An Instrument of Torture?

Thank you for the kind wishes yesterday.  

We spent the morning exercising but in the afternoon we re-visited Shugborough and this time checked out the mansion and servant's quarters.  You might easily imagine this to be some instrument of torture but it was actually used to clean the larger items of linen from the house, using the stones to agitate the cloth.

The last time I can remember being inside the mansion I was probably in my teens, so it was interesting to see how the National Trust had gone about recreating the rooms.  Certainly the servant's quarters were really interesting, and seemed quite complete in respect of the equipment and utensils one might have expected to see for a large country house of this era.