Gardens to Visit: Thornbury Castle

This pretty little garden is in the grounds of a swanky Gloucestershire hotel. 

But that hotel started life as a Tudor palace. It looks as though it has fallen into ruin, but in fact work was stopped mid-flow when Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham fell foul of Henry VIII and the building he envisaged was never completed. It seems that Henry (or his advisers) was suspicious of the grandeur of Stafford's plans and he was suspected of having designs on the throne. Today it seems amazing that anyone might be beheaded simply because their building schemes seem too fancy.

You do not have to stay in the hotel to visit the garden. 

I know they provide afternoon teas on the lawn, and perhaps you can also drop in for a coffee or glass of wine and take the opportunity to explore the garden.
The garden is not as fancy as the building but adds a little extra something to a visit to this amazing building.
I can't help feeling that had Thornbury Castle been completed the gardens would have been considerably grander, but perhaps not so charming.

If your garden is surrounded by a high Yew hedge you can't go wrong.

The tea tables are set out on the lawns in the garden courtyard but the flowers are mostly planted in a room hidden behind the Yew.

Old brick or 500 year old stone walls serve as a beautiful backdrop to any planting.

A wander round the garden offers views from all angles of this fabulous building.

After a large hotel breakfast it was nice to have such a pleasant little garden to stroll round. 

It probably did me a power of good.

There are some large trees to admire on the other side of the building, and a vegetable garden too.

Next door to the castle there's a nice country church in a graveyard, and then about 5 minutes walk away the little town of Thornbury.

It's always fun to stay at a grand hotel like this but rather than have dinner there we ate at a local pub, Hawkes House, which was relaxed and welcoming, and the food was very good too.

Exotic Packaging: Bath & Shower Soap (Honeycomb)

And here is another soap from the Society for the Promotion of Nature Conservation obviously based on honey.

Exotic Packaging: Honeycomb Beauty Soap

This is a soap I don't recall at all.

But obviously it was made with honey and beeswax.

Exotic Packaging: Crabtree & Evelyn Jojoba & Honey Soap

I think this must have been a set of three jojoba and honey soaps.

The individual boxes are about 2" square so each soap would be quite small.

The designs are a little bit odd: some of the bears look like real bears, and some of them are teddy bears. What's going on? And that girl having a picnic with her teddies doesn't look at all put out when are real bear turns up....

Exotic Packaging: Bronley Heather Soaps

Bromley Heather & Honey, and Honey & Clover soaps

Exotic Packaging: Crabtree & Evelyn Avocado Oil Soap

Another fabulous soap box from Crabtree & Evelyn.

What more is there to say?

Gardens to Visit: Avebury Manor

Of course Avebury is a fabulous stone circle in Wiltshire with huge undressed stones, very well worth a visit, but in the middle of the circle is the village of Avebury, and Avebury Manor and its gardens are in the centre of the village.

Part of the garden is very formal with clipped box hedges, yew topiary and lily pools.

And part of the garden is very relaxed and feels almost as though it has been left to its own devices.

The lady who sold us our tickets told me it is lovely at daffodil time but I'm not sure where they grow.

And then a couple of minutes walk from this pretty little garden and you are back with the majestic stones of the Avebury stone circle. They really are amazing and definitely worth a visit. Indeed, worth a fairly big detour.

Just around the corner is the strange and symmetrical Silbury Hill. 

Nobody knows why it was built, but it is the largest man man mound in Europe. 

Both Avebury and Silbury Hill are part of a UNESCO World Heritage site, as is Stonehenge. Most people know Stonehenge but you can't get up close to the stones these days.

The huge skies of Wiltshire.

Fabulous stuff... but take time from these huge monuments to relax in the garden of Avebury Manor.

Books to Read Again: the "Julia books" by Ann Bridge

I'm not sure why I enjoy the Julia books so much.

Julia Probyn, our heroine, is bossy and opinionated to a degree, the books are set very firmly in the 1950s and 60s so attitudes to foreigners (anyone not British!) are extremely dated and frequently patronising (foreigners are stigmatised for stupidly owning the wrong sort of shoes or wearing hats while traveling), and the politics often discussed at wearying length are of course the stuff of history. However, I continue to read them.

The Lighthearted Quest (1956) introduces Julia as a rather foolish-looking young woman with tawny blonde hair, always beautifully dressed, with plenty of money and a part time job (when she feels like it) writing for weekly magazines. Julia's elderly friend Mrs Hathaway and cousin Edina Monro enlist her help in finding Edina's brother Colin who has been travelling for some time and is thought to be somewhere in North Africa. Colin is needed at home; he is needed to manage his inheritance, a large property in Argyll (in Scotland) called Glentoran. Julia undertakes this quest with enthusiasm, takes a cargo boat to Morocco, finds a job with an elderly Belgian archaeologist (in those days British travellers were restricted to £100 a year in foreign currency), travels to a number of Moroccan cities, gets slightly blown up in a terrorist bombing and of course finds Colin in the end.

