Wimpole Hall II The Interior

   It's turned nippy here at night of late.  I have a feeling that Autumn has started that little bit early this year and I've put the heating on.  That said today has turned out to be one of those glorious, slightly melancholy days of late summer/early autumn.  Just the right sort of day to get out into the garden and prepare for winter.  I've dug out one bed and plied it with compost and replanted things in a bit more of a structured way.  I've also been on-line and bought tulips and aliums to plant for next year.  There is still a lot of work to do though.
    The apples and pears have been a disappointment this year, but the blackberries have been in superabundance, so many in fact that for the first time I've made blackberry gin.  It's currently maturing in a cool dark place and will be drinkable in mid November.

   The visit the bf and I made to Wimpole Hall seems an age ago now.  It was a lovely mild summer's day.  And it was good to explore part of the country I've never seen properly.  Here are some of the pictures I took of the interior.  I've been meaning to post them for sometime.  Better late than never. The  first few images are roughly in the order you see them as a visitor; I've left the fireworks I promised on my earlier Wimpole post to last: the Book Room, and the Yellow Drawing Room both by Sir John Soane, and the Baroque chapel by James Gibbs and Sir James Thornhill, who both, incidentally, lived on the Harley estate in West London.

   Unfortunately my attempts to photograph the Gibbs library were unsuccessful - as in the chapel at Belton the blinds were down and it was just too dark.  Many of the fireplaces (fireplaces, again!) are by Flitcroft, and most of the plasterwork on the ceilings is 19th century, where the architects of a previous generation had wisely left plain: the majority of the rooms at Wimpole are relatively low, and the plasterwork makes the ceilings a bit oppressive. The rooms are as left by the last owner Mrs Bainbridge, the daughter of Rudyard Kipling and saviour of the house, who bequeathed the house to the Trust on her death, so that being the work or successive owners and architects the interior is also an example of conservative mid-century British taste.  (Wimpole never stayed in one family for that long, so that there isn't a continuity of contents.)