As my sister and my daughter-in-law had never even heard of Titsey Place, we thought we'd take them there for a history lesson while we amused our grandson in the huge garden.
It doesn't open until 1, so we took a picnic lunch - our grandson adores picnics - and then bought tickets for the house for two of us and the garden for the rest.
There were far more flowers this time than we saw on our visit at the end of May.
This was one stunning display from inside the walled garden. Below is another.
I think we visited at just the right time to see this part of the garden.
Of course, such displays are of no interest to two year olds, so we had to drag his mother out of the walled garden to the part of the estate where there were huge open spaces for running about. This didn't go entirely to plan, as we walked over to look at the ha-ha and explain to my daughter-in-law what it was and how it was used, and the said two year old, who loves jumping off things, decided to jump down into it! He just jumped, with no warning; his mother and I nearly had a fit! He must have jumped down 6 or 8 feet, and could easily have broken something. Fortunately, the ground was very soft, and apart from a look of surprise, he seemed not to be hurt at all. It was quite complicated to get him back again though. (I should explain, for people unfamiliar with English stately homes, that a ha-ha is a way of keeping the grazing animals out of your garden without spoiling the purity of the view of your land with anything so plebeian as a fence. The ha-ha is something like a very deep ditch at the boundary between your garden proper and your grazing land. The ditch is completely vertical on the garden side and built up with stone so it remains vertical and won't erode away. On the grazing land side, the wall of the ditch is usually lower and may be sloping - you don't want your grazing animals to break a leg falling in, and you want them to be able to get out again if they do fall in. But there's no way sheep or cows can climb a 6 or 8 foot wall and get into your garden)
Our grandson was able to climb the sloping side of the ditch and get into the field beyond, but then we couldn't get him back to our side. The ditch was too deep for any of us to reach down and lift him out, and rather too deep for any of the adults to contemplate jumping down - none of us wanted a broken leg! We all ran along the garden side of the ditch and he ran along the other side in the field, while we looked for a shallow area where one of us could jump down. Eventually, we came to a spot where there was a bridge across not much more than a foot wide, and he ran across that and we lifted him over a gate and back into the garden. I'd have had to go over a bridge that narrow on my hands and knees, but he knows no fear; he's just like his father.
He seemed none the worse for his adventure, and insisted on playing 'roly-poly' down all the steep banks he could find in the garden, encouraging his grandfather to join in. I'm not sure what other visitors thought of elderly gentlemen rolling over and over down nearly all of steep banks in the garden! I wouldn't let them roll down this bank, I thought it was too steep.
Anyway, they would have ended up in the rose bushes, which might have been rather uncomfortable. This is a view of the side of the house; clearly, somebody has spent a lot of time on the box hedge, to achieve that wonderful decorative pattern.
We walked to other parts of the garden, looking for other banks to roll down. Not everywhere was suitable, as the grass wasn't always comfortable. We walked right down to the far end of the garden, something we hadn't had time to do before. There are two lakes, with a stream between. We managed to walk all round the furthest away one.
This is half way down one side. The blue bridge you can see goes across to a little island, but there's a gate half way along the bridge, which prevents you crossing to the island, where there's a duck house, so probably ducks. At the very far end of the lake, behind the island, there's a little imitation Greek temple where we rested - or some of us rested anyway. The smallest one just continued to run about - heaven knows where he gets the energy!
After we had walked all the way back up to the house, we had a short wait while his mother and aunt finished their house tour. By that time, my grandson had been running about and rolling down banks for more than an hour - and that's after running about like a mad thing in the huge walled garden and the excitement of jumping into the ha-ha. He was exhausted by the time they came out of the house though, so we all came home.
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