Woolbeding Gardens

Woolbeding Gardens is a bit of an unusual National Trust property, in that you have to pre-book your visit. And then the instructions are all a bit MI5-like - 'arrive at this car park and wait for a bus to come and collect you' - as if you're going to discover that Oompa Loompas actually exist and are working as gardeners in Sussex.

The other challenge is that Woolbeding is only open on Thursdays and Fridays. This is because the tenant uses the property as his weekend home and for some strange reason he doesn't seem keen on having hundreds of people clumping past his window while he's watching Saturday Kitchen.

So if I'm being honest, all of this faff meant that I wasn't feeling particularly positive about Woolbeding. And then I got there and I absolutely LOVED it. 

Here's why I LOVED it:

• There have been people in Woolbeding since Saxon times!
• The house we see at Woolbeding today still has some elements of the Elizabethan building in it, eg the chimney stacks:

Props to the couple who sat at the table eating their packed lunch,
looking like they owned the gaff - I am definitely doing that next time

• However, it is mainly a Georgian building that was constructed by Sir Richard Mill
• The house was sold in 1791 to Lord Robert Spencer, third son of the Duke of Marlborough, who wanted to knock it all down and build something mad but he wasn't allowed to
• He invited all his Whig friends to stay and the manor became known as "a temple of Whiggery", which is a fabulous nickname for any house
• He planted a tulip tree which grew to be the tallest in Europe! It was blown down during the Great Storm of 1987, missing the house by two feet! Eek!
• The Lascelles family acquired the place in 1893
• The National Trust took it over in 1956 
• In 1972, the NT leased it to Simon Sainsbury, of supermarket fame, and his partner, Stewart Grimshaw, who is a botanist and still lives there today
• They transformed the place, creating a wonderful garden that is a complete joy to walk around
• The designer William Pye designed the large fountain by the house - it is called Cedra and it commemorates a large cedar tree that fell down: 

• William Pye tells the story of the fountain on his website - he was taking the brief for the commission when he suddenly realised that he had visited the house as a boy 60 years before and sat under the very tree he was commemorating! Amazing!
• The garden has two sections - a more formal area close to the house, which was designed by Lanning Roper, with ordered borders. I challenge you to walk around this area without singing "In an English country! Gar-den!" to yourself over and over again:

• The other area is a more relaxed Pleasure Ground, designed by Julian and Isobel Bannerman:

I can't recommend the Pleasure Ground enough - there are so many lovely little spots and features to see. And I had it pretty much to myself - for all my whingeing about it being difficult to get to and only open for 5 minutes a week, it was a lovely experience to stroll around in peace and quiet, with only a few other people milling about.

The Woolbeding scones
But I didn't just come to admire an English country GAR-DEN. I came to admire English country SCO-ONES and that's what I did in the very lovely tea-room.

The staff were particularly lovely and friendly and my cream tea came with two generous scones. I occasionally come across a scone that tastes different in every mouthful, and that happened today. They were a tiny bit dry but very tasty.

I've also decided that when I have finish all the scones, I might start a Toilets of the National Trust blog because Woolbeding has the loveliest loos ever. 

Woolbeding Gardens: 5 out of 5
Scones: 4 out of 5
Lovely toilets: 5 out of 5

Uppark House & Garden

Have you ever been at a National Trust property when someone has shouted "THE ROOF'S ON FIRE!", before encouraging you to join a human chain and remove as many treasures as you can from the house before the ceilings collapse and everything is consumed by flames?

Me neither. But that's exactly what happened at Uppark House in West Sussex on 30 August 1989.

It was a builder using a flame to finish some lead work that set the house ablaze. National Trust staff, visitors, members of the family living at Uppark, plus the fire service had about three hours to rescue as much as possible - at one desperate point firemen were pulling curtains down and ripping wallpaper from walls. 

If I was in charge of a National Trust property that burned down, I would now be doing one of two things; I would either be hiding in Acapulco, living under an assumed name and jumping into a cupboard every time someone said the words 'national' or 'trust'. Or I would still be under sedation somewhere.

