Mosaic Monday # 77 - Harvington Hall, an Elizabethan Manor House.

Here I am warmly ensconced in the sitting room of a small cottage in Worcestershire looking out of the large window at the snow laying gently on the garden. There's a wonderful log fire burning brightly in the super modern high tech stove across the room. The Senior Partner is in the kitchen preparing a typical English Sunday lunch of roast beef, Yorkshire puddings & gravy, roast potatoes with a medley of vegetables and it certainly does feel like home!
But more about our home from home later, first I want to tell you about a wonderful place which we visited yesterday afternoon.

Harvington Hall is a restored Tudor Manor House surrounded by a beautiful moat and gardens.

It's origins date back to the 1580's when it was built for Humphrey Pakington and his family.

They were devout Catholics during the reign of Protestant Queen Elizabeth I and therefore Humphrey had many hidden Priest hides included throughout the building.

Click here to find out more about the largest surviving collection of Priest hides in England @ Harvington.

They really are fascinating to see and the tales of the lengths the priests and the host family went to in order to avoid detection, or in some cases didn't avoid, are incredible.

Harvington Hall is simply steeped in History with a capital H and the very informative and chatty docent, dressed as an Elizabethan female servant, brought it all to life for us.

I couldn't possibly cover five centuries of history in a single blog post but if you're keen to know more then do visit their website, you'll be in for a real treat if you do.
Before we left the 16th century behind we stopped at the Moat Side Tea Room for a pot of tea, toasted teacake and cream tea, well it would have been rude not to.

(The cream tea debate of Devon versus Cornwall has raged for decades in the UK. Do you put cream or jam on your scone first? Well, it would seem that HRH Queen Elizabeth II has finally settled things once and for all. She (like me) prefers the Cornish method of jam first with cream on top not jam followed by cream as they do in Devon).

As we left the tea room we saw that during our tour of Harvington snow had begun to fall but by the time we arrived back at The Perry Shed it had blown over.
During the night it blew back again and this how things looked this morning.

Normandy Life

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