Today we went to the Chatsworth House.
It was absolutely amazing. This is the home of the duke and duchess of Devonshire. It’s a beautiful home full of ancient artwork and beautiful architecture. Almost all of the ceilings have gorgeous paintings on them and the furinature is stunning.
We took a guided tour of the house and out tour guide was really good. He was very knowledgeable and quite a funny and entertaining person. He told us that the artwork in the home was insured at 750 million pounds, which means it’s actually worth about twice that. That’s about 2 billion dollars of artwork in that home.
The duke and duchess do still live there. There are two wings of the house that no one tours that they live in during the day. At five when the tours end they remove all of the ropes keeping people away from the artwork and the family can use the whole house until eight the next morning. It seems kind of crappy to me that they can’t live in their whole house but the guide also told us that the tourist stuff in the house is completely non-profit. All of the money is used to preserve the artwork in the home.
See the little black square on the wall and the black spot in the sculpture, those are "honesty spots," that is what the wall and sculpture would look like if it weren't cleaned yearly.
After our tour we had lunch and then we had two hours to explore the grounds of the home. They have about 1000 acres of land and its beautiful. They have all kinds of sculptures in the lawn and a pond and a fountain. I walked around with Zoya, Maria, and Jullian. We walked to a garden with a hedge maze. We didn’t go into the maze though we just walked by it. We walked up a hill to a small waterfall and a little gazebo in the woods.
We left around five and it was a three hour ride back. After that Zoya, Maria, Rebecca, and I went and got dinner at the Red Lion. It’s a really good pub and it’s pretty cheap food and drinks. When I got home I was so tired. It was a great day though. Anyone traveling to England has to take a day trip to see the Chatsworth House it’s totally worth it.
No comments:
Post a Comment