But luckily I was not in charge and the Trust rallied itself for the mother of all restoration projects. It was the contents that saved the day for Uppark - the house itself was completely gutted by the fire and there were people who thought it should be pulled down. But where to put all of the contents that had been saved? In the end, Uppark was restored, although it took six years and a lot of money.

They deal with the fire very well at Uppark. In every room there's a picture of what looks like a scene from the Blitz, but is actually the same room in 1989. It's really quite staggering. 

There's a lot more to Uppark than the fire, however. Here's a quick summary:

• Uppark House was built around 1695 by Ford Grey, Earl of Tankerville.
• Sir Matthew Fetherstonhaugh bought it in 1747 and remodelled the interiors.
• His son, Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, was a bit of a lad - he had a liaison with Emma Hart, who eventually became Emma Hamilton and mistress to Lord Nelson, and she used to dance naked on the tables at Uppark, until she became pregnant and Sir Harry got rid of her.
• Sir Harry married his dairy maid, Mary-Ann, when he was 70+ and she was 20.
• Mary-Ann remained at Uppark with her sister, who died in 1895.
• Sarah Wells, mother of H.G., was housekeeper for Mary-Ann and Frances for a while, but she was "perhaps the worst housekeeper that ever was thought of" according to her son.
• There was no heir when Frances died, so it was handed to family friends who obligingly changed their names. Today it is still inhabited by some Meade-Fetherstonhaughs. 

No photography was allowed in the house, hence the lack of pictures. 

The Uppark scone
But I do have photos of the scones. Readers, I think the National Trust might be onto me. Of my last six visits, FIVE properties have now scored top marks for their sconeage. It's unheard of, frankly, and I'm worried about my reputation as a discerning sconnessieur.

Uppark didn't help me much: the scones were absolutely top class today. They were fresh, perfectly sized, melt-in-the-mouth...just top drawer. Well done, Uppark scone baker. 

Uppark: 4.5 out of 5
Scones: 5 out of 5
Optimism in face of total adversity: 100 out of 5

Standen

I went to primary school in the 1980s when 'arts and crafts' was a term used to describe 30 kids sticking screwed up bits of tissue onto sugar paper using gloopy white glue that you smeared about the place using little white spatulas.

So I was quite surprised when I discovered that Arts and Crafts actually means something quite different to most other people. I'm not going to embarrass myself by telling you when I made that discovery but it wasn't in the 1980s.

Anyway, Standen in West Sussex is a fine example of a house built in the Arts and Crafts style. It was designed by the architect Philip Webb, who also built Red House.  

Standen was built in 1892-4 for James Beale, a solicitor, and his wife and seven children. In the guidebook there's a lovely photo of the Beale family. Most photos from Victorian/Edwardian times have people stood about like pokers with big glum faces - the Beales actually look like fun people. Or Mafia people. One or the other:

James Beale wanted Standen to be a family home, not a grand country house for entertaining and showing off. But it's an amazing building - it's very homely but it's also quite big. It's also clearly very modern for its time. The Dining Room, for example, has an alcove with dressers in it - it feels practical rather than ostentatious, as you find in so many other properties where rooms used by visitors were designed to impress.

In every room there are fabrics and wallpapers from William Morris, a cohort of Philip Webb and the main driving force behind the Arts and Crafts Movement. Webb was a founder member of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., the business set up by Morris and his friends to provide well-crafted furniture and furnishings to the Victorian middle-class.

Webb himself was a fascinating man. He built very few public buildings, preferring to take on commissions for country houses and other properties where he could build a rapport with the owner and create something true to his vision. 

The house was handed over to the National Trust in 1972 by Helen Beale, James's daughter. So what you see is essentially a home built and inhabited by one family.

James Beale's wife, Margaret, was a direct descendant of Oliver Cromwell and there's a picture of him in the hall (on some very pretty Arts and Crafts wallpaper).

The Standen Scone
As the self-appointed National Trust Scone Blogger, I'm often asked for the definitive National Trust scone recipe. As far as I know, there isn't one. Every scone I've met so far has been completely unique and each one has its own position on my trusty National Trust Sconeometer™. 

