Well, only 10 days behind now! I did catch up, but then I slipped again by being too hot and tired on Thursday 11th to write up what we did, and too busy on the following days.
We had collected my sister from Kings Lynn station on Wednesday night - she caught the train up from London after work - and on Thursday morning, we set off for some determined sightseeing. We had afternoon tickets for Houghton Hall in the late afternoon, so we started by setting off for Castle Rising, which is just to the East of Kings Lynn.
Castle Rising is a good example of what you might call a Norman Motte and Bailey castle, built in 1138.
This is the ditch and bank of the motte, showing the entry across the ditch into the gatehouse.
This is the keep, set inside the bailey.
You can see from my photo that the earthworks round the castle are now very high, but this height is not original; when they were first built they would have been much lower and the castle would have been visible from a great distance away. The earthworks were raised to the current height at a later date.
There was something on the site even before this castle was raised. Doomsday Book shows that before and after 1066, it was a part of the manor of Snettisham. Stigand, the Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury, owned it from 1052 until his overthrow by the Normans in 1070. Then William the Conqueror gave it to his half-brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux (the person who ordered the Bayeux Tapestry)
Odo fell from favour in 1088, and the castle's next owner was William's son, William Rufus, who later became King William II. It was later bought by William D’Albini, and he built the current keep in 1138. After a couple of changes of ownership, it was given by King Edward III to his mother, Queen Isabella in 1331. Even though she was popularly believed to be implicated in the death of her husband, King Edward II, she was not held prisoner and lived a life of considerable luxury here. When she died in 1358 the castle passed to Edward the Black Prince. He seems to have been the last owner to spend much money on it, and after his death it gradually fell into decline. In 1544 King Henry VIII gave it to the Howard family who still own it, but it's now a ruin, as you can see.
Most of the stairs are in the towers, so you can still go right inside and upstairs to see the remains of the rooms.
You can see marks in the wall where beams would have been to support the intervening floors. There are many interesting smaller rooms just inside the walls.
After that visit, which took quite a while because it was very interesting, my sister decided she would like to see the sea, so we drove to Snettisham beach. The tide was out
and the beach at this point was very shallow, but beautifully sandy. There was almost nobody to be seen anywhere, though we walked about a mile along the beach. We got lots of sea air because it was extremely windy!
Then we set off for Houghton Hall, where we had tickets to get into the house at 4.30. Tickets to see the house were in rather short supply, so I was fortunate to get any at all. There was plenty to see in the gardens, so we wanted to arrive for lunch to have a good look at everything outside the house first.
I should explain that Houghton Hall was built in the 1720s by Sir Robert Walpole, who is usually regarded as Britain's first Prime Minister. It is described as being one of England’s finest Palladian houses.
Houghton once contained part of Sir Robert Walpole's great picture collection, which his grandson the 3rd earl sold in 1779 to Catherine the Great of Russia to pay off some of the estate's accumulated debt. Most of the paintings are now in the Hermitage, in St Petersburg.
The current owner of the house is a descendant of Sir Robert, the Marquess of Cholmondeley. (This is yet another of those delightful English names which is pronounced differently from the way it is spelled; the name is pronounced Chumley!) In a drawer in Walpole's desk he discovered handwritten plans showing the position on the walls of all the paintings, and thought it would be wonderful if they could be displayed where they originally were. Little else has changed since Walpole’s time with much of the original furniture and fabrics still in place, as the family had very little money to spend on 'improvements'. Lord Cholmondeley negotiated with the Hermitage and other Russian museums as well as the National Gallery in Washington and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to return 70 lost paintings to their original position on the walls, surrounded by the original furnishings as well so visitors would see the house looking much as it did in Walpole's time. Now perhaps you can understand why the tickets were in such demand; the exhibition only runs from May to September, and visitor numbers are limited - I booked about a month before we went, and was lucky to get any tickets at all.
After lunch, we walked around the ten acres of beautiful gardens.
This is the rose garden, a sea of white roses and lavender. The herbaceous borders were also spectacular.
There are other beautiful gardens in the huge heavily cultivated area, including wonderful kitchen gardens; heaven knows how much it costs to maintain such huge and spectacular gardens in such a lovely condition.
After that, we walked round the rest of the extensive grounds; the Marquess of Cholmondeley collects modern art, and pieces of it are displayed all over the grounds.
This is the giant stainless steel Scholar Rock by Chinese sculptor Zhan Wang.
Before 4.30, both Paul and I were completely exhausted and needed a rest in the shade before we could contemplate seeing inside the house.
Unfortunately, having such late tickets, we only had an hour in the house, and could have stayed much longer. No photographs were allowed, and there are room stewards who watch you closely, so I had no chance to sneak even one. There are paintings by Van Dyck, Poussin, Rubens, Rembrandt, Velazquez and Murillo, as well as lots of other artists. The Van Dycks were superb, as was the Velazquez, and the Rembrandt quite remarkable. My sister thought the Poussins had been over-cleaned. Because it was a house and not a gallery, the painting were crammed in all over the place and hung right up to the ceiling. It was frequently hard to discover what they were, because the numbering system in the little booklet was so very strange. Most of the paintings are not well know, or not by us at least, but that's not surprising as they aren't in this country. Many of them were by people I had never heard of, and some were 'studio of' and I would consider them quite poor. One in particular, 'studio of Veronese', showed the risen Christ in such an odd attitude he looked like an almost naked Bruce Forsyth with arms spread wide and one foot forward, exclaiming 'Da Dah!' The furnishing and tapestries were superb though, and there were some wonderful statues, not to mention spectacular ceilings. As usual, we had to be ushered out at closing time - an hour was not really long enough for us to appreciate everything. We were all exhausted though, and had to go back to the hotel to recover before going out to eat. You will appreciate why I was too hot and tired to write this up in the evening!
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