Saturday Morning At Stowe

A bright and sunny morning again. We were quite prepared to make the most of it. We chose to visit Stowe Landscape Gardens near Buckingham, about a 30-minute car journey from home. There are a lot of other National Trust properties we considered, but in the end Stowe was where we eventually chose to visit.

It's a quite spectacular drive when you turn off the road from Buckingham onto the avenue that leads to the magnificent Corinthian arch which you see from the distance. The road goes between two lodges either side of the road and out into the tree-lined avenue. As the road makes it's way you loose sight of the arch as you dip down because of the hilly landscape and then it comes back a couple more times as you approach. Today it is lit by the sun which almost makes it seem to glow. It would have been even more astonishing back in the 18th century when visitors approached via horse-drawn carriages. Ir would obviously have been a good deal slower than modern-day mechanical transport, such as cars and coaches, adding to the excitement before you arrive at the entrance, which was originally through this arch.

You now park in a more recently-built and opened carpark from where you parked your car when we used to visit years ago, near the Stowe School playing fields and enter through a temporary building on the opposite side of the gardens. This was intended to replicate how visitors came to the gardens back in the 18th century, when some would have stayed in the inn, which now forms part of the visitors centre, which includes a café, toilets, shop and garden centre area outside and then you can walk down the road which leads into the gardens, or you can take one of the several buggies which ferry visitors the short distance if you don't want to walk. We saw many visitors walking with children in pushchairs as well as walking dogs, as this property seems to be a favourite dog-waking venue. This lane is known as Bell Gate Drive, because it leads to a gate into the gardens which used to have a bell which visitors would ring in order to be let in by a servant who lived in the near-by house. All the planting near the carpark is beginning to mature and the bushes and trees have grown considerably since we last visited. Also, the surfaces of the paths have been given a far more substantial finish, better for walking on or pushing wheelchairs or buggies on. We also noticed that there seem a few more ride-on buggies for those who prefer not to walk and some which circulated within the garden. A good idea, because it is quite a long way to walk if you come from the carpark along Bell Gate Drive and then go across to, say, Stowe House, which is on the opposite side of the gardens. Today we walked down but took the buggy back when we left to go home.

We walked quite some way within the gardens. Some areas which we have never visited before. It's such a large place that it's surprising that we saw parts we had never seen before. Everything looking well cared for and tidy, a good enough thing to notice particularly as we're National Trust members.

We had intended having ice-cream or coffee in the café when we arrived back at the visitor centre, having had a lift on the buggy. I went off to the toilet and Carol went to see what was on offer in the café, but by the time I got back to her she said that there was such a long queue that we'd have to wait too long and it would be better to just return home. Which is what we did. On arriving back in Milton Keynes we went to the One Stop shop in Coffee Hall to buy milk and Cadbury's Dairy Milk ice creams which we took home and sat and ate in the sitting room.