DEVON'S ARLINGTON COURT.

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Last saturday we went to Arlington Court for the afternoon, this property was originally owned (for over 500 years) by the chichester family the last of which was Miss Rosalie Chichester (who was a real accentric).The Estate houses a fine collection of horse drawn carriages and also is the home of a colony of fairly rare lesser horseshoe bats. The house and Estate is situated in beautiful Devon countryside and farmland just a few miles from Barnstaple and is a total of around 2700 acres.The house grounds are of about 30 acres and contain a chapel, stables and a walled garden that is under reconstruction. Any of you that saw the T V series (20 or so years ago) will understand the amount of work and manpower that goes into the construction and daily maintenance of this project. A lot of the produce fruit veg herbs etc are used daily in the Restaurant and Tea-rooms.As a by the way, any of you reading this who hav'nt seen the mentioned T V series "The Victorian Kitchen Garden", then if you possibly can get a copy, do so they are still available and absolutely fascinating. On our visit we started with a stroll around the house gardens followed by of course a good old cup of Tea (quite dear),then into the main house. The house contains dozens of pictures and models etc of old boats(ships ?) also a very fine collection of shapes colours and sizes of sea shells and the things that can be made from them.This suprisingly took well over an hour (so back for more expensive Tea).We then managed to walk around the well laid out formal garden and on into the walled garden, as I said earlier this is probably about 60-70% complete and to gardeners like us was wonderful. All in all a quite expensive (relative I suppose) but very enjoyable day, although I did miss out on the lake walk and the walk to see the bats due to my disability, hopefully next time.