on tour

I'm back.  I had a nice time.  I should have gone for the Grantham Travelodge wi-fi option, then I could have written about my historic garden visit this morning before the conference, instead of watching breakfast TV.  As it is you are going to get a truncated account of everything, otherwise the blog will start getting days behind, like Tristam Shandy's life unfolding faster than he can write about it.

The Grantham Travelodge was fine.  It was very quiet, no slamming doors or loud voices in the corridor late at night, and clean.  It was slightly cold, and I should have taken a supply of tea bags, but overall I'd recommend it if you need to arrive for a meeting in Grantham before ten, and don't happen to live in the area, and don't want to spend more than £35.  Travelodge room pricing is quite dynamic.  It was only £29 when I first looked at it, a few days before I got round to booking.

Belton House and its garden were interesting, and I'm glad I bothered to go and see them, but I was not captivated.  I don't know if I'd have felt differently if I'd been there on holiday with the Systems Administrator, when I was in the mood to be captivated, or if it was down to the National Trust's stewardship of the house, or the compromises forced by the sheer number of visitors.  I started by looking at the house, since that shuts earlier than the gardens.  The National Trust is very keen nowadays on explaining the life of domestic servants, but I skipped booking a timed, guided tour of the basement, since over the years I've seen quite a few servants' halls and sculleries, and read Margaret Powell's Below Stairs (highly recommended).

The trip round the house was faintly baffling.  It was built in the late seventeenth century, and altered internally over the centuries as is the way with grand houses.  Turn the dining room into the library, move the front door, adapt what were servants' stairs for use by the family, that sort of thing.  Many original architectural details remain and are superb, like some of the plasterwork ceilings, a (presumed) Grinling Gibbons carving in the hall, black and white marble floors and so on.  What I failed to get was any sense of how the house had been used.  The furnishings are original, meaning that they were in the house when the Trust acquired it in the latter part of the last century, but different rooms are furnished to different periods.  As I followed the prescribed route for visitors I felt as though I were looking at a disjointed series of bedrooms, boudoirs, bathrooms, dressing rooms and dining rooms, with no idea of how the family and their friends would have lived in it.  The large print (it needed to be large print because to preserve the fragile textiles there is no artificial light at all) booklet I borrowed at the start of my tour (self guided in the tourist and leisure jargon) told me about some of the rarer and more distinguished objects in each room, while most rooms had a cut-out of a servant, with some stuff about servants (like that footmen were tall and chosen for their good looks).  At the end of it I was none the wiser about whether, by the year 1900, the red drawing room (or whatever it was ) would have been used every day, or on special occasions, or where the family ate their meals if they didn't use the formal dining room with the tapestries every day, even for lunch on a wet Wednesday, or anything.

The gardens are historic grade I listed, but I only knew that from my elderly Telegraph book of gardens to visit, since the National Trust doesn't seem to mention it, or not anywhere obvious.  There is a formal Italian garden (fountain not working because of the drought) and a formal Dutch garden (think more topiary and bedding but no fountain) and some pleasure grounds and a big deerpark.  The pleasure grounds are carpeted with bluebells and cowslips, and lines of tatty rope strung between angle irons to stop you walking on them.  There is a box maze (reinforced with wire mesh to stop people pushing through it) and surrounded with more old rope.  There is a boat house in the Swiss style (locked).  The effect is of a landscape struggling to cope with the weight of visitors.  The most atmospheric thing is the orangery, which is now run as a burgeoning conservatory, full of plants with big leaves, some tender, and a working water spout.  Some of the plants had a nasty attack of greenfly.  That's the trouble with being a gardener.  You notice such things.  I sat in the conservatory and felt thoroughly charmed.

The cafe is OK, and there is a second hand bookshop where I got a very clean copy of the reprint of Mrs Earle's Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden for a quid, and overall I'm glad I bothered to go, but I wasn't enchanted.

The conference was just like a conference, with name badges, and slightly tepid hotel coffee.  It turned out that I should have been impressed that Clive Anderson made it, since this morning he was in London recording this evening's episode of Loose Ends.  His speech was very funny, and he did a splendid job of chairing the closing debate, and once more I was thoroughly charmed.  Almost all of the speakers over-ran their allotted times, including the Chairman in her opening remarks.  I realised that my years of reading, and hanging about people who manage woodlands must have rubbed off, as I didn't learn many new actual facts about trees and woodland that I didn't know already.  The organisers put people from the same area on the same tables, so I met some fellow volunteers from Essex, and my task manager, who I last saw about four years ago, and have communicated with since via e-mail.  It was fun, without leaving me pining for the corporate world of agendas and name badges.  Ted Green was pugnacious and thoroughly entertaining in the closing debate, and I'm still disappointed not to have been allowed on his workshop session about the Ancient Forest Myth, but I expect I can buy the book.