Swan at Newark Park

After our return from Dorset, I fancied a minor jaunt, so we set off in the bright sunshine for Newark Park, one of our nearby National Trust properties. Today was the first opening for the spring season, and the grand unveiling of the new "catering pavillion" which, although lovely on the outside, has all the charm of a service station cafe, with prepackaged sandwiches and coffee from a twenty-button machine. This was a great disappointment to me, but I recovered, and we concentrated on blipping snowdrops, aconites, croci (?) and other natural materials in the grounds.

I chose the swan in the room overlooking the Edge (of the the Cotswold escarpment) because the previous tenants, Robert the Texan and his partner Michael, loved swans and there are hundreds of them in porcelain, arrayed all over the house. There is nothing kitsch about the decor, however. Robert died in 2000, and Michael, an antiques dealer, moved to Bath in 2011, and now the house is an NT property pure and simple, but one in which the furniture can be sat on and the items handled.

I've blipped the house and written about it before, so I'll go and find some links to it. https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/5036490 Newark Park isn't a showy place, as NT piles go, but it is lesser-known and all the much more loved for it. This may about to change, however, if the half term crowds were anything to go by.