Burton Constable Hall

Today we had a day out at Burton Constable Hall.  This is yet another large country house with grounds landscaped by Capability Brown.  The house wasn't open to us, and the day had quite a cold wind, so we had a short work around the outside of the house, then had some lovely toasties for lunch, before heading out again for a longer walk.  We then went to warm up again with some tea before photographing the Orangery and then heading back.  The Orangery was full of lemon trees, does that make it a Lemonery?

The main blip is of the front of the house.  Our approach into the property was along the main drive into the hall, so we were treated to this view as we drove in.

The first extra shows the clock mechanism for the stables clock.  We spent some time trying to work out how this worked.  There were two weights which were attached by cords to the mechanism, and disappeared into the floor.  We could see where they went down wooden square pipes when we looked outside.  We think one of these did the bell ringing (though that didn't seem to be working) and the other did the main clock mechanism.  We could see where the mechanism could be wound to bring the weight back up.

The second extra shows the dragon motif that we found around the site.  Some of these had been painted in gold, like this one, others were left in black.

As we headed back for tea we found an alarm maintenance man who commented that he'd been stood in the shade for an hour and was freezing, so he'd moved out into the sun to warm up.  We were glad to hear this, as we were all wrapped up against the wind, but some locals were out in shorts and summery dresses.  Far too cold for that sort of thing!

We headed away from the hall and towards the coast at Withernsea.  We spotted the tower in the last extra out to our left, somewhere near Hilston, and decided to go down a side road to see if we could get a good view of it.  We managed to stop off to one side of the entrance to a farmer's field and took some photos.  This tower is Admiral Storr's Tower, built as a folly in the 1750s.  (No birds were added after the photo was taken!)

(Randomly in Withernsea, as we drove through, we spotted a bloke sat at a table outside a takeaway, with someone about to film him.  Looks like it was Danny Malin of YouTube Rate My Takeaway fame.  Tim only knows it was him from articles about him in Leeds Live, he's not a subscriber!)

From there we carried on towards the coast and ended up parking at the end of the road somewhere between Hilston and Roos.  We had a good view of the wind turbines from here.

As we headed back, we stopped at the coast again at Easington, watching several horses being exercised on the beach.  We then returned back to our cottage for much needed pizza.