1 post tagged “bed and breakfast”
Yesterday, we finished inspecting the homes that are in our stewardship. This 7 homes was located in Kelsale, in Eastern East Anglia. We could not inspect them all in one day so we spent the night in the Moat House Bed and Breakfast, a beautiful country place in the midst of the countryside. Here is the main house and the back "garden".
The place was recently completely remodelled and was beautifully done in natural wood, including the step down out of the shower.
For breakfast, we had a traditional English one. Fried tomatoes, fried mushrooms, bacon (like Canadian bacon), sausage, fried egg, wheat toast with jam or jelly. After the big meal we had the evening before at The White Horse pub, we were stuffed and ready to go all day.
One of the homes we inspected was a 500 year old hunting lodge called Kelsale Hall Lodge.
Kelsale Hall was a large, manor house back then, about 10 miles East of this hunting outpost. The structure itself was in remarkably good condition, considering its age. It needed a lot of work though. Ceiling plaster was separating from the lath behind and a couple raised panels in the front door had rotted clear through leaving a small hole in the corner of each of them. We are hoping it will not be too expensive to replace the two raised panels in order to save the very old door which is nearly 4 feet wide and barely 6 feet tall. Here is the old hunting lodge with a old wing added on one end. Many of the windows need to be replaced and the brick work needs to be repointed to keep the rain out. If you look carefully at the far end, you can see a change in the bricks there also where an extension was added some years ago. It is amazing that these old buildings have so little problems with foundations cracking. A two story brick has a lot of weight. The old builders obviously knew how to do it right because we had to really study the outside walls carefully to find a couple of cracks and those were from lower windows to upper ones.
On the way home in the afternoon, we took a few pictures because the scenes were so classic for this area. Here is a couple Englishmen out for a stroll in the evening, a scene down a typical narrow highway and one of those late afternoon landscapes that looks like it should be a picture puzzle. You see a small farmhouse
in the distance nestled among the mixed forest of broad leaf and conifers, the mighty oaks standing in the hedged winter pasture with grass in tiny hummocks all beneath that unsettled sky that so often graces these picturesque vistas.
