A Day Out at Cragside (National Trust)

Yesterday, having started to make various fanciful interpretations of what I could "see" in my Abstract Thursday blip, I joked that I needed to get out more - and several blippers seemed to agree! Well today we did just that.

In view of Lockdown2 we stayed within the Northeast area but drove to Cragside, near Rothbury. If you don't know it, it's a fabulous Victorian estate and house created by William Armstrong. There's lots of interesting info on Wikipedia here. After Armstrong's death in 1900 the family ran into financial problems but happily the National Trust took over the site in 1977, thereby preventing the estate being turned into a large-scale residential development.

The main photo shows the house seen from one of the many walking tracks round the estate. At this time of year I think the house is always closed to visitors (we've been in before in summer time so that didn't matter) and of course with lockdown it couldn't be open anyway. But the grounds are massive and magnificent - social distancing was no problem at all especially with the small number of visitors.

Armstrong was a pioneer of hydroelectric power and, although his original system no longer functions, a new "Archimedean Screw" generator has fairly recently been installed at the outfall of one of the lakes. The first shows it in action, and the second gives some fascinating information about it.

The autumn colours around the estate were still rather splendid, so I've uploaded some shots to Google Photos here.