Visitors and roses

We have had a busy week with two visits already. When you take visitors around your home there is a certain amount of scurrying about hiding the detritus of life before they come. That pile of newspapers, odd socks etc that seem to be on every table or hot pipe. The criteria is that the house can be used normally when visitors go home. This is why we are only open to guided groups. Life requires some planning!

We are therefore going to have an 'Open House' day on 17th July. We will take groups round the house at about 2pm but people must be booked in with us (01275 393141) so that we do not have too big a group to fit in the rooms (in the 13th and 14th century they were rather smaller and lower than in the 17th). The tour of the house is followed by tea and cake which I often make with roses and other garden fruit. The berb garden - re-designed 4 years ago is also a great place to wander and we can share the scents and flavours of the herbs that we have here. Some more unusual. The Romans have influenced the garden and signs of them can be seen both in and outside the house.

The garden was open under the National Gardens scheme several years ago and featured in a national paper...We had 1200 visitors and had a real problem finding cups, tea, milk etc to look after everyone.Thank goodness now for the farm shop next door which as such an asset to the valley. A lot of our guests go to lunch there before coming on to us in the afternoon.