Sunday – Well Dressings and a Duke’s House

Mostly cloudy day today with some rain but generally pleasant.  This morning we drove the nearby tiny town of Tissington, a quintessential little English village.  It, like other towns in England, is celebrating their annual Well Dressing Festival this week (Good timing!).  Well dressing (also once known as well flowering) is a summer custom practiced in rural England in which wells, springs or other water sources are decorated with designs created from flower petals. The custom is most closely associated with the Peak District of Derbyshire and Staffordshire.  (I’ve been saying we are in Derbyshire.  All the sights we have seen are indeed in Derbyshire, but Dovedale Lodge is in fact over the border in Staffordshire). We parked just outside the village, and walked through town viewing the six well dressings located here.  Tissington is the most famous of all the well dressing villages in England.

Click on Pictures to Enlarge (Lots today!)

From here we drove back up toward Bakewell to visit the ancestral and current home of the Duke of Devonshire.  Chatsworth House is located on a huge estate, and it was very busy on this long weekend Sunday.  We went through the magnificent house, and then ventured into the lovely gardens.  Parts of the house are currently displaying an exhibition of British style.  The gardens were huge and we did only a short walkabout there.  You could easily spend a whole day here, and families had spread blankets on the vast lawns and set up elaborate picnics.  Apparently the current Duke’s mother, the Duchess, used to come down and greet visitors who came to view the house every day until she died at age 84 a few years back.  The current Duke, the 12th, took over on the death of his father in 2009.  His grandfather, the 10th Duke, had an older brother who was married to Kathleen Kennedy, sister of John F. Kennedy.  He was killed in WWII and never assumed dukedom.

After an abbreviated visit in the gardens, we headed back home to change for Sunday afternoon brunch at the Duncombe Arms, a short drive from Dovedale Lodge in little Ellastone.  Service wasn’t great, but the food was good.  As our only meal of the day, I started with a delicious chicken live pate while Elaine had citrus salmon with avocado.  I had traditional English roast beef with Yorkshire Pudding and potatoes while Elaine enjoyed chicken and mushroom pie.  For dessert Elaine had sticky toffee pudding with ginger ice cream while I indulged in a strawberry trifle.  All yummy with a nice bottle of wine (French Bordeaux).

Fully sated, we headed home for a rest.  We had cocktails on the lawn again as a hot air balloon floated by, and we had a nice chat with our landlord, Roger.  This tiny village of Blore has only four resident families. (Well, five if you count us!)  Then it was early to bed after a busy day.