Mystery Birthday Outing

 This is where we ended up today for my pre-birthday outing - Little Moreton Hall in Cheshire! 

It is a fascinating and rather marvellous wibbly-wobbly house of some 500 years in age. There has been a house on the site since the early 1200s, but the building of this particular one started in the very early 1500s and continued for around 100 years with various bits being added to it over that period, culminating in the Long Gallery at the top of the house, which, because it was soooooo heavy, nearly did for the floors beneath it and caused a majority of the wibbly-wobbliness. However, it is STILL standing which I think is marvellous testament to the risks one can take in building things - faith over building regulations hurrah!! 

It’s the kind of house I’d like to live in. All built around a central courtyard and with a series of rooms running off one another in glorious rabbit warren style, no space wasted by the inclusion of corridors. 

The Great Hall. The house contains only three pieces of its original furniture - this long table, a cabinet of drawers and a large round table which the last tenant farming family used to do their ironing on. They clearly weren’t in awe of its Tudor carpentry status.

A very olde worlde fireplace. I caught myself wondering what they might have put on the mantelpiece.

A wall decorated with Tudor hand painted wallpaper. This was revealed by a carpenter who was doing some work in this room in 1976! 

The Long Gallery at the top of the house. This would have been used as a recreation and exercise space during spells of bad weather. The original gym, maybe? Four Tudor tennis balls have been recovered from this space during the on-going renovations. It is a space said to be haunted by a grey lady. Probably bemoaning the loss of her tennis balls. 

The house also contained its own private chapel and two garderobes (inside toilets) which were VERY drafty on account of them hanging over the moat for waste disposal purposes. Not the sort of place to encourage prolonged sit ins whilst perusing the weekly copy of ‘Ye Dailye Tudor Lyfe’ that’s for sure. Still, indoor loos, eh? 

We had lunch in the lovely tea rooms which were continuing the tea room service tradition of Mrs Dale, the last tenant farmer, who apparently served exceptional scrambled eggs and scones to visitors until she got fed up and stopped. Mind you, she’d had 14 children by then so I blame her not one jot for drawing a line under the catering for others malarkey. Electricity was introduced to the house in 1956 which probably made it easier to serve a wider range of fodder. 

We walked around the grounds and I tried to imagine this space as a new place back in the days of yore, a busy and bustling household. I’d have loved to see the rooms full of their original furnishings, be a part of its functioning in a day to day life. I expect the smells got a bit ripe from time to time, what with garderobe/moat toilet plumbing arrangement, but I bet it was a good house to live in!