Family Stories by Lois

Revisiting the Scales Hotel

I wrote about the Portland Arms, the pub in Cambridge that my grandfather Reuben Elsden once held the license, and I was reminded of a post I wrote some time ago. Here it is: From the Scales Hotel to the Portland Arms was no distance at all because they were one and the same! The […]

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Bits and pieces by Lois

Juxtaposition

Sometimes you see two unexpected colours against each other and they just seem to work… I’m not an artist and so I don’t know anything about the theory of colour, and maybe the colours I saw adjacent to each other in the walled garden at Knightshayes Court are a classic match… I saw these clumps […]

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Books by Lois

Another doorway…

I am rather taken with unexpected doors, doorways, gates, stairs leading nowhere, bricked up entrances… and this one; it’s a door in a wall that I walk past several times a week in our village. The wall is neat and well-maintained, but it is too high to see the house beyond it. I’m sure there must […]

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Bits and pieces by Lois

Sunny Knightshayes

Knightshayes Court near Tiverton in North Devon is a stately home under the ownership of the National Trust. There is a wonderful and very interesting house, a shop full of delights, a tearoom, and beautiful gardens. We spent our afternoon having a picnic in the parkland, and then wandered round the walled garden.

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