Roaming Richardsons: May 2019

A Visit to Knole

Monday, 27 May 2019

We spent last weekend in Kent. (Rox and I attended a Hen's Party there on Saturday, which was a lot of fun!) This was our first visit to Kent and we will definitely be returning soon, not least because we have a wedding to attend next month! Both my paternal and maternal families originate in Kent, so I have lots of genealogical scratching to do there too. On Sunday, we decided to break our journey home with a visit to Knole. It was a spur-of-the-moment visit, so I hadn't done any research and had no idea what to expect. It turned out to be a lovely place and we will definitely take Paula and Cal there when they visit next month.

We began our visit with a walk through the medieval deer park. It was such fun to see the deer up close.

The littlies enjoyed messing around in the forest den (a feature of most wooded areas we've walked through here in the UK)

We then wandered up to the cafe, where we had a lovely lunch. Most of the National Trust places we have visited have had really good quality, reasonably priced meals available.

After lunch we took a wander around the 600 year old estate buildings, which were originally built as an archbishop's palace. We didn't do an in-depth tour of all the rooms as we had the grandchildren with us, next time we'll definitely wander through more of the showrooms. We absolutely loved what we did see. So beautiful!

Knole is definitely one of the most child-friendly estates we have visited, with loads of hands-on features for the grandchildren to fiddle with.

The children were encouraged to touch the displays in the estate room above and there were even bits of paper and stamps provided for them to use.

We absolutely loved our visit to Knole and highly recommend it.

bluebells · Chilterns · Hertfordshire · woods

Bluebells in Dockey Wood

Sunday, 12 May 2019

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I have a new love in my life..... the English Bluebell! Living in South Africa, bluebells were never something I thought much about and then we moved to England and suddenly they have became something of an obsession!

I've discovered some interesting facts about these pretty little blue flowers since I sat up and took notice, for instance: I discovered that almost half the world's bluebells are found in the UK, they’re relatively rare in the rest of the world. The entire bluebell plant is poisonous to humans and animals. Although common in the UK, bluebells are threatened by habitat destruction and cross-breeding with non-native bluebells (eg the Spanish bluebell) They are pretty fragile, they can take years to recover from being stepped on and bluebell colonies take a long time to establish - roughly five to seven years from the seed being planted to flowering. Bluebells are protected by the Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981), making it against the law to intentionally pick, uproot or destroy bluebells

Since the beginning of April I have been on "bluebell watch", eagerly awaiting our first visit to see the bluebells. Bluebells usually flower from mid-April to late May, depending on the weather. Finally, a couple of weeks ago we saw the first bluebells appearing in the odd garden and then, the first week in May, I heard that the bluebells were looking beautiful in some of the local woods and so we made our first visit to Dockey Wood to see these beautiful flowers. We were not disappointed! What a sight to behold!