The Home of Lord Palmer, Manderston is the Edwardian House par excellence. It was built with no expense spared and with every modern convenience of that era. Here you can see sumptuous staterooms and a silver staircase, the only one in the world. Coupled with the elaborate domestic quarters, it gives an intriguing insight into the daily life of the Edwardian Country House.
Outside there a princely stables, octagonal marble dairy and fifty six acres of garden immaculately kept to enjoy.*
*From a leaflet advertising the house
Tags: Duns, Manderston, Scotland, Vacation
Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.
A Japanese Proverb
Tags: Cherie's Place Thought, Crookham, Flodden, Flodden Field, Northumber- land, Vacation
Budle Bay is in North Northumberland and is a beautiful and important bird sanctuary, with huge mud flats that are exposed at low tide. The whole area is part of the Lindisfarne National Nature Reserve and is very popular with birdwatchers, particularly in the winter when thousands of wildfowl and waders spend their winter on the bay’s mud flats.
The Bay itself has an industrial past, it was once an extremely busy port in the times of King Henry III in the 13th Century. The harbour has now disappeared beneath the rising silt of the bay, but some of the remaining buildings still hint towards the past. There was a corn-mill here, which is how the hamlet got its name, in 1187 and current building dates back to 1780. This building was abandoned for many years but has recently been redeveloped and turned into luxury apartments, all of which offer stunning views over the bay.
Tags: Budle Bay, Estuary, Northumber- land, Sea, Vacation
The photo above shows the coble in which Grace and her father launched in atrocious weather to rescue survivors from the steamship Forfarshire which had struck the Big Harcar rock on the Farnes. The photo below shows St Aidan’s church as viewed from the Grace Darling museum with rather calmer seas in the background.
Tags: Bamburgh, Coble, Grace Darling, Northumber- land, RNLI, Sea, St Aidans Church, Vacation
You will recall from a previous post that over the past few years I have created a personalised calendar as a Christmas present for Mr C. For 2016 a fellow blogger sent me a lovely calendar in PDF format that I was able to print off hang on the wall above my computer. I enjoyed his beautiful photos so much that when the year ended I left the calendar hanging up with December’s photo as we crossed over into the New Year of 2017.
I was wondering what I would replace it with until I received an email offer from Moonpig on half price calendars. I thought the offer was too good to miss and created a January gift for me. I am impressed by the photo quality and printing, so next year I think Mr C will be getting a personally created but professionally printed calendar at full price. He is worth it 
I tried to mix the photos about a bit but some of them are inevitably the same as the photos I chose for Mr C. Below is the front cover photograph that I chose for my calendar as a bit of fun. Seeing it full size and professionally printed I think it would make a good advertising photograph for Bottle Green or the Alnwick Garden
PS: Click on the top photo for links to the original uncropped photographs
Tags: 2016, 2017, Calendar, Gift, Journey, Ted, TedVenture
There has been a bit of a technical hitch with my blog hosts causing my site along with many others to be offline for several hours. The tech guys have been working flat out to get it resolved and here I am with a little bit of colouring that that I did last year. I used watercolor pencils but did not apply water to blend.
Tags: #CalmColourCreate, Blog, Calm, Calm Colour Create Magazine, Colouring, Life
