A rainy Sunday

We are currently 'enjoying' a typical English summer: that is, gloriously sunny from Monday to Friday, and grey and damp all weekend. Nevertheless, we packed a picnic and went out last Sunday to Wallington Hall. Our plan was to walk in the area, and to head for the house if the weather turned against us. But the weather turned against us before we even arrived: all the way north we watched the dashboard thermometer dropping and the rain increasing, and we ended up spending most of the day touring the house.

This was no hardship; it just wasn't the walk we had planned. We hadn't been to Wallington for some time, and in the interim they've been closed for renovation work; so the visit was a mixture of moments of recognition and memories (the study where my mother talked about Sir George Trevelyan, the greenhouse where we showed durham_rambler's mother the fuchsias) of trying to work out what was new and what I had simply forgotten. It's a house with a huge amount of detail to see: the china collection, for example, and the Bell Scott murals (slideshow here), the kitchen with its many devices (a spice box just like mine! a marmalade cutter!), the eighteenth century embroideries of Lady Julia Calverley (scenes from Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics, it says here, which explains why parts of it matched the conventional 'works and days' and some didn't). There was also a room full of doll's houses, but here I admitted defeat (one doll's house is infinitely absorbing, two could be interesting, but six or seven?) We didn't have the energy for more than a cursory inspection of the Cabinet of Curiosities, either.

By now it was four o' clock, the rain had almost stopped. We decided that although we had done as much museum-type walking as we could take, we might manage a little stroll round the gardens, and followed the map we had been given, with a detour to the gryphons' heads (which used to be the identifying image of Wallington but seem to have been supplanted by owls), across the road, round a sequence of ponds studded with waterlilies, to the walled garden. The gardens were in full bloom and sparkling with raindrops. Then down to the Wansbeck, passing under the ornamental bridge, back across the road, over the river on stepping stones and back through the woods to our starting point. Not a long walk but a very pleasant one, and we had it almost entirely to ourselves.