Stourhead

A journalist contacted me about this blog once. He didn't work for The Wall Street Journal, or even Take a Break magazine, and he didn't want my expert opinion on National Trust scones - he just wanted to let me know that the blog was very disappointing because it wasn't critical enough.

And it is true that I don't keep a list of The Worst National Trust Scones That I Ever Ate In My Life. However, I have had TWO duff NT scone experiences and I have been honest about both of them. So imagine my surprise when I came across a list of the most visited National Trust properties of 2013 and BOTH of my duff scone locations were in the TOP TEN! How can this BE? How can NT properties that are HEAVING with visitors be serving sub-standard scones? Heads should roll.

So the pressure was on today for Stourhead in Wiltshire. It's the third most visited National Trust property - almost 400,000 people trotted along there last year. Would Stourhead prove the rule that more visitors = duff scones?

Before I get onto the scones, let me tell you a bit about Stourhead. 

Stourhead was created by a man called Henry Hoare. His father, Richard, had set up Hoare's Bank in 1672 (which is still going strong on Fleet Street today, banking fact fans) and Henry decided he needed a country estate that would allow him to join the ranks of the landed gentry. He bought a chunk of Wiltshire countryside in 1717 and started work with his brother-in-law, William Benson, to create a Palladian villa.

The house was then handed down through the Hoare family - Henry 'the Good', mentioned above, gave it to his son, Henry 'the Magnificent'. He passed it on to his grandson, Colt Hoare, who handed it on to his half-brother, Henry Hugh. It carried on through various Henrys and Hughs until it reached Henry Hugh Arthur. He had one son, Henry Colt Arthur, who was killed in the First World War. Henry Hugh Arthur and his wife Alda decided to hand the estate and all its contents over to the National Trust in 1946.   

My favourite room in the house was the huge Picture Gallery. This room was added to the house by Colt Hoare in 1802 to show off the Old Masters that he and his grandfather had collected. It's very impressive:

But the best thing about Stourhead is undoubtedly the landscape garden. The walk from the house round the path and back to the house is one of the nicest experiences that I have ever had at the National Trust AND IT WAS RAINING. I can only imagine what it would be like on a sunny day.  

It was Henry 'the Magnificent' Hoare who started work on the garden, after his wife died in 1743. He worked with Henry Flitcroft, a talented architect who helped 'the Mag' to realise his vision.

The centrepiece of the garden is the lake. As you walk around, you come across a variety of buildings and bridges, giving you the idea of being on a journey. This journey idea was exactly what The Magnificent wanted - he was a big fan of Virgil's Aeneid, which is all about Aeneas's journey from Troy to Rome.

One of the buildings is the showstopping Pantheon. It's like a Wendy house version of the actual Pantheon in Rome:

To be fair, it's a bit bigger than a Wendy house but you get the idea - it's just a very accurate miniature version of the real thing:

The grotto is equally as impressive. You enter through a dark little tunnel:

Inside it's dark and atmospheric, with the sound of running water and two striking statues, one of whom is purportedly Tiber, the god of the Roman river:

And there are lots of other sights to see, including a Gothic Cottage. I loved it.

The Stourhead scone
But now let's talk about the other thing I love: scones. Did Stourhead prove the Scone Blogger's Theorem, that the more popular the NT property, the poorer the scone?

Readers, they ditched that theorem into their lake. Consider first the size of the scone: one of the properties that I had a quality issue with was Cliveden, where I almost needed a microscope to see my scone. And I don't feel AT ALL guilty saying that, because six months after I timidly reported that my scone was a bit small and soggy, a correspondent said that he'd just had a scone there and it was small and soggy. So I'm less timid about it because I think it's a bit rubbish for the second most popular National Trust property in England to be ignoring well-meant feedback and knowingly serving poor quality food to its members.

The Stourhead cream tea was literally three times the size of the Cliveden one:

Consider next the taste and texture. The other scone that had quality issues was at Wakehurst. Usually, I'm not one of those people that feels the love (man) in food, but at Wakehurst I could tell a mile off that nobody cared about that scone. Nobody cared that it was hard and dry and unpleasant to eat. And I do feel a bit happier knowing that the National Trust doesn't manage the catering at Wakehurst, but even so - it reflects really badly on them.

