Paved Garden

I am now staying with friends near Westerham in Kent who used to be our next door neighbours.  They picked me up yesterday on their way home from Cornwall stopping at Niwaki's on the way to look at the Japanese garden tools.

 Today we visited Penshurst Place.  The photograph is the Paved Garden with probably the gardener's cottage behind.  Other photographs are views of the castle.  The property used to belong to Henry VIII who passed it to his son Edward VI and he in turn granted it to Sir William Sidney in 1552 whose family, the Viscounts De L'Isle, are still the owners and live there.

It was a boiling hot day so after strolling through numerous garden rooms surrounded with Yew hedges we were very glad to see inside. There is an enormous medieval hall, still with the original medieval long tables, and a fire on the floor in the middle of the room.  I think now only charcoal is burned as there is nowhere for the smoke to go! 

The lily pond in one of the photographs was originally a medieval stock pond (presumably for fish) and then became Diana's Bath - there are steps down into the water on two corners.  No one knows who Diana was.