A Visit To The Lovely House part one

13th December
If it's your first visit to the Lovely House you'll have driven a long way along windy, ill-signed roads, when you suddenly see the house through the gates you have to make a sharp turn. If you get your vehicle through the iron gates without the stone pillars scraping a groove down the side of it you will be feeling relieved. You'll park alongside the big barn doors, look back at the stable block and thank the Jesus, Mary Mother of God person who is living in the niche above the stable doors.

You'll see trees in the yard; there's a big cedar by the gates, then some lime trees, a persimmon and some flowering bushes, including a big pink smelly rose bush that has been flowering since we got here.

Beyond the walls on this drawing is the 'park' (staff would lay out picnic lunches here in Ye Olden Dayes) with grand specimen trees; mature chestnuts, redwoods and cedars. There's a Giant Sequoia which has been struck by lightening - the resulting split houses a large bee community. Wandering further you would come across a couple of large ponds (mare), dug to provide the clay to make the bricks to build the house (which doesn't have foundations). The resulting pond fills with water from the many springs around here and provides irrigation for the farmland. Old Landlord dug the second, much bigger mare (it's pronounced 'mar') in the 'fifties, partly because he wanted more water to irrigate his expanding farm empire but also to fill with fish.

Beyond the biggest mare is a vast bramble-bound walnut grove and a hay meadow, Mrs Druid will be bringing her sheep to graze here in the spring.