The Stourhead scones weren't fresh, but they were very tasty indeed - I thoroughly enjoyed them. The restaurant is beautiful - it's big and airy and run by very friendly people.

And before I get any cease and desist letters from Dame Helen Ghosh, I just want to reiterate that I have eaten nearly 70 National Trust scones and I have only disliked two of them. That's not bad going AT ALL. And I have journalists complaining about it, telling me I need to be more like Alan Sugar! I'm suffering for my art here, Dame Helen. 

Anyway - definitely go to Stourhead, people, it's fantastic.

Stourhead house: 4 out of 5
Stourhead grounds: 5 out of 5
Scones: 4.5 out of 5

Lacock Abbey

I'm a bit like Shania Twain when it comes to National Trust properties that have appeared on TV or in films - they don't impress me much. However, I'm going to make an exception with Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire.

Lacock Abbey stood in for Hogwarts in many of the Harry Potter films. The cloisters below, for example, were used in numerous scenes, and the Sacristy was Professor Snape's laboratory. 

Lacock is a fantastic place, whether it has Harry Potter connections or not. The abbey was built in the 1200s by Ela, Countess of Salisbury. She sounds quite formidable: she was the only child of the Earl of Salisbury and became a ward of King Richard I when her father died. She married William Longespee and when he died she built Lacock Abbey, where she lived as its first abbess until she died in 1261. Her tomb can be seen in the cloisters.

Lacock survived as an abbey until 1539, when it was closed during the final wave of Henry VIII's Dissolution. It was bought by William Sharington, who turned the abbey into a country house. Lacock was relatively small, so Sharington built on top of it rather than knocking it down. 

And that's what makes Lacock Abbey quite fascinating - it's a house on top of an abbey and you can see the joins all over the place, as in the South Gallery:

Lacock ended up being passed to Sharington's niece, Olive, who had married a John Talbot. The house then remained in the Talbot family until it was passed to the National Trust in 1944.

The most famous Talbot inhabitant of Lacock was the snappily named William Henry Fox Talbot, who changed the world when he invented the photographic negative.

I love the story behind WHFT's invention, even though it makes me feel completely inadequate. Basically, he was on honeymoon on Lake Como and feeling annoyed by his inability to draw or paint the beautiful scenes he was seeing. "There must be a way of committing these images to paper," he thought, and so went home to Lacock and invented a way. I've said it before; if the world had relied on me to invent things, we'd still be sitting in caves in the dark. It would never even occur to me to try and create such a thing.

Anyway, there's a museum that explains WHFT's work and his rivalry with Louis Daguerre. I am still absolutely none the wiser as to how photography actually works, but that's not the museum's fault at all. I could have stayed in there for the next 20 years, with WHFT himself taking me through it, and I would still be clueless.

Lacock also has a Great Hall, which gets another big tick from me, as I do love a Great Hall:

There's more. Lacock village itself is also a star of TV and film - Cranford was filmed there, Pride & Prejudice, Moll Flanders, Emma, Tess of the d'Urbervilles...you name it and Lacock's 18th century houses have been in it. The village is also owned by the National Trust.

But now it's time to move onto the scones. I spent far too much of my time this week on a side project called Scone Forensics. I invented SF to help me work out the age of a scone - I wanted to be a bit more informed on my scone visits, so instead of me saying 'It was a bit dry' I wanted to be able to say 'This scone was 3.48 days old! Give it a bus pass!'.

Using Scone Forensics for the first time (eek), I would say that the Lacock scone was at least a day old and had been kept in an airtight tin. It looked and tasted quite dry, and it had that soft, slightly damp texture that you get from keeping a scone in airtight conditions. I'm not sure why people do it, to be honest. 

I was too scared to go and ask the staff behind the counter if I was right. I once had to take a scone back because it was the wrong flavour and the girl serving seemed so traumatised that I felt guilty for days afterwards.

