The weirdest places....

We visited Buckland Abbey.

Buckland Abbey was originally a Cistercian abbey founded in 1278 by Amicia, Countess of Devon and was a daughter house of Quarr Abbey, on the Isle of Wight. It remained an abbey until the Dissolution of the Monasteries by King Henry VIII. In 1541 Henry sold Buckland to Sir Richard Grenville the Elder (Sewer of the Chamber to Henry VIII, poet, soldier, last Earl Marshall of Calais) who, working with his son Sir Roger Greynvile (Gentleman of the Privy Chamber Henry VIII, Captain of the ill fated Mary Rose), began to convert the abbey into a residence renaming it Buckland Greynvile. Sir Roger died in 1545 when the Mary Rose heeled over in a sudden squall while the English Fleet was engaged with the French Fleet in the Narrow Sea off Portsmouth, leaving a son aged 3, also named Richard Grenville, who completed the conversion in 1575–76. After being owned by the family for 40 years, Buckland Greynvile was sold by Sir Richard the Younger to two intermediaries in 1581, who unbeknownst to Greynvile, were working for Drake, whom he despised. The abbey is unusual in that the church was retained as the principal component of the new house whilst most of the remainder was demolished, which was a reversal of the normal outcome with this type of redevelopment.
Drake lived in the house for 15 years, as did many of his collateral descendants until 1946, when it was sold to a local landowner, Arthur Rodd, who presented the property to the National Trust in 1948.
We visited many years ago, when the boys were small, in an effort to instil a sense of history in the pair of them. They were, pretty much, unimpressed but picked up on the story of the Armada. 
Later on Wembury beach, we invented a game called "Drake and the Spaniels" in which we set up pebbles in the sand and then lobbed other pebbles at them. The pebbles were the Armada [Spaniels] and we were Drake. Time and time again we were victorious over the rampaging King of Spain's navy.

Anyway, guess what? Dogs aren't allowed in the house and gardens, so while Roo went to look at those, Tess and I had to walk around the grounds. Every so often on the set walks there are plaques, intended for rubbing. Obviously, H has been here before?