Dyrham Park

Greetings! Tuesday saw me whizzing off in the direction of Bath to visit Dyrham Park with a friend. It's a Baroque country house and deer park run by the National Trust. The roof is currently being renovated and so there was a lot of scaffolding in evidence. It did mean, however, that (acrophobia permitting) you could don a reflective jacket, take a wobbly lift and do a tour of the renovations. It was mostly enclosed with tarpaulins, so wasn't in fact too vertiginous. 

 We were rather fond of this griffin:

 .... and Mercury:

 The view from the unenclosed bit:

 After a collections tour around the house itself - my favourite part being 2 mummified rats named Martin and Colin after the builders who discovered them - we went for a walk round the gardens. We stood watching this coot's nest in the middle of the lake for ages. I never realized that coots were such good parents. The father scoured the lake for bits of food and took them back to pass  to the mother. She broke it up and fed it carefully to the cute offspring. We could only see one chick (they were quite far away) but she may well have been sitting on more. All the while we were watching, neither parent seemed to eat anything; it all went to the chick.

 Then it was off to the deer park to watch the amazingly tame deer:

 They were divided into 2 herds - the males in one part of the park and the females and young in another. The males were in the process of losing the velvet on their antlers. I'm sure it's not, but it looked quite painful as the velvet hung down in bloody strips in some places. Then it was a long scenic route back to the car park and home.

Other happies this week are non-photo ones - E did herself proud with her AS results and also managed to pass her driving theory test this weekend. Despite all that, I've been feeling a bit blue for the last few days, so there is a sad lack of other photos I'm afraid. Hope to be back to normal next week.

Toodle pip for now. x