A Few Days in Sussex

So, as I am about to wend my way south back to Glasgow, and then Inverness for a few days (leaving as per horribly normal , on the crack of dawn ferry on Wednesday) I thought I should get a move on chronicling our recent trip to Sussex. For those worried in retrospect about how far away it is and the effect this might  have had on the wheel bearing, it was an organised trip and we flew from Glasgow.

 

I cannot tell you what we did in the right order. This is partly because we did something as soon as we got off the plane, more or less, and I didn't have my camera with me. I am still waiting for the OH to upload his pictures of Penshurst Place from his phone and then e-mail them to me. It is also partly because the reason for doing the trip in the first place was an opera related Project 60 thing which will have its own post.

 

Never mind. We will jump straight to Day Two and Great Dixter. Of course I have photos, since I had by this time unpacked my camera but there are none of the inside of the house because photography is not permitted in there. I am not sure why. You're encouraged to look at stuff really closely - and I mean close enough to breathe on it, and touch stuff (well some of it) but photography inside the house is not allowed. Our first guide told us that. Our second guide, seeing someone looking around with a phone in hand, screamed it at us. NO PHOTOGRAPHY INSIDE THE HOUSE. Okay, we get it.

 

In a way this sums up the problem I had with the interior of Great Dixter, which is that the guides are a lot more precious about the place, and the people who lived there, than I suspect Christopher Lloyd, and his family before him , ever were about themselves. I don't generally do hero-worship (and I bet that surprises a lot of you out there, eh?) and I don't find it attractive in others.  I do respect people for what they achieve, and GD is an achievement, but it doesn't make me think the Lloyd family were just a little lower than the angels or to be talked about in  hushed tones and as though they never made a mistake, aesthetic or otherwise.

 

This whole attitude reached a peak when the more junior of the guides, referring to a swiss cheese plant that was running riot  over swathes of the Hall told us, in the hearing of the senior guide that it had been a present from Christopher Lloyd to Someone-or Other at which point the senior guide corrected her in front of us all by saying it had actually been a present from someone-or-other to Christopher.

 

Like it matters.

 

After the house we were taken on a guided tour of the garden by a young German man who had been a student at Great Dixter and then been fortunate enough to be given a job there. I am not a great one for national stereotypes, but you know the one about Germans being methodical and thorough.... we were ages!

 

Pictures

 

 

The House - obvs

 

 View of small garden just outside the house. One of the few places to have a bit of colour - October isn't necessarily the best time to visit great gardens

 

 

The Woodshed. The estate has quite a lot of woodland, which it coppices. 

The garden is designed on a 'lots of small rooms' idea. We could do that with ours - not that we ever will!

 

Clematis and Dahlias

 

Cactii!

 

Not a clue, but they were a bonny colour!

 

View over countryside at the bottom of the drive. I have to say the Sussex countryside is stunning.