Damn! Our brief break is nearly over. And I’m just getting started on relaxing!
Sad to go. But we’ve had an ace time. Took a few parting snaps.
We’ve tried our best to leave the place as close to how we found it as we can. It was immaculate. And I can’t pretend we leave it quite so shiny. But we did our best.
But what a great week! A few daily outing type haunts. Some quality chill time at the flat. Just the one (fiscally crippling) meal out. And lots of good eating ‘at home’.
Brilliant!
CHARTWELL
En-route home, we stopped at Chartwell House, which is now run by the NT. Wow! What a place.
Despite being slightly ‘out of season’, this is undoubtedly one of the most popular NT places we’ve been. Very, very, very busy!
Once parked, it’s ‘timed entry’ tickets. We thought that meant a tour. Turned out it didn’t.
The grounds are astonishing. Quite hilly. With lots of water features, all on different levels. And all fabulously planted.
And so, to the house…
I love the way the bookshelves in the study/library are flush to the walls, even over the doorway. And there’s a great aerial view model of D-Day…
Blah…
I overheard the NT volunteer/guide in the room featured in pics below telling an interesting anecdote about the beautiful rug featured in the first of the next gallery of photos.
Apparently Winston came down in the middle of the night in one (no doubt historically momentous) occasion, and tripped on the tassels of this exquisite piece of textile. So he got some scissors and simply cut the tassels off.
It’s an odd house, in terms of the stuff inside it. Being both very domestic, and personal, but simultaneously a place to display art and artefacts of a ‘great man of history’.
I didn’t really photograph the rooms that are most altered, the gallery type spaces. It makes me wonder how much is displayed as it was (when Churchill lived there), and how much has been altered, and to what degree, for the sake of creating a public exhibition of Churchill’s life and times.
And back out into the gardens…
Then we visited his art studio, a short walk from the main house.
The complex of buildings housing the art studio is massive. We only got to see inside a tiny portion of it. I wonder what the rest is/was for?
An extraordinary home, in an unbelievably gorgeous location. The views it commands of the valley (is this the Weald?) are fabulous. Sadly my iPhone camera fails utterly in capturing such stuff.
But this was certainly a fun and very worthwhile place to visit.
POSTSCRIPT
We had a fab break in St Leonard’s on Sea, and would love to go back again. So it was nice to see the above feedback after our stay in Markwick Place.