Boscobel House, Shropshire
For my birthday this year we purchased joint (senior!) membership of English Heritage. One of the first places we chose to visit was Boscobel House in Shropshire – where Charles II famously hid in an oak tree after his defeat at the battle of Worcester in 1651.
You can visit an oak tree that grew from an acorn from that very famous Royal Oak tree. You can also see the priest’s hole in Boscobel House where Charles II subsequently hid.
It was a beautiful sunny autumn day. We declined the guided tour and meandered through the house and gardens on our own, through hazel avenues and around lavender and box formal flowerbeds. The house has some wonderful old beams and floorboards and there are magnificent views over the surrounding countryside. The dairy is very well equipped with ancient equipment, milk pails, enamel jugs, wooden butter churns, memories of a by-gone age when everything was painstakingly done by hand.
By this time, we had worked up quite an appetite so, before embarking on the 20 minute walk to White Ladies Priory (which actually took our ambling gait well over half an hour!), we decided to treat ourselves to a late breakfast. The café is installed in the old stable block and we enjoyed delicious real bacon sandwiches and a proper cup of tea in china cups, poured from a china teapot.
Thus fortified, we set off the find the priory. The path goes along the edge of the fields alongside the road so we made a mental note to walk back on the easier terrain of the tarmac. The priory must have been magnificent in its time (built in the 12th century). As you can see from the pictures some impressive archways of the church remain – after the suppression of the monasteries most of the convent buildings were taken down. We imaged the nuns (Augustinian canonesses who wore habits of undyed cloth) at morning prayers, growing herbs, peacefully tending the gardens and watching the sun set on the Shropshire/Staffordshire border.
