Water feature

We rounded off our short tour of the north of England by visiting Fountains Abbey and the water garden in Studley Royal Park with our friends this morning, before driving home to a rather chilly flat (which is set to get more chilly tomorrow with the weather that's forecast...).

My earlier memories of Fountains Abbey are from the late 1960s or early 1970s when we used to visit there with grandparents and other family. My brother was at nearby Rippon Cathedral Choir School in the late 1960s. I think that during my time back in Leeds from 1995-2004 we only visited Fountains Abbey once - with some friends in the summer of 1999 or 2000. I have a great photograph from that time that I found and scanned recently of my son racing a friend of ours up the hill. I recall the competition between the 10 year old boy and the 50+ year old man was quite intense!

It's changed a lot since we were there - especially on the Studley Royal rather than Fountains Abbey Visitor Centre side, with the National Trust pretty much turning the whole thing into a licence to print money. Given the amount that has been invested in sprucing up the park I don't think I entirely resented the £19 it cost to get the two of us in...

Anyway, it was a lovely couple of hours spent in the company of old friends whom we've seen too little of since we moved up to Edinburgh.