Holidays

 I’ve been remiss about recording the holidays we’ve been on this year (so far). So I’ll start by writing about our most recent to Durham.  We went there straight from staying at my brother-in-law and his wife in Devon.  They’d recently moved to Barnstaple and we tried to get a separate break there but instead we went from hom (Dorset), stayed in Barnstaple then on to Durham (with an overnight stop in Leicester). So we were away from home for 2 weeks, after which we had a lot of catching up to do!

Devon is only the next county, but it’s slow going on the A35 getting to the fastest road and after Exeter there are single carriageway roads to Barnstaple. While there we had a visit to Arlington Court NT, with a tour around the gardens and another day using our bus passes from Barnstaple to Lynton and Lynmouth.

A few views of the scarecrow characters around Lynton and the yarn bombing on the Town Hall

Our travels from Devon to Co. Durham included a stop in the Cotswolds to Hidcote Manor NT with delightful gardens.

And a textile art exhibition by Janet Haigh.

Our reason for heading to the North East again was to revisit Beamish Museum as we had an annual ticket after our visit there last year and didn’t get to see everything we wanted to see first time around.  But we also want to visit Durham and other places too.  We stayed in a cottage attached to the farm house just south of Durham.  At this time I still had stitches in my forehead as I had a fall a couple of days before we went away and we weren’t going home for another week. Luckily the Urgent Treatment Unit at nearby Peterlee Hospital wasn’t busy so I had the stitches removed and my scar looked to be healing well. (See my July post).  We found a nearby Tesco for our supplies for the week and to say this store was huge - this was massive! So it took a while to find where things were!

We enjoyed another NT garden- this time in Crook Hall and Gardens in the city centre. An oasis of calm in a city centre.  From one garden you can see the top towers of Durham Cathedral. Just above the shrubs. From the kitchen gardens at the back a view of the top of the railway pantograph.

There are a few sculptures 

I bought a mystery book from the secondhand bookshop.  The paper did look pretty…

Just out of the city is Washington Old Hall, said to be the ancestral home of George Washington, the hall at one time was divided up into several dwellings. An interesting building. A chance to see a North Country quilt on a bed.

On our return we could see in the distance Penshaw Monument, a rather large folly in the style of the Parthenon 🏛️.  David is unable to climb many steps so I braved the climb up there. He took a photo of me at the top of the monument with a long zoom.

During our stay we managed to visit two heritage railways. The first was the Weardale Railway in Stanhope, near Bishop Auckland. It’s a short railway and we rode on an ex-Northern Pacer diesel unit.

The second railway we visited during the week was the Wensleydale Railway and we went on another Pacer from Leeming Bar station to Leyburn.  They had recreated a Victorian station masters house at Leeming Bar so we had a tour of the station building with costumed volunteer guides which was a nice touch.

So I’m going to leave it here and my next post will be about Beamish.