The Gardens

I went around the kitchen garden first. As you might imagine it was full of vegetable patches and fruit trees. There was even a large banana tree. Despite the recent hot weather the flowers still looked in pretty good shape.

After the kitchen garden I came across the children's adventure playground. The apparatus looked so good I was almost tempted to have a go myself on some of them. It was certainly different to the 'adventure playground' of my childhood. My old stomping ground was situated in an old quarry and consisted of a few tractor tyres concreted to the ground, and an old fire engine that had been vandalised almost beyond recognition. The quarry was surrounded by high cliffs which were a death trap to youngsters. I was once caught by a gang of kids there, who threatened to immolate me. Fortunately my tears drenched their cigarette lighter. Not so happy days.

The trail continued around the back of the main house and then around the lakes. This area was very picturesque. There were quite a few birds on the lakes including wild fowl, gulls, swans and a heron. The trail went through a Menagerie garden and this was accompanied by a rather spooky looking house.

Since you have to pay to enter the gardens, the whole area is fenced off from the rest of Nostell's grounds and so I had to follow the trail back to the Stables to get out to the main grounds.

Flying High

As I walked from the Stables to the main house I heard a cry above me. I looked up to see the magnificent sight of a Buzzard circling above me. It soared around me a few times and then followed the woodland down towards where the cattle were grazing.

The seats outside the main house were occupied by a lot of men. Some of them looked rather fed up. Maybe their partners had gone into the house and they hadn't, due to their lack of curiosity, or quite possibly because of the price. The house contains one of John Harrison's clocks. In fact he lived here at Nostell. He was the first person to invent a clock that was accurate enough to enable sailors to calculate their longitude position. I wanted to walk around the other trails in Nostell's grounds today though, and so visiting the house would have to wait for another day.

Nostell's Free Trails

I set off to explore the other trails in Nostell's grounds. The cycle trails have signage indicating they are one-way systems. I headed off the wrong way up one of them, in an attempt to see what would happen. Maybe the NT would put me in stocks for the afternoon. In the end, nothing happened and I just continued. The free trails are less picturesque than the gardens, but they are still well worth a wander. At the end of Obelisk Park (open area), there is the mysterious Obelisk Lodge. The building reminded me a little of an obelisk that James T Kirk finds on a planet, in one of the original Star Trek episodes. The episode is called The Paradise Syndrome. It is an interesting episode in that Kirk gets one of the ladies on the planet pregnant. Yes, really! I'll let you look it up to see how he got out of that one. I think he forgot to update his Captain's Log on that particular occasion .

There is a long stone boundary wall on the northeast of the grounds. Many of the stones were weathered and created some wonderful patterns. The trail eventually brought me back to the carpark.

Nostell Priory hadn't seemed to have changed much over the last 40 years. I have though. My knees aren't as flexible as they used to be, and I have to wear a sun hat due to the loss of my thatch. I can still drink a few pints of Theakston's Old Peculiar without any problems though. I might even dust off an old Jethro Tull CD when I get home .."Too Old To Rock'n'Roll And Too Young To Die", as Ian Anderson sings in one of their songs.