At one end of the National Trust Sconeometer™  are the scones known technically as the "massive hefty ones", a good example being Quarry Bank Mill. 

At the other end of the Sconeometer, we find the light and fluffy species of scone. Until today, Claremont Landscape Garden was the world leader in fluffy National Trust scones. 

But today, Claremont was gently wafted off its perch by a scone that we suspect has more in common genetically with a cloud than with other baked foodstuffs. It was unbelievable. It looked more like a soufflé and it had the texture of one too:

I usually have some sort of heated debate with the scone sidekick about whether a scone is worth top marks or not, but today it was an undisputed FIVE stars.

So that's now FOUR scones in a row winning the Scone D'Or. It's unheard of and it's frankly unnerving. Surely this glorious run of scones can't continue? Stay tuned, sconers - the final nail-biting visit for July takes place on Monday. 

Standen: 5 out of 5
Scone: 5 out of 5
Lack of blobs of tissue stuck on sugar paper cut into the shape of Elizabeth I: 5 out of 5

Nymans

If the National Trust ever looks in its marketing money box and finds 5p and a button, then I have an idea for them, which I will donate for free.

There's a partly ruined manor house at Nymans in West Sussex that was built by two men, Sir Walter Tapper and Norman Evill. I think you will agree that these are BRILLIANT names and should immediately be turned into cartoon characters: Sir Walter, a tap-dancing mouse in a big Cavalier hat that goes about rescuing heritage for the nation, and Norman Evill, his murky nemesis, who tries to foil Sir Walter in a variety of dastardly ways (trying to knock down stately homes to build car parks, eroding the coast, spreading a bit of damp about - there's a lot of potential here, it could easily run to 50-60 episodes). It's marketing GOLD, I tell you. Although Norman Evill's descendants might sue. And the people that moan about the Disneyfication of the National Trust will have a field day. 

But putting my genius marketing ideas to one side for a moment, let's focus on the UTTER LOVELINESS of Nymans. If a heritage-loving alien arrived on Earth and wanted to be shown one property that sums up the National Trust, I'd take it to Nymans. It has everything:
a) extensive gardens that are actually interesting
b) a ruin
c) a Gothic-style house that you can go inside and see where an Edwardian Englishwoman lived

I was actually expecting Nymans to be a bit of a sad place. The original manor house and gardens were bought by Ludwig Messel in the 1890s. His son Leonard remodelled it, creating a stunning Gothic house (this is where Tapper & Evill come in). 

But then it burnt down. The ruined bit might look lovely and romantic now but imagine it on that February morning in 1947 when it was a smouldering pile of rubble. Awful. And Leonard never went back. His daughter Anne lived there in some capacity until she died in 1992 (this week's National-Trust-amazing-factoid-that-gets-briefest-mention-in-guidebook: Anne was the mother of Antony Armstrong-Jones, Princess Margaret's husband).  

But Nymans isn't sad at all. The ruin is beautiful, while the rooms you can enter give you some idea of how stupendous it must have been to have lived here during its 20 year heyday. 

Nymans is famous for its gardens and they are indeed stunning. I'll be honest, my interest in gardening is at the lower end of the scale but even I found it fascinating. The wisteria in the photo below is a real reminder of how landscape gardeners are unique, in that they're always designing and planting for the future - and not just next Spring, but 20 years' time or even beyond their lifetimes. 

The Nymans scone
At the risk of being boring, the cafe at Nymans was also lovely. It's one of the best National Trust tearooms I've seen - it's big and efficient, with a really lovely outdoor bit. And if the scones had been any fresher, I'd have been eating a pile of flour. They were also massive, with a choice of fruit or plain. The plain scone was very nice but the fruit scone was a triumph of a scone. Utterly lovely.

Like Waddesdon Manor, Nymans is a National Trust property that really knows what it's doing. And it was packed - we arrived at 10.30am and there were 100 cars in the car park already. A fantastic place that I highly recommend. 

