Saturday, May 09, 2026

Outdoor Art from our Trip to England

Crathes Castle Garden and Sea Birds

This was the final tour on our cruise in the British Isles.

Birds Seen from the Ship

Thus begins the challenge of catching up with all the photos I took during the voyage while I had inadequate internet access to upload them and little time to create blog posts! This is shared with several weekend blogger collections.

Friday, May 08, 2026

Kitchen Scenes

Here, in no particular order, are some of the photos I took when touring two Great Houses along our route in the British Isles last week. The families who own these houses, which also have beautiful formal and less formal gardens, lived there until fairly recently, so the kitchens combine historic display items with slightly older equipment for preparing grand dinners and family meals. Some of these photos were in a post I did last week, but I wanted to include them again.

I’m writing this while watching a version of a Jane Austen novel on TV — I suspect that these kitchens would have been quite similar to the ones in the houses she wrote about, though the characters in the novels weren’t generally in any kitchens. They are definitely similar to the ones in many TV series about the British upper classes and their servants!