HOWEVER. Lacock scores very highly for its generous cream portion and for the size of its scone - I reckon you could fit two Cliveden scones into one Lacock scone. It also tasted really nice, despite being a bit dry - it was buttery and very tasty. AND there was a choice of plain or fruit, which is always a treat. 

On the subject of Cliveden, a correspondent went there recently and tells me that the scones are still very small and don't taste very nice. I'll be honest: this depresses me. I'm not claiming to be some sort of Gordon Ramsey of scones but if someone told me, in a polite and constructive way, that I was selling something that wasn't great value for money, I would change it.

But never mind that: Lacock is fantastic and I highly recommend it.

Lacock: 5 out of 5
Scones: 3.5 out of 5
Sightings of Hedwig the owl: 0 out of 5

Avebury

My other half puts up with a lot. When I want to spend 3.5 hours on a train just so I can eat scones, he obligingly comes with me. For my birthday he spent months and loads of money planning a trip to Hadrian's Wall, in cold, wet February, because he knew that's where I wanted to go.  

But everyone has their limits and his limit is Stonehenge. He HATES it. I'm not exactly sure why but it's something to do with it being "a massive rip-off" (his words) rather than any issue with Neolithic builders. 

So I was really surprised when he agreed to go to Avebury. After all, Avebury is also about standing stones but they're more low-key, a bit Charlie Watts to Stonehenge's Mick Jagger. What if we drove the 80 miles to get there and it was rubbish?

Fortunately, there are lots of different things to see and do at Avebury:

1. Avebury stones
Avebury is the quintessential English village - it has houses and a pub and the usual road signs and cars and people buying the Daily Mail and eating bags of Quavers, just as you'd expect. But as you drive into that village, there they are - these big stones jutting out of the ground, just standing there for you to walk up and touch. It's quite a shock and I'm surprised there aren't loads of car accidents caused by drivers going "there it is! there's a stone!"...crunk.

The stones are part of Avebury henge. A henge is a Neolithic earthwork, usually round or oval and consisting of a bank and ditch surrounding a flat area of ground. Avebury's flat bit is 340 metres across, surrounded by a ditch that measures three quarters of a mile.

Once upon a time there would have been 100 stones in the Outer Circle at Avebury:

Today there are 36 stones standing within the henge. 15 of those have remained upright throughout time, so potentially since they were first put there in 2,600 BC or so. The other 21 were put back up by an archaeologist called Alexander Keiller during his excavations in the 1930s - they'd either fallen over or been buried.

And it's all a big mystery as to why it was created at all. Some think the stones are connected to the sky, the sun or moon, or to the seasons. They may have had religious uses. The henge may have been created for celebrating or contacting the dead. We just don't know. But it doesn't really matter - it's still a fascinating experience. 

2. The museum 
The museum is good. It's housed in a pretty barn and it has a helpful timeline showing when the various sites around Avebury were created. The section on Alexander Keiller is great; there are some short videos which really bring him to life as a person. He was heir to the Keiller marmalade business and spent his fortune on all sorts of interests, but mainly women and archaeology. 

3. Avebury Manor 
The Manor is only a five minute walk from the stones and it's a delight. It's one of those properties, like Mompesson House or Hughenden, where I could happily hang around until 5.30pm, hide in a cupboard, and then lock the door from the inside, refuse to come out, and live there forever. 

Three years ago, Avebury Manor was empty - the National Trust had bought it but, pretty as it was from the outside, inside it was all gaudy 1970s paintwork. An empty manor house isn't very appealing, so the Trust teamed up with the BBC for a programme called To The Manor Reborn. They redecorated it and filled it with furnishings in various styles - so the kitchen is laid out as it would have been in 1912, for example. (I haven't watched it but I will do so and report back on whether it's any good.)

