Our good day out

I woke reluctantly, despite the pot of tea beside the bed, but I didn't want to waken. Eventually I surfaced enough to then make a coffee for Woodpeckers in return, and once in the bath I didn't want to get out. But I had promised to be ready by 11 o'clock to drive Helena and her friend Ann, who has come to stay for the weekend, on a jaunt to Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire. Actually it was only just over the border from Gloucestershire to be honest, but it did seem to be a very different sort of place.

Helena had visited there before some years ago, and I remember her report of swimming in the river Thames beside which the house and its gardens are sited. We eventually got away and the bonus was that the early morning low cloud and constant drizzle had receded and dilute sunshine was beginning to break through to warm the air and brighten the landscape.

Our trip took us to Cirencester and then on the Oxford Road to Bibury where we stopped to buy some freshly caught trout from the fish farm which uses the old mill pond to breed the fish. Then I drove across country using the old lanes and then a favourite old drove road which took us to Lechlade, an important fording and then bridging point on the Thames. Three more miles of single track roads brought us to Kelmscott Manor, a grade 1 listed farmhouse adjacent to the River Thames. It was built around 1600, with an additional wing added to the north east corner in about 1665, of local limestone on the edge of the village of Kelmscott.

From the Society of Antiquaries of London website, who are the owners:
William Morris chose it as his summer home, signing a joint lease with the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the summer of 1871. Morris loved the house as a work of true craftsmanship, totally unspoilt and unaltered, and in harmony with the village and the surrounding countryside. He considered it so natural in its setting as to be almost organic, it looked to him as if it had "grown up out of the soil"; and with "quaint garrets amongst great timbers of the roof where of old times the tillers and herdsmen slept". Its beautiful gardens, with barns, dovecote, a meadow and stream, provided a constant source
of inspiration.

The house – perhaps the most evocative of all the houses associated with Morris – contains an outstanding collection of the possessions and works of Morris, his family and associates (Benson, Burne-Jones, Rossetti and Webb amongst them), including furniture, original textiles, pictures, carpets, ceramics and metalwork.

William Morris, his wife Jane and children Jenny and May are buried in the grounds of St George's church, Kelmscott. In the village are cottages designed by Webb and Gimson and the Morris Memorial Hall (also Gimson) - all of which have
associations with the Morris family.

I found it very impressive and the collection of artefacts were of a very high quality, but very sadly no photography was allowed inside the building at all, which scuppered my planned blip for today. The gardens were attractive and the building was interesting and rather similar to the farm I stayed in when I first came to work in the Cotswolds for four months in 1975. I do recommend a visit there if these sort of historical experiences appeal to you. I really felt that the furniture, the paintings and the details such as wallpapers, tapestries, curtains and other designs associated with William Morris brought a real sense of their presence into the house.

We left by mid afternoon on a hunt for food and went straight to Lechlade, where we knew of a pub beside the ancient bridging point over the Thames. I'd blipped a scene of a man jumping from the bridge earlier this year. It was a good move as the basic standard pub food turned out to be just what we needed, the bitter was good, and in the afternoon sunshine it was delightful to sit beside the river watching the masses of swans, ducks and gulls on the water, although only a couple of boats passed by. We both commented that we would like to take a boat trip for a few days, which might be something we should think about more seriously.

I had a few pictures I would have been happy to blip including quinces hanging on a tree in the orchard at Kelmscott, and also some beautifully ripe crab apples looking like miniature Cox's apples. But of the various bird shots in flight this was chosen by Ann and Helena as my blip for today.