Saturday, July 16, 2016

Winster Secret Gardens And Scarecrow Trail 2016

I've already been to two Open Gardens days this summer with Siobhan, my support worker; to Birchover and Bonsall. Well, today we enjoyed walking round gardens in Winster, in the same small area of the Peak District.

The weather could have been better, it was cloudy all day with quite prolonged periods of light drizzle; nothing too much to stop anyone from visiting the gardens though. It was quite busy; we had to queue to get in to a couple of the gardens.

When we reached Birchover, the village just north of Winster, I was surprised to find out it was their Carnival Day. Our car was delayed by the festivities, especially a renegade class of St. Trinian's schoolgirls [complete with hockey sticks] who were flashing their knickers and cleavage at everyone...and then by a troupe of Morris dancers who were dancing around us on all sides, jumping in unison and waving their handkerchiefs at us.

There were twenty three gardens for us to visit in Winster, we managed twenty two of them; we couldn't find garden number 18, Mount View. To be honest, we didn't look that hard though, by this time we were quite tired and were just making our way back to the car by the quickest route. 



The third garden we visited featured a large lawn where there had been a duel over two hundred years ago between a Dr. Cuddie and a Mr. Brittlebank caused by their rival affections for a young lady in the village. Dr. Cuddie lost and is buried in the churchyard, Mr. Brittlebank fled to Australia.


The scarecrow trail added a bit of extra interest to the day, some of them were quite unusual though; I'm not quite sure why a crow in a field in the middle of Derbyshire [an inland county] would be scared of a deep sea diver.




Although the gardens probably aren't as steep overall as the ones we visited in Birchover and Bonsall the lanes and ginnels in the village are very steep and there are some lovely views from some of the hillside gardens. Obviously these views weren't as clear as they can be due to the murky weather...therefore most of the following photographs are close-up shots of interesting and quirky things I noticed.














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