Step Into The Story

Thank you to everyone who helped me reach the 50 blog followers milestone this week! Today I am blogging with the lovely Deanna Jewel at http://deannajewel.blogspot.com/ Please drop by to say hello and join us for tea and cakes in the virtual parlour of Ashdown House. There is a set of the Brides of Fortune trilogy books up for grabs too!

Okay, I'm cheating now and cross posting something that I put up on the Ashdown House blog a month or so ago. I've closed the Ashdown blog down now and I'll be posting stuff here instead in future and also posting archive articles I hope will be of interest. Then, in August, it will be all change again when my NEW WEBSITE and BLOG are launched - exciting times! But for now, here is a piece I hope is interesting. It's also topical at the moment with temperatures in the UK set to hit 30C today and tomorrow. So pour yourself a cooling drink - iced tea? - and read on for a bit of a chill! Readers in the Southern Hemisphere might want a hot toddy instead, of course! In Ashdown village there are the remains of an icehouse. Trust me, they really are under this pile of weeds! A weed covered mound is now often the only evidence for the existence of an icehouse on an estate. There are similar enigmatic bumps in the grounds at Lancing Manor in Sussex and at Sherborne in Glouces...

As the new season at Ashdown House approaches I'm reminded of all the reasons why I enjoy working there. One of the main ones is that I always learn fascinating historical facts from our visitors. We get such a huge variety of people through the doors; history buffs, people with a connection to the Craven family, people whose ancestors worked at the house, and experts who have come to see the portrait collection or who are knowledgeable about 17th century architecture, or gardens or both or many other things. Here are three of the most interesting things that I have learned from Ashdown visitors: 1. That the rather idiosyncratic carved wooden heads on which the antlers are mounted were the accepted way to display hunting trophies in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The science of taxidermy had not progressed to the stage of allowing the preservation of the entire stag's head so the antlers were removed, a wooden stag's head was carved and painted and the antlers we...

Yesterday I was guiding tour parties around Ashdown House on a lovely, hot and sunny summer's day. For the first time we had other events happening at the house and it was fabulous! First there was an early music ensemble playing in the gardens. When we were on the roof balcony we could hear "Greensleeves"wafting up to us on the breeze which was wonderfully evocative. Then there were the living history re-enactors. A horse and carriage was taking visitors around the estate and it was extraordinary to see a historic vehicle using the old Ashdown carriage drive and the road down to the stables. But for me the absolute best bit was having the living history re-enactors wandering about the house and gardens and chatting to us all. On the guided tour we talk about the reasons that the staircase at Ashdown is so wide and one of them is to accommodate the breadth of ladies' skirts. I'd never seen a lady in period dress trying to ascend the stairs until yesterday and now...

Here I am blogging on this blog about what I have written on my other blog, which strikes me as somewhat surreal! However it did occur to me that there might be readers here who are interested in the life of a servant in Victorian times, so if that appeals to you drop by the Ashdown House Blog where there are also plenty of other interesting historical snippets!