Yorkshire - The Next Instalment

So having recovered from my brief peri-prandial sulkette it was up early the next morning for the main event of the Dunnett Gathering. This was held at Betty's in Harrogate in one of their meeting rooms and I have to say as a venue for a couple of illustrated lectures and a lunch it left a bit to be desired. It was very elegant and there was nothing wrong with the catering, quite the reverse, in fact. It was a bit small to be comfortable for a group of our size, especially as the lunch and later afternoon tea and cakes were served at the back of the room. It was a bit of a crush. It is also in the middle of Harrogate, and the room was full of people so the question was do you open the windows and let in a load of traffic noise, or leave them closed and allow the atmosphere in the room to get 'a  bit thick'. We opted for open windows, which gave several people the opportunity to moan about the 'ungodly noise' from the bagpipe player who was busking nearby.

 

Now I quite like the pipes myself, and would have felt obliged to leap to the defence of the piper, but he only seemed to know two tunes - O Flower of Scotland and Highland Cathedral, and much as I love Highland Cathedral by the time I'd heard it ten times I was, temporarily, heartily sick of it. Although I was more bothered by the noise of the motorbikes myself.

 

Anyway if you want to see a photo of what a standard Dorothy Dunnett Gathering looks like, it looks a lot like this

 

and if you're thinking that that looks like a room full of opinionated middle aged women, you'd be right. We had two talks and I enjoyed them both; one was about mid C15 trade in Yorkshire, specifically the stuff that was imported/exported through Hull. The other one was about jewellery in the Renaissance. It was given by Susan Rumfitt who I gather is an expert who turns up on The Antiques Road Show now and again. She certainly knew her stuff and was quite entertaining; and she had some lovely slides of C15 & C16 portraits.

 

After this our involvement with the weekend was over. Most of the rest had another dinner that evening and a trip to Newby Hall the following day, but we had to get away from Harrogate sharpish. We had keys to pick up for this place

 

 

For some reason, despite staying there for a week, I never got around to taking any pictures of the inside, but it was as lovely inside as it was outside. Anyway we only had time for a quick look around and first pick of the bedrooms (for the record we took the one upstairs with the separate bathroom, leaving the ground floor one with the en-suite shower room for the others), and then it was off to the station to pick up Son No 1 and family who were joining us for the week. Excitement reigned.