There has been some sort of building on the site of the manor from Norman times, although the current building is thought to date from the 1500s. In 1935 it was bought by Keiller who used it as a base for his excavations. It's a lovely little place and the volunteers are particularly friendly and full of information. Some of the rooms are closed due to the fact that the floor is potentially about to collapse, which seems sensible enough to me, but one volunteer was particularly forlorn about this turn of events. They should give him a collection bucket - he'd have made a fortune from people donating to the restoration just to stop him being sad.

The Avebury Scone
Anyway. If Avebury itself was a bit of a surprise, then so were the scones. The tearoom was super-efficient and a cream tea of fruit scone, jam, and cream was served up very quickly. The scone was as fresh as could be with the perfect texture and it tasted...a bit odd, actually. I still for the life of me cannot work out what was in it but it had a really unusual tangy aftertaste. It was like strong cheese or balsamic vinegar or something - anyway, it wasn't a bad taste, it was just the first bite that was a bit of a shock. If anyone knows what the mystery ingredient is - let me know*.

3. Silbury Hill

We ended our trip with a quick detour up the road to Silbury Hill. Silbury is 37 metres high, the largest prehistoric mound in Europe, and was created in 2,400-2000 BC. It really is a bit Close Encounters of the Third Kind. You stand there wondering what on earth is inside it - giant ants? a Bond villain? Vladmir Putin? - until you read the signs, which explain that archaeologists have tried to tunnel into it expecting to find treasures galore, but all they found was mud. And as a result of the tunnels, the whole thing started eroding and they had to fill in the tunnels and tell the burrowing archaeologists to go away.

So Avebury gets a big thumbs up - put it on your list if you haven't been.

Avebury: 5 out of 5

Scones: 4 out of 5 

Vladimir Putin's secret UK lair: 5 of out 5

* The very lovely people manning the Avebury Twitter feed investigated the mystery ingredient for me the next day. They concluded that it was actually a cheese scone and the tangy stuff was mustard. However, both of our scones had fruit in and both tasted the same - maybe the mustard has snuck into the sweet dough? Like Avebury, it will probably remain a mystery.

Mompesson House

It's a well-known fact that good things come in small packages. I, for example, am 5'3". Mompesson House in Salisbury is also proof of it.

I had very low expectations of Mompesson. I spent yesterday at the stupendous Hardwick Hall where you couldn't move for grandeur and historical connections with the great and the good of Elizabethan society, from Bess of Hardwick to Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth I herself.

Mompesson is very different. It was built in 1701 by Charles Mompesson, an MP in Salisbury. It was passed down through various families over the years, before being handed over to the National Trust in 1952. It's also much smaller in size - you could probably fit the whole house into one of Hardwick's rooms. 

But Mompesson is a fabulous little place. Its rooms are so neat and cosy, I could happily move in tomorrow if they'd let me. 

The Mompesson Scone
I headed straight out into the garden to find the scones, and what a lovely little garden it was. The scones were fresh and delicious, the sun was out, the staff were very friendly - it was the perfect place to be on a Sunday morning.

Mompesson also has three other advantages:

1. Salisbury Cathedral 
Mompesson House is located in Cathedral Close, snugly tucked away just in front of the gigantic and stunning Salisbury Cathedral. It is quite literally awe-inspiring and it went straight in at number three on the Scone Blogger's Top 10 Cathedrals of the World (Strasburg is number one. I've never met anyone else who has been to Strasburg though, so maybe I'm imagining how good it was. I'll have to go back and check.)

2. Magna Carta 
I went to Runnymede once. Every single other person there was American. It's strange but the British don't really seem to care about Magna Carta as much as other nations. Maybe it's because we aren't taught about it at school (I wasn't, anyway. But if you want to know anything about Sino-Soviet relations during the Cold War, I'm your woman.) Anyway, there's a copy of Magna Carta at Salisbury - it was brought there by Elias of Dereham, who was present when it was signed and who was also involved in the construction of the Cathedral. Every single other person looking at it was non-British.

3. Salisbury
Salisbury is a lovely place. If you haven't been, GO.

Mompesson House: 4 out of 5
Scones: 4.5 out of 5
Salisbury/Cathedral/Magna Carta: 5 out of 5