Buscot Park

I only knew two things about Buscot Park before I went there today, both of which I found very disturbing:

• They have their own website. Why? WHY?? Every other NT property makes do with a few simple pages on the official NT site. Why does Buscot need to do its own thing? What does it mean??
• Nowhere on that website does it mention scones

I always expect the worst when NT properties have their own websites, as it usually means one of two things. Either:

• The property is not run by the NT - Tatton Park for example is actually run by the local council, which is why it has its own website to promote events like the Moscow State Circus, rather than the usual NT events like 'Sticks - they're really great'.  
• The property thinks it's a bit special

It didn't take long for me to work out that Buscot belongs in the first category. Lord Faringdon, administrator of Buscot, writes on their own Buscot fancy website:

Any reservations you may have - about the internal colour schemes, the changes in the walled gardens or the way we open the property - must be laid fairly and squarely at my door and not that of the National Trust, for the Trust plays no part in the day-to-day running of Buscot Park, nor on the vermilion reds or the germolene pinks we may choose.

Lord Faringdon; for using the words "germolene pinks", I'll forgive you everything - even not being open at weekends or allowing photographs in the house.

Anyway, I trotted along to Buscot today with very low expectations. And as often happens when your expectations are low, I was very pleasantly surprised. Here are my highlights:

1. The house

Buscot House was built between 1780-1783 for a man called Edward Loveden. He sounds like a character - he was a magistrate and an MP and a big advocate for canals. OK - he also had a very scandalous divorce. And a son called Pryse Pryse.

The house was sold in 1859 to Robert Tertius Campbell, another interesting character, who turned the Buscot estate into the most industrialised farm in the country. I don't think he had any scandalous divorces or sons with bizarre names though.

Finally, along came Alexander Henderson, the 1st Lord Farimgdon, who bought Buscot in 1889. He was another man of his time - a top financier in the City, he also headed up railway companies. His grandson, Gavin, had been a member of the 'Bright Young Things' set in the 1920s before becoming 2nd Lord Faringdon. And his grandson, Charles, is the 3rd Lord Faringdon that still lives at Buscot today, painting the walls germolene pink.

The house was bought by Ernest Cook in 1948 and was leased to Lord Faringdon. Cook left the house to the National Trust in 1956.

2. The Burne-Jones pictures in the Saloon
I know absolutely nothing about art. But sometimes you see something that astounds you and you know it's special - and that's what happened to me today in the Saloon at Buscot.

Edward Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite artist, started a series of paintings based on Sleeping Beauty as early as 1871. They were eventually exhibited in 1890 to huge acclaim as four pictures called 'The Legend of the Briar Rose'. The first Lord Faringdon bought them, and Burne-Jones himself came to see them at Buscot. He didn't like the way they looked, so he extended the frames.

I'm probably going to get sued for borrowing this off Wikipedia, but I'd rather that than have Lord F think that I disobeyed his photography rule. This is one part of Burne-Jones's The Legend of the Briar Rose. It's breath-taking and you must go and see it:

3. The Water Garden
The grounds at Buscot are really beautiful - I can see why visitors would go back over and over again to walk around them. I particularly loved the Water Garden:

4. The Big Lake
The Water Gardens lead down to The Big Lake, which is indeed a lake that is big:

5. The Terracotta Army
I was completely stunned to find a load of life-sized Terracotta Army figures lined up along the path in the garden. It's like they just woke up one morning in Xi'an and said "I fancy a scone - do you fancy a scone? Shall we go to Oxfordshire and get a scone?" and have been silently inching along towards the Buscot tea room ever since. I still have absolutely no clue why there are there. Not since I walked into a Dalek in the stables at Tredegar House or found a copy of Wham!'s Greatest Hits at Sizergh have I been more surprised by an artefact at an NT property.

6. The Swimming Pool
Buscot has a swimming pool! It's only the second swimming pool that I have ever seen at the NT (the other was the decidedly less attractive-looking one at Upton House). 

7. The Buscot Scones
If the NT plays no part in the day-to-day running of Buscot, then I assume Lord Faringdon himself baked these scones and they shouldn't really count in this highly controlled study of mine. 

But I'm going to include them. They were certainly the weeniest little scones I've ever seen - they were like doll's house scones. They also looked a bit pale and so my hopes were low. But they were delicious. They tasted home made and fresh and I thoroughly enjoyed them.

So there you have it - Buscot Park is a lovely place, own website or not.

Buscot Park: 5 out of 5
Scones: 4.5 out of 5
Surprise factor of the Terracotta Army: 5 out of 5

Nuffield Place

If you drew a Venn diagram and put the National Trust in one circle and Top Gear in the other, the bit in the middle would say Nuffield Place. For this is where Lord Nuffield, founder of Morris Motor Cars, lived for 30 years until he died in 1963.

