Gaskell Society Conference 2019 (2) - Trip 1

Oh yes, two posts in one day! But the sock one was short. 

There are always two trips arranged for the conference; one on Saturday and one on Sunday, and one of them always includes a cream tea, which is a nice touch I think. This year the trips were to Oakwell Hall and the Millennium Gallery in Sheffield. 

I did Oakwell Hall first. It once belonged to some friends of Charlotte Bronte and she visited there several times and used it as the basis for Fieldhead House in Shirley. Shirley is almost CB's most tedious novel (imo, of course, other opinions are available, and given my deep loathing of CB I may be just slightly biased against all her works, not just Shirley). Anyway Oakwell is now in the care of the local authority and a very good job they make of it. It is open to the public and furnished as a Jacobean Manor house, that being the period in which it was built. The gardens are nice and include a very random statue of a sheep. 

Huge Jacobean Fireplace

Yep, a textile. I always take pictures of the textiles.

Exterior with excellent view of Jacobean window

Some of the garden

A carelessly dropped lute. I had to take a photo of this as the OH and I are toying with the idea of buying a lute between us as our Christmas present to each other this year. 

A view from the garden into the Spen valley

                                          No I wasn't kidding about the random sheep statue. 

The person nominally in charge of us on this afternoon kept stressing what an excellent gift shop the place had, and indeed it did. I could have spent an awful lot of money in it, but didn't. I did spend a little bit though. 

After Oakwell we moved on to the Beehive Honeypot for our tea. This was one of a whole set of restored buildings which had their own leaflet and it did all look lovely on a sunny afternoon and the tea and scones were great, but when all was said and done it was  a glorified retail opportunity with a garden centre at its heart. However it gave me a couple of nice pictures. 

And that was trip number one.