A Derbyshire Mystery

Last weekend I visited my Cheshire family and went with Mother and Dad for a beautiful walk in their beloved Derbyshire Peak District. We parked the car at Middleton (which features in the magnificent book The Hike by Don Shaw) and walked through beautiful Bradford Dale.

Mother & Dad on a clapper bridge over the River Bradford

In the hollow leading down to the River Bradford we came across this intriguing piece of sculpture. Can any blogger tell us anything about it? We'd love to know how something so unexpected came to be there!
Click to enlarge and read the words

Old House in Youlgrave

Along with Auntie Kath, we also visited Tatton Park near Knutsford

where the Japanese Garden is a particularly beautiful feature

Our England is a garden...

You'd expect a post with such a title* to have Kipling connections but really it's about Kent, which is known as the Garden of England for its bountiful hops and fruit orchards. In particular it's about this exquisite medieval manor house near Sevenoaks where we spent a happy day:

*first line of The Glory of the Garden

Ightham Mote

Ightham Mote (pronounced Item: I asked) has a long and complicated history, beginning in the mid-14th century. There are Tudor, Jacobean and Victorian additions and the furnished rooms reflect this, from the medieval and Tudor chapels (the latter having a unique barrel-vaulted ceiling with painted panels) to early 20th-century bedrooms and library. Oh, and a moat. And a Grade 1 listed half-timbered dog kennel which you can see in the courtyard in one of the photos above. It's owned by the National Trust which spent 15 years and £10 million restoring it and who also look after its estate of several hundred acres.

After looking round the house and delightful gardens, we took a three-mile walk around the estate woodlands and lanes. The first half of the walk regaled us with a Wordsworthian profusion of wild flowers, some of which I know, others I'm guessing at after squinting in my little pocket book of wild flowers. I'd love to hear from people who know more about wild flowers than I do! That's probably most people.

Bugle?

Lesser Celandine

Ransoms (Wild Garlic)

Germander Speedwell

Dog Violet

Wood Anemone

Yellow Pimpernel

Lady's Smock (Cuckoo Flower): thanks to Carla for identifying

Ground Ivy or Bugle?

Greater Stitchwort?

Yellow Archangel

Wood Spurge

Red Campion?

May Blossom

On the second half of the walk, the views over the Kentish Weald (below and the blog header) in beautiful spring sunshine were breathtaking. My camera scarcely does them justice):

Ian Had a Little Lamb...

This one's for Alex. Lambsie-Pie was in a farmer's field. It must have decided Ian was its mother and it gambolled after him all the way to the field gate and stood with its little face at the fence, bleating in a heart-rending manner as it watched us walk away.

Lower Peover

Whilst staying with my parents recently, they took me for a walk in the Cheshire countryside which brought us to the tiny, almost hidden village of Lower Peover (no giggling in the back row there: it's pronounced Peever, not Pee-Over).

Here's the unusual parish church of St Oswald in Lower Peover:


It was originally built in about 1269, possibly, according to the church guidebook written by Rev Canon Sladden, who was its vicar from 1959-1986, in thanksgiving for peace after the rebellion of Simon de Montfort and to commemorate the release of men who had sided with him. St Oswald was the evangelising king of Northumbria who died at the hands of the heathen king Penda of Mercia at the Battle of Maserfield (probably Oswestry in Shropshire) in 642. His remains, the Canon tells us, were recovered later by his brother Oswy, who took them to be enshrined at Lindisfarne and Bamburgh, possibly passing through Peover on the way. The body of the church is one of the oldest timber-framed buildings of its type in Europe, whilst the tower is of red Cheshire sandstone. Here are some photos of its interior from the inestimable Cheshire Antiquities website.

There are other Peovers hereabouts: Peover Superior (or Over Peover), Nether Peover and Peover Heath. Near Over Peover is Peover Hall, an Elizabethan mansion with an Arts and Crafts garden. It was for a time during the Second World War the HQ of the American Third Army under General Patton.

According to the knowledgeable Canon Sladden, the name Peover comes from early British pevr meaning 'darting', 'sparkling' or 'bright', an apt description of the stream known as the Peover Eye which runs through the area. The Anglo-Saxons took over the name and added their own word for stream: thus it became 'Pevr Ee'.

Before we leave charming Lower Peover, here are some more photos:

The village street

The old school house

The village pump

Here are Mother and Dad outside St Oswald's

And here they are with my Auntie Kath at the birthday lunch we had on 2 February

I don't think they would mind me saying that they are in their eighties, lively, active and interested in everything - an inspiration to us all.

Sussex Back-to-Backs

On a recent ramble we came across a fascinating house called Great Wapses Farm, near Twineham, West Sussex.

The footpath took us past the front of the house, which looked like this:

Then it led us round to the back of the house, which looked like this:

As we were gawping in amazement, the owner came out and explained that the timber and brick house was built in the early 17th century and the Georgian house added to its back in about 1720. It's now all one house. Apparently, there are only about 40 such houses in England, mainly in Sussex, the rest in Suffolk.

I wondered if the owner of the earlier house had gone up in the world, perhaps having profited from enclosing land, and had built himself an elegant house a la mode on the back of the old one, facing away from the farmyard.

A couple of weeks later on a ramble that began in Warnham, West Sussex, we hoped to find the poet Shelley's childhood home at nearby Field Place. But no public footpath runs within viewing distance so when we got home, I Googled Field Place. Imagine my surprise when this came up:

The website where I found this photo explains:

Although Field Place was "improved" by successive owners over the years, the house has now been meticulously restored to its eighteenth-century condition by Kenneth Prichard Jones, a past president of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association. The house is composed of several architectural elements (for a thorough analysis of the architecture, see K. Prichard Jones, "The Influence of Field Place and its Surroundings upon Percy Bysshe Shelley" in the Keats-Shelley Review). The original thirteenth-century medieval section held the kitchen in Shelley’s time. There is also a fourteenth-century central addition.

There are more photos of Field Place on the website.

Finally, back to Twineham, then, where there's an unusual brick church built in around 1516, replacing an older building from about 1290. British History Online has this (and more) to say about it, as well as more about Great Wapses and other historic houses around Twineham:

The church of St. Peter is a small structure consisting of a chancel with a modern north organ-chamber, nave, south porch, and west tower, with a shingled oak spire. The walls are of brick, with remains of original plastering outside; the roofs are covered with Horsham stone slabs. The church was built in the first or second decade of the 16th century, probably on the site of an earlier building.