CASTLE HOWARD

" `I have been here before,' I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest."

Yes for you literary types, that's from the opening of the great Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, describing Charles Ryder's rediscovery of  'Brideshead', during WW2.

The house used as 'Brideshead', was Castle Howard in Yorkshire which we visited on the weekend.

What a grand place - the house, the gardens, the estate and out-buildings - marvellous.
It's so nice visiting a place for the first time that you've known through film and or literature and to be not disappointed.

We took a bus from York to Castle Howard (it used to have its own railway station but that was closed down in the 1950's) and spent most of the day there seeing how the other half live.

The other half incidentally, the Howards, are in a bit of turmoil. We were there on Saturday and on Sunday the papers had headline reports of a coup at castle Howard. The incumbent and his wife have been given the heave-ho by his older brother and his wife and have to move out.

We saw no evidence of anyone being thrown from the ramparts or being drowned in the fountains but I guess the aristocracy handle things a bit differently that when they first stole accepted patronage of lands and possessions.