Nymans: 5 out of 5
Scones: 5 out of 5
All-round utter loveliness of it all: 5 out of 5

Petworth House

I think it says a lot about me that on the day I decide to start a new blog called National Trust Scones I go to a National Trust property that doesn’t do scones. 

I sat in the coffee shop at Petworth House miserably eating a piece of perfectly nice lemon drizzle cake while my other half said unhelpful things like “just call it National Trust Cakes instead”, which is completely stupid because who wants to read a blog about National Trust cakes? I wondered if it was a sign that I shouldn’t bother with this idea because no-one’s ever going to read it and let’s face it I could spend my time doing other stuff, such as cleaning out our fridge so that I don’t ruin another holiday fretting that the cat-sitter is going to find the bag of wizened carrots with a sell by date of February 2013 that I keep forgetting to throw away because they’re under the onions. 

But then I remembered my reasons for writing about National Trust scones (see the intro to your right) and reminded myself for the 2,000,000th time in my life that I shouldn’t give up so easily and lo and behold I saw a sign for cream teas being served in the restaurant. 

So that’s the first thing you need to know about Petworth House – the scones are in the restaurant. And don’t be put off; the restaurant is just a bigger version of the coffee shop and not a formal place with waiters or menus or anything that involves you having to walk out £40 poorer.

The second thing you need to know about Petworth is that the scones are ruddy excellent. One serving contains two nicely sized scones, jam, clotted cream and a pot of tea for £4.95. But being in a hurry and full of lemon drizzle, I didn’t realise this and so we ended up sharing one portion. The tea was proper loose stuff so it tasted like the tea my nan used to make (with a strainy thing in the spout of the pot so you don’t have to ingest insect-textured tealeaves) and the scones were great – just a tiny bit too much sugar in them, which I love because it reminds you you’re eating a cake and not bread.

The third thing you need to know about Petworth is that it’s really very good indeed. It reminded me of Blenheim Palace in some ways, although it lacks the vista that BP offers. To see the full glory of Petworth you have to walk up to the house and then walk away from it through the grounds so you can turn back to marvel at its frontage (or at least we did, there may be a better approach).

There has been a house at Petworth since the 13th century (although only the very impressive chapel dates from that era) and it was once owned by the Percy family (the Dukes of Northumberland). The estate has been passed down through the family and for the last couple of hundred years has been owned by the Wyndhams. It was given to the National Trust in 1947, although the current Lord and Lady Egremont still live there. I do find that really bizarre – even if your private quarters are quite spacious, it must be like living in The Borrowers: you get up off the sofa, open the living room door and there are 100 people wandering round your house peering at your tapestries. You get used to it, I imagine.

They’re very fond of Turner at Petworth, which is a shame because I am really not very fond of him at all. I blame the Tate: I once went to an exhibition of his and there were about 5000 pictures of ships negotiating wearily similar stormy situations and I was bored out of my brain. Today I learned that he did other things so I’ll have to revisit him. The third Earl of Egremont was Turner’s patron, hence the connection. Other works of art can also be found – Titians, Van Dycks, and carvings by the very marvellously named Grinling Gibbons.

I definitely recommend paying £2 for the audio/video tour. Petworth has a lot of volunteers on hand to explain things - I was particularly encouraged that the woman manning the pantry seemed to think that I’d know how to make ice cream - but as my other half always reminds me, I am incapable of asking anyone for any help of any sort at any time in any place so the audio guide was ideal. 

If I hadn’t done the audio tour I would have been oblivious to the fact that the huge book in the glass case in one of the rooms is a hand-written manuscript of The Canterbury Tales, dating from 1400. The second Earl of Northumberland was married to Chaucer’s grand-niece apparently. Anyway, once the shudder that comes with being forced to remember your English A’ Level had subsided, I marvelled at the fact that such an important relic was not worthy of any kind of mention at all until you actually walked into the room. They’d have built an entire museum around it in the States.

Scones: 4.5 out of 5. I may have to revise this once I’ve got more to compare against.
Petworth: 4.5 out of 5. It’s got a bit of everything.