I'm not into cars or Jeremy Clarkson at all, but Lord Nuffield, or William Morris as he was known to his mother, was a fascinating man. He started his own bike-building business in 1892 in his kitchen with just £4 capital - he left school at 14, needing to earn some money for the family, but decided to go it alone when he was refused a pay rise from his bike repairer employer. 

He moved onto motorcycles and then cars. He wanted to build a car that was affordable and he did - the two-seater Morris Oxford was launched in 1912. The four-seater Morris Cowley, and eventually the Morris Minor (and even I know what a Morris Minor looks like), followed.

But you'll be disappointed if you're expecting to see loads of cars at Nuffield Place. The only car on show is Lady Nuffield's Wolseley - Morris bought the Wolseley firm in 1927 when it went bust.

The house is very much the star of the show at Nuffield Place and although it's roomy, it's a very modest house for a multi-millionaire industrialist. 

And that unshowiness says an awful lot about Morris's personality. He was a hugely wealthy man but he preferred to give his millions away - there's an Oxford college named after him and he gave generously to medical causes.

The whole place is down to earth. In his bedroom there's a wardrobe that opens up to reveal a little workshop, allowing him to fix clocks and other household items when he couldn't sleep at night. I was just leaving the room when I overheard the guide tell another visitor "and there's his appendix right there on the shelf of course" so I had to scoot back in for another look and sure enough there it was:

I read a short book called Lord Nuffield by Peter Hull before I went to Nuffield Place. Admittedly there were paragraphs like "they specially designed and built a small 10-horsepower (8.9 horsepower RAC rating) four-cylinder side-valve T-head engine, with a 60mm bore and 90mm stroke, splash lubricated, with a three-bearing crankshaft and on which both the inlet and exhaust manifolds were cars with the cylinders" which might as well be written in Greek for all I understand of it, but there were plenty of insights into Morris's character. And here's a portrait from his billiard room to give you some idea of what he looked like:

But now the tricky bit. They had scones at Nuffield today but only cheese scones. I realise that nowhere in the terms and conditions of the National Trust Scone Blog does it stipulate that only sweet scones are included (I don't have any terms and conditions for one thing) but we'd had a long drive and a cheese scone just wasn't going to cut it. So I had some Victoria sponge cake, which was divine, and the scone sidekick had to be a millionaire's shortbread sidekick for the day (and that was divine too). 

Nuffield Place: 4 out of 5
Scones: 0 out of 5 - they only had cheese scones
Availability of previous owner's body parts: 5 out of 5

Greys Court

Greys Court near Henley-on-Thames was originally recommended by another National Trust property, who informed me that I'd find particularly excellent scones there. 

I then had a look on the Greys Court website and saw that they also have a 'rare Tudor donkey wheel', so it was only a matter of time before I headed to Oxfordshire for a look. (I must admit that I didn't actually know what a Tudor donkey wheel was. I think I was hoping that there might be a 500 year-old donkey attached to it. But read on for more about that.)

The Greys Court scones
First, THE SCONES. Greys Court definitely wins the award for best National Trust tea-room so far - it's a lovely set-up in a 16th century building that used to be the stables. I nearly changed this blog to National Trust Pork Pies for the day having seen the hand-made fayre on offer but we are sconers and scones we shall eat.

The scones were perfectly sized - usually two are too much for me, so these smaller ones were ideal. In terms of taste and texture, I'll admit that the word that sprang to my mind was 'bouncy'. I don't think AA Gill or any other food critic will be fearing for their jobs, but the scones had a real lightness that was quite unusual so I'm sticking with bouncy, even if it does make me sound like a cretin.

Greys Court itself is a lovely little place. It was built in the 16th century and bought in 1937 by Felix and Elizabeth Brunner, who made it their family home. Lady Brunner died in 2003 and the house is presented pretty much as she left it. (Interesting factoid about Lady Brunner: she founded the Keep Britain Tidy Group.)

But the undoubted highlight for me was the Tudor donkey wheel. You HAVE to go and see it. A picture on the wall brought me up to speed pretty quickly as to what a donkey wheel does - it's basically like a hamster wheel for donkeys. Except that hamsters don't generally power the lifting of buckets of water from a well. And donkeys don't generally have a choice about theirs, so they don't generally choose to get on the wheel at 3am when everyone is trying to get some sleep and all they can hear is Fluffy going like the clappers until one day Fluffy 'escapes' and that's the end of that.

BUT ANYWAY: the donkey wheel at Greys Court was in operation from Tudor times right through to 1914. The donkeys would hear the noise that signalled that the bucket had reached the top of the pulley and they would stop, be turned around, and then walk the other way so that the next buckets were lowered/raised. Ingenious! 

My sconeing companion was also fascinated by it. I am half expecting to hear a lot of sawing and hammering next weekend while he builds one in the back garden. This is a not very good photo of it - just go and see it for yourselves:

Scones: 4 out of 5 

Greys Court: 4 out of 5

Rare Tudor donkey wheel: 10 out of 5