WE SET OFF ON OUR TREK - AND THE FIRST GARDEN ON OUR TOUR . . . LITTLE MORETON HALL

At the risk of sounding like the beginning of a children’s TV show - here’s Ben - Ben of the National Trust - and with Ben coming to sign us up, our three week camping trek around England and Scotland began. Lucy Corrander met him in the winter when he was braving ice and wind on the sea-front, offering tea to anyone interested in joining.  Here he is braving the chaos of our house. Sometimes, I make a list of what’s on our kitchen table for the entertainment of people reading my other blog. Now you can see why the inventories are long!

Little Moreton Hall, near Congleton in Cheshire.

And this is why we wanted to join the National Trust - free entry to places like Corfe Castle (a bus ride from home) and to others like Little Moreton Hall (pictured above) which were on our holiday itinerary.

Are you gasping with amazement?

I’d been there before and was a little nervous taking my family along for it had made a deep impression on me. What if they found it an anti-climax? “Oh, mum! Why did you think we’d like this?’ kind of thing. But they didn’t. Indeed it was hard to wrench ourselves away from the higgledy-piggledy arrangement of rooms, the sloping floors and the long gallery at the top (the weight of which contributes substantially to the way the building sags).

The house dates from the 1450s. (A new wing was added between 1570 and 1580). Although the wealth of the royalist Moreton family was dented during the civil war (1642 - 1651) and Parliamentary troops were billeted there for a while, Moreton descendants continued to live at The Hall until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when lack of money meant they had to rent it out. Gradually, it fell into such disrepair, it became uninhabitable . . . but was restored in the nineteenth century and handed into the care of the National Trust in 1938.

When I say ‘restored’ I’m not sure it would have looked precisely as it does now when it was built. Time has created rickety angles to an almost comic extreme. But there’s another thing too . . .  I grew up in Essex where there are lots of half-timbered buildings, and remember hearing that the original architects hadn’t intended that the wood be exposed like this. The Wikipedia entry about Little Moreton Hall says that the beams in this particular house would have been visible right from the beginning and the weather would have been allowed to soften the colour of the wood (it wouldn't have been painted bright black!) - and the plaster would have been ochre, not white.

The day we were there, it was raining heavily. Indeed, it rained almost non-stop for the whole of our holiday, which limited both what we did and what we photographed - but here’s a quick glimpse of the knot garden. You may see foot prints up the middle path. Just before I took the picture, a little boy had run from one end to the other, leaving these scuffs behind him. A few moments later, a man emerged from somewhere with a rake and smoothed it all flat again.

If it hadn’t been raining . . . I’d have taken a picture of the moat . . . the apple trees and quinces . . .  and maybe the plants for sale . . .

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The next garden to be visited will be Rydal Hall in the Lake District.

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To find out more about Ben and his work for the National Trust along the Jurassic Coast - Click for 'Jurassic Coastin'.