Castle Howard, Fountains Abbey - July 4

Today we (Mark, Morrie, Dawn, and I) checked out of our B&B after another lovely English breakfast and headed out of York to the north east. Our first stop was Castle Howard. It is a stately home built in the late 1600s to early 1700s by the Howard family. I’m sure most of you remember Thomas Howard, the powerful patriarch of the Howard family in the times of Henry VIII and uncle to two of Henry’s wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. It was his descendants that built this home. Interestingly enough, Georgiana Spencer who married the Duke of Devonshire (think of the movie with Keira Knightly) had a daughter, Georgiana (Little G) Cavendish, married into the Howard family and lived in this home. This was her bedroom.

Also, both versions of Brideshead Revisited were filmed at Castle Howard. The guidebook says, “The audacity of the great baroque house is startling, proclaiming the wealth and importance of the Howards. This was the first private residence in Britain built with a stone dome.” The Howard family still live in part of the house today.

The house and grounds were beautiful. There was a walled garden which reminded me of “Secret Garden” filled with beautiful flowers and a fountain.

We left Castle Howard and meandered through the countryside and visited an English lavender farm. From there we drove about an hour west in search of yet another abbey ruin, Fountains Abbey. It is more intact than the one in York.

Back in the car, we drove another 2 hours west, arriving in the Lake District and the Lakeland Villages timeshare that Morrie and Dawn had traded their timeshare for. We are situated right on a river and it is very woodsy. We went to a local pub, The White Hart, for dinner. Morrie and Mark both had the steak & Guinness pie and declared it excellent. There were many locals at the pub (everyone seemed to know each other), the ceilings were low with beams running the length, and there were all sorts of game stuffed and mounted as décor.