be just as grand as the outside.
Static and Silence 