Raby Castle, Teeesdale

Another day out started good, went downhill. First stop was Raby Castle, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Beautiful countryside: achingly green fields, sheep, trees in leaf, and few cars on the road compared with in the South. 

Raby castle is still lived in (sometimes) and is a collection of towers from different eras, bolted together. It has a gorgeous walled garden, a formal garden, a forest on the estate, and a high waterfall, which I would have loved to see. It's the kind of place where you have to have a guided tour. We left D watching a short film, and then accessing a computerised
 tour of the castle, because he can't do stairs very well. He was  satisfied with this arrangement. 

We saw Octagon-shaped rooms like the one above; paintings including one by Van Dyck; a kitchen with an old fashioned range and 540 copper items that need polishing every year, and much more. I enjoyed the feel of the property, and especially the Morris-inspired simple wallpaper in the guest bedroom, because of the wallpaper, this room is called 'the blue room' .
This made me giggle because my mother's house had a spare 'blue room' 
that had a loch side view, but was so small that if you slept on the inside of the double bed, you couldn't get out without climbing over the other occupant. The kind of room with 1970s style fitted vanity units from MDF-is-us. The Raby castle room would have fitted four of those rooms, and four more on a mezzanine level.

The tour was excellent, but we didn't have time for a coffee at the new 'vinery' terraced restaurant, because we had to rush to Barnard castle, then race to meet a train. We had about an hour and twenty minutes in Barnard Castle, a market town with a ruined castle. D and I went to the pub and had some lunch. It's any port in a storm now with D, but it was better than Morrison's cafe, and we had a window seat overlooking the Main Street. I took a quick run around the town centre, but had no time to look for the building that inspired Charles Dickens to write about the boarding school that he called 'Dotheboys Hall'. 

Next stop, after another glorious drive, was to the Weardale Railway. This is where things slightly fell apart for me. The engine was diesel, not steam, and the carriage seats were old bouncy patterned bench-style seating from the  1980s. There was no commentary on where we were going, no audio guide, no explanation, and we just went up the line and back down again. There was nothing to do at the head of the line, Wolsingham, and the former station house is a private dwelling with a barbecue in the small garden. I guess I'm spoiled, but we all agreed that we'd been on better heritage railway line trips. 

We drove back to the hotel, and I joined D in the bar and then for dinner. Our dinner companions are another odd couple: one is intellectually challenged, and the other has social awkwardness, among other things. The conversation was very stilted. The other woman who had been sitting at the other table with us had deserted us, and the coach driver had also deserted the table next door, which features an unsusual, outspoken couple and an older woman. I felt that dinner would never end, with conversations being totally disjointed. I didn't dare to talk to the people at the next table, because D had been freaked out by their earlier  ghost stories. I went to bed as soon as I could, and seriously wondered if I would go mad! I tried to phone S at home, but the signal was bad. Chatted to my SA friend V online about her citizenship application. Wondered how I was going to cope with the next day without going round the bend. Ended up watching Dogs Behaving Badly on the laptop (TV remote batteries had died) before going to sleep, knowing that D's alarm clock in the room next door would wake me at six. 

I did, however, love Raby Castle and estate, and didn't mind spending much time in 'Barney'.  It's the mindfulness/inner calm part for myself that might need a bit of working on. All great material for a novel!