On Saturday, after the morning, coffee-based social gathering with fellow CCC Photographic Group members, we visited Calke Abbey, around 20 minutes drive from Conkers.
Within a very large estate and at the end of an impressively long drive, the Abbey is actually a very large house and country estate, now in the custody of the National Trust.
Clearly there was no shortage of money to build and equip the house and estate as they were almost entirely self-sufficient. There was never an actual abbey on the site, but at one time there was a priory.
When the National Trust took possession in 1985, it had been neglected for decades by a family who never threw anything away. Some rooms bear more than a passing resemblance to a French brocante with piles of old and dusty artifacts.
The House
Inside the house, there are rooms which are very stately indeed and others which look as though they had been used for strorage for many years.
The salon has a ladies’ billiard table, which is a little higher than the normal, as this prevented the women’s embarrassment of revealing a normally hidden ankle. You would assume this meant they used a rest to support the cue, but apparently not, there was no concern about showing too much cleavage.
Many rooms in the house were not in use and were just used for storage:
This extremely tall four poster, behind a glass-walled partition, has remarkable hand decorated Chinese silk curtains:
Servants in the house used to have to pay for any breakages. A large number of broken Royal Worcester plates were found buried in the grounds.
The Outbuildings
The Gardens and Grounds
After our evening meal, we joined other CCC Photographic Group members to watch a presentation regarding completing a project called “100 Strangers” by Alf Myers, who I had actually seen before at Leyland Photographic Society in 2017, but I was happy to see the presentation again.
"See-u-Later" 