Friday 10/28: A visit to Chatsworth Estate

Yes, I managed to get up at 7:30am today. Okay, I did have to set an alarm (I didn’t want to sleep in until 9am, if everyone else had gotten up at 6:30am!), but perhaps it’ll get easier after a few days of going to bed early…

I helped make breakfast (omelettes & toast) and met the rest of Grace’s sister’s family. Karin and Dave have two daughters, Charlotte (14 yrs old) and Emily (11 yrs old). Yes, I was thinking “Brontë Sisters?”

After breakfast, all of us headed out to visit an old estate about 30-minutes away from Sheffield. During the car ride, Grace, Miranda, Elara, and I played a game where one person says a name (for instance, “Wilber”) and everyone has to describe the person they think of when they hear the name. For example: “Wilber is a balding man in his late 70s who wears bulky knitted sweaters and spends most of his time in the garden.” or “Wilber is a teenage boy with messy red hair. He has braces and plays the violin. His also has an affinity for pickles.” You get the idea. Anyways, it was during this game that Miranda couldn’t remember my name and ended up calling me “Tiffany.” After being corrected, she still couldn’t remember and just started calling me “Not Tiffany.” And somehow the name stuck…

The Chatsworth Estate is owned by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire and is immense. Apparently they have 35,000 acres of land! There’s a huge mansion (built in the 1500s, I believe), an enormous garden (with a hedge maze!!), a farmyard, and a little river.

Photo: The House and view of the beautiful grounds and hills surrounding...

It’s pretty much exactly where you’d imagine a Jane Austen novel taking place. Since you can pay to get in separately to the house, garden, or farmyard, we chose to just visit the gardens. They are so big, that we couldn’t even see everything just in the gardens! I imagine it’d take a good week to visit all three.

Photo: Exploring the hedge maze with Grace and Ben, the dog

We spent many hours wandering the paths. There were waterfalls, statues, a coal tunnel (which we went through!), and a maze! That was particularly fun—it made me think of Harry Potter #4…although it wasn’t so scary, of course. There were a bunch of jack-o-lantern head on sticks in the center of the maze, though!

Photo: Enjoying the beautiful surroundings!

We had lunch in the Estate restaurant (I had a delicious baked potato with cooked veggies on top), which was very kindly paid for by Grace. I was really grateful for her generosity because she paid for both the lunch AND the admission fee! Knowing me, I would have just visited the free areas and never have gotten to see inside the gardens!

After our late lunch, we headed home. We spent the afternoon in Grace’s office: Grace sewing knife pouches (for an order she needed to finish urgently), Miranda working on an art project for school, and me helping Elara with her research project on marble. We made a pretty sweet poster with lots of lovely pictures. :)

Photo: Elara with amazing marble poster

Tonight we had Chinese food for dinner (it made me think of Yangs!!) and Grace and I spent the evening in her office as she continued to work on the pouches while I played scrabble online and hoped that someone in the US would come online… No one did. But, Grace and I had fun chatting and we ended up staying up until 10pm! Later tonight Grace’s husband, Kim, is getting home from his work trip to Edinburgh, so I will meet him tomorrow.