Belton House, Gardens and Church

We have not arrived in Yorkshire yet - this was the second visit we made on the way there, just 15 miles north of Isaac Newton's home. I think I will post in the order that we visited places and then you can come along and enjoy visiting with me.

Why did we stop here? Well mainly because this was the house that was used in the BBC adaption of Jane Eyre. We will have lunch and then visit around the house, (no pics allowed), and the gardens between the showers, before finishing in the family church that dates back to 1200.

Belton was built in 1685-88 for Sir John Brownlow. The house has stunning interiors with rooms displayed in the 17th century, Regency and Victorian styles.

There are 36 acres of delightful gardens, lakeside walks and a magnificant landscaped park. The church of St. Paul and St. Peter's in the grounds dates from 1200. It is filled with monuments of the Brownlow and Crust families.

We will not have time to tour the whole place as we want to continue our journey, but we will see as much as we can. Yorkshire beckons!

The Orangery and church

This looked like it was perched on top but the shrub was grown around it

Family tomb stones

Click to read the writing

Top 100 Books Meme

I received this Book Meme from Sara of Much Ado About Something The BBC began broadcasting this through 'The Big Read' in 2003. The National Endownment for the Arts in America estimates that the average adult has only read 6 of the books from this current list. As did Sara, I thought it would be fun to see how many I have read. If you want to take on this challenge, let me know and I will come and look at your scores.

1. Bold those you have read

2. Italicize those you intend to read

3. [Bracket] those you have viewed via movie, TV or theatre



1 [Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen]

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 [Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte]

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 [To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee]

6 The Bible

7 [Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte]

8 [Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell]

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10( Great Expectations - Charles Dickens)

11 [Little Women - Louisa M Alcott]

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 [Middlemarch - George Eliot]

21 [Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell)

22 [The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald]

23 [Bleak House - Charles Dickens]

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 [Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh]

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 [Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck]

29 (Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll)

30(The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame)

31 [Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy]

32 [David Copperfield - Charles Dickens]

33 [Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis]

34 [Emma - Jane Austen]

35 [Persuasion - Jane Austen]

36 [The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis]

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 (Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres)

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 (The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown )
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 [Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery]

47 [Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy]

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 [Lord of the Flies - William Golding]

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52( Dune - Frank Herbert)

53 [Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons)

54 [Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen]

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 [Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck]

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 [Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas]

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 [Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding]

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 [Moby Dick - Herman Melville]

71 [Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens]

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 [The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett]

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 ( Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome)

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 [A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens]

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 [The Color Purple - Alice Walker]

84 [The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro]

85 [Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert]

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 ( Charlotte’s Web - EB White)

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 [The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery]

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 (Watership Down - Richard Adams)

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 (A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute)

97 [The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas]

98 [Hamlet - William Shakespeare]

99 [Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl]

100 (Les Miserables - Victor Hugo)


My Score:
I have read 37

I intend to read 7 (and already have them)

I have viewed 49

If you decide to do this, I am sure you know that you do not have to type it all out, just copy and past it and then alter for your own scores.

Sara found this interesting link
http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/100books/bbcbigread.htm

Woolsthorpe Manor - The Home of Sir Isaac Newton

My Computer is fixed!!!!!!!!

Driving up to Yorkshire is only a matter of 4 hours (without stops) so we visited a couple of National Trust properties on the way.

The first was the birthplace and family home of Sir Isaac Newton. He was born here on Christmas Day in 1642. The premature and sickly baby was not expected to survive, but he grew into a thoughtful and solitary child unsuited to a farming life. He neglected his duties and even allowed animals on the family farm to wander off. Seeing Isaac’s intellectual promise, his uncle persuaded Isaac’s mother to allow him to go to King’s school in Grantham and he later went on to Cambridge University.

In 1665 Newton returned to Woolsthorpe in order to escape the plague in Cambridge. His discoveries at this time included revolutionary ideas in Mathematics, Optics, Gravity and formulating the Laws of Motion.

His theories and scientific methods underpin the world of science today.

You will see here the apple tree that Newton was said to be sitting under when the apple fell on his head which caused him to wonder what caused it to fall, which he thought was caused by a gravitational pull.

The tree we see here grew out of the stump of the original tree which fell in a storm.

Sorry it is blurred, I took it through glass

Scenes from his bedroom

Looking out of his bedroom straight at the apple tree

The working kitchen

See the servants sleeping cupboard

Back Home and a Giveaway

Back home after a fun holiday in Yorkshire. Visited castles, country houses, gardens, rock formations, a gorge, caves, villages, abbeys, churches, cathedrals, moors and dales, museums, tearooms and the beautiful town of Harrogate where we based ourselves. Must not leave out the world famous Betty’s Tearooms in Harrogate and our last night at the beautiful home of friends who recently moved to the area. Wonder why I felt exhausted. I did not even turn my computer on for 24 hours – that says something!

I have just loaded 436 photographs, many of which I plan to post as I am able.

It rained for 8 days out of 9 but we did not let this spoil our holiday, nor the disappointing accommodation. Thinking we were going to be staying in a mews cottage we found we were staying in an apartment. Somehow booking through a ‘holiday cottage’ agency the word apartment somehow slipped past my brain.