Along the way we learn about docks and dockers, radar, Moroccan politics and the French administration, olive oil mills (modern and Roman), the iniquities of the British tax system, mining with special reference to rare minerals, and much else. Most of it collected by Julia as potential subjects for her magazine articles. Indeed, she travels with a typewriter; no wonder she always needs a porter at the railway stations. And in fact, much of this information helps her find Colin who has, naturally, been working under cover for an unnamed branch of the secret service.

By the end of the book Julia has cast off two suitors and is getting to know a third (Colin's boss - of course - Hugh Torrens); Edina has met and become engaged to the mate of Julia's cargo boat who was brought up on a large property in Northumberland and has luckily inherited a large fortune so he and Edina can manage Glentoran between them; and Colin has decided to stay with the secret service.

The Lighthearted Quest was followed by The Portuguese Escape (1958), The Numbered Account (1960) set mostly in Switzerland, The Dangerous Islands (1963) where Julia visits a selection of Islands off the West Coast of Scotland and Ireland, and then the Isles of Scilly, Emergency in the Pyrenees (1965), The Episode at Toledo (1966), The Malady in Madeira (1970) and Julia in Ireland (1973).

For some reason the author has recurring characters like the Monro family and Mrs Hathaway, take rather a hard attitude towards Julia's many admirers and accuse her of leading them on. Since she is always described as very attractive with an engaging manner, and as she has ample opportunity to meet men while "helping out" the secret service as she so often does, I find this a very odd attitude. And when she in her turn falls for a Mr Antrobus (also of the secret service) who subsequently gives her the brush off, her friends are not very sympathetic.

Perhaps this is because Ann Bridge was born in 1889 and had very old-fashioned ideas. Perhaps because she had a difficult relationship with her husband. Who knows? But luckily for romance Julia swiftly falls for Philip (Colonel Jamieson), who she first meets off the coast of Scotland, and they marry. Unfortunately Philip turns out to be an unmitigated idiot. Yes he works for the secret service, of course he does, but who other than a moron installs his heavily pregnant, and not very well, wife in a house in a tiny village in the Pyrenees with no access to telephone or a car? Poor Julia is entirely dependent on the kindness of strangers and this very nearly leads to disaster.

Sadly for Julia the author kills off her husband on a super secret mission in Madeira. Luckily Julia has what used to be known as private means, and the idiotic Philip seems to have been pretty rich himself, but even for a fictional character being left alone with a very small child can be no barrel of laughs. Naturally Julia visits Madeira and solves the sinister mystery. She always manages better than the real agents. I'm never really quite sure if Julia is actually employed by the secret service but she should have been. A combination of feminine intuition and looking rather stupid while in fact having a considerable deductive brain makes her a very good detective.

Ann Bridge wrote nearly 20 other books but although I have read one or two I like the Julia books best. I like the recurring characters. It's always nice to see Colin again (although his super wealthy wife is so dim one can hardly credit it), it's always nice to meet Hugh Torrens and Mrs Hathaway, and even the rather spiky Edina.

There is a mass of period detail to be enjoyed in all these books. Lots of fascinating stuff about managing large estates in Portugal, ambassadorial entertaining in Madrid, railways in Switzerland and the countryside in Madeira. And particularly loads of detail about how expensive telephoning used to be.

The final book, Julia in Ireland, I think is a sad mistake. Julia falls for an Irishman who sounds ghastly. Not because he's Irish, not because he's a Roman Catholic, but because all his character traits irritate me like mad. Who bursts into song all the time? At least, he is introduced in a letter as someone who does this, and isn't it wonderful? But somehow, when we meet him, he doesn't do it again. But then he is such a wonderful person (say all the characters) and yet he employs a housekeeper who allows his house to go to rack and ruin: she doesn't appear to do any housekeeping.

And then I don't think the book is very well written. Somehow Julia spends ages getting on and off buses and instead of her travelling being incidental to the plot it is in danger of becoming the plot. And in the end I wasn't very sure what the plot really was. Something to do with a property developer but a bit of a come down for a woman who has been battling communist spies for the last 15 years.

I can't help feeling that Ann Bridge was bullocked into writing one final book about Julia because her fans wanted to know what happened to her. But I'm not sure that most Julia fans wanted to read about her struggling with Irish bus timetables (she is supposed to be rich: why doesn't she just buy/rent a car?) and converting to Catholicism; a sort of after thought that seems to spring out of nowhere.  I almost wish I had never read this book because I really don't find it a good addition to the series.

However, at the end of the day I have read and enjoyed The Lighthearted Quest so often, and the next couple of books too, that I really can genuinely recommend this series of books.