Why was the accommodation disappointing?

NEGATIVES
1. We scraped the side of our car as soon as we arrived trying to park in a garage (compulsory as there was nowhere else) through a door that left only 2 inches either side of our car and 4 inches at the back when the up and over door was closed. Neighbours parked at an angle on the hard stranding either side of our entry position.
2. The advertised ‘courtyard’ was only a small back yard.
3. We had a ground floor apartment (4 floors in all) in a large old town house above a guy who played drums to accompanying music at 7.0 am and 11 pm sometimes.
4. There was a pub opposite, an RAF club 2 doors down and an ex-servicemen’s club next to that. With the ban on indoor smoking the smokers drink outside even in the rain.
5. The house was situated on a large roundabout that connected 4 main roads.
6. The drains overflowed and smelled bad when there was torrential rain.
7. Kitchen cupboards dusty and full of ‘stuff’, jam making things and much that one would never use on holiday but lacked some of the basic things I needed.
8. The advertised ‘dining room’ was a small space set as a walk through between the kitchen and bathroom, the bathroom door opening almost on to the table.

POSITIVES
1. Large comfortable sitting room and bedroom with comfortable four poster bed and 11 foot ceilings.
2. Tall, double sided American style fridge-freezer.
3. A separate study area that I found useful for dumping my photography stuff and papers, maps etc.
4. Could walk into the centre of the beautiful town of Harrogate.
5. A large supermarket less than 5 minutes walk away.

We found out from neighbours that the owner had originally owned the whole house and then converted it into separate apartments, living on the ground floor herself until last Christmas when her husband died when she moved. I was not surprised to hear that as it felt more like it had been someone’s home than a holiday let. There were many oil paintings and watercolours on the walls and the impression was that it had once been an elegant place

So I will be posting on many aspects of Yorkshire as and when I can but for now I am coming up to my 300th post so am offering another GIVEAWAY. Leave a comment and let me know if you want to be entered for the draw. I will draw the winner on the 31st August. If you win you will need to let me have your E-mail address and home address: See details below:

Cath Kidston is a very popular and modern London designer

I bought this little bag which is a Cath Kids

from her junior collection

I thought it would make a nice little hanging bag for make-up

but of course you may have much better ideas yourself

There will be an extra surprise inside

that I bought especially for the winner while in Yorkshire

This is the tearooms in the Cath Kidston shop in Harpenden

It is fitted out with Cath Kidston cushions and table coverings

Harpenden is a very upmarket area and when we were there the place was full of

Mum's and children straight from school

We visited when at Janie's as it is a 10 minute car ride from her home

A Pub

Houses on the Green

My Best Wishes to all who enter - I wish you could all win

Baptisms, BBQ's,Holidays and More

I have again received this Brilliant WebLog Award. This time it came from

Willow of Willows Cottage

Thank you Willow I am honoured to receive it

I am going to pass it on to Janie of From Under the Maple

Janie as most of you know is my precious daughter

I think she does brilliantly to manage an interesting blog as well as hold down a full time and high flying career as well as being Mum to darling Oliver who was 2 last weekend

She is unable to post at the moment as their computer 'died' when she returned from holiday with lots of photos of Cornwall to post on. She will be back as soon as it is possible.

I mentioned on a recent post that we were having a Baptism for a new Christian in our House Church. The venue was a play pool in the garden next door. I have her full permission to post a couple of pictures of the baptism.

Afterwards we moved to another home across the street to have a barbecue

It was a wonderful day in all

The card I made for Oliver

We bought him a traditional wooden train set

Another card made recently

I am managing to work on my computer to a point, but there are still things that need fixing.

During the 2 re-builds my printer driver seems to have disappeared

and some of my graphics stuff

I have been amazed to realise just how much I had on my computer that is not now there

I am having to gradually download much software as needed

The 'professionals' backed up my documents and everything in them including photos

but they did not back up my Outlook Express, nor any of my settings. I did therefore lose about

120 E-mail addresses and lots of information stored in folders there.

In future I will not store anything in Outlook Express that is important to me.

To think that all this came about because I attempted to install a

new wireless keyboard and mouse to replace my existing one

I don't even have a wireless keyboard installed at all now

and am using the bog standard one that came from Dell in the first place

Aren't computers wonderful!

We are off on holiday this coming Saturday

We are going to the Yorkshire Dales for a week

and basing ourselves in a Mews Cottage in Harrogate

There will eventually be lots of photos as we will be visiting

castles, country houses, gardens, caves, beautiful rolling hills

and the Spa town of Harrogate

We will then spend a night with friends in Ripon before returning home

I hope you all have a great week

I'll be back soon but in the meantime I leave you with a great tea-time treat

made by my own fair hands

The Shortbread is ready

The finished product

Chocolate Caramel Shortcake

Enjoy

My Roses and Awards

I am honoured to again have received another award. I have received this award 3 times in the last week. It came from Maria and Teresa and Laura Thank you all so much. I am passing it on to Cindy and Merisi and Sara All 3 have brilliant Weblogs, always hard choosing among the many brilliant blogs I visit.

As the first flush of roses has finished I thought it would be nice to have a reminder of the beauty that was, or at least the ones I got to take photos of.