Saturday, 19 May 2018

Stratford-upon-Avon - #2 Hall's Croft

Hi there everyone 😀

It's the morning of Prince Harry's wedding to Meghan Markle. The sun is shining and the sky is blue and we will be wandering round to friends later, where I will be glued to the TV watching the wedding with Jackie, whilst Martin and Phil will be building a raised bed in the garden. We have Pimms and elderflower and lemon blondies to keep us going, it's shaping up to be another lovely day.

For now though, we are back in Stratford for the second of my posts following our short break last week.

We started off at Anne Hathaway's Cottage which you can read about here and from there we headed into the town centre, where we parked up on the other side of the river and had a walk up to the lock, where we watched the general coming and goings on the river whilst taking in the views.

We Walked back along the riverside ...
... where I found another natural treasure to add to my collection ...
Being by the river in Stratford always has a real holiday feeling about it for me. I don't quite know what it is and I’m sure the weather helped, it was perfect. It always feels so tranquil and chilled out and just makes you want to take everything just that little slower.

We didn't mind at all when the chain ferryman said he was stopping for lunch, we just sat on the nearest bench in the sunshine and watched the world go by, waiting until he was ready to get going again.
We didn't have to wait long and were soon on board ...
... and been wound across to the other side of the river ...
We were heading for Hall's Croft, the home of Shakespeare's daughter, Susanna, and her husband, physician John Hall. We wandered past pretty period cottages ...
The Other Place ...
... and Tai Chi in the park ...
... before turning a corner and being stopped dead by this sight ...
The sight and the scent literally took our breaths away, it was absolutely stunning, and we just had to spend a while trying to capture it ...

Hall's Croft was only a short walk along the street and it too was putting on a very good display ...

We decided that it was a good time for lunch and started our visit with a very pleasant half hour sat in the garden eating our Tudor Fayre, with this as our view ...
After lunch, we had a wander round the garden, which is quite small, but nicely laid out ...


I think it would be fair to say that the deck chairs gave as much colour as the planting, so if this was by design then 'Nice one!' ...
Again, we spent far longer in the garden than we did in the actual property itself, this does seem to be coming a bit of a theme for us at the moment.
From Hall's Croft we walked back past the glorious wisteria ...
... to Holy Trinity church, where we sat and pondered for a while, admiring the masses of tapestry kneelers made by some very talented local ladies, but not feeling inclined to pay to visit the Bard's final resting place.

We made our way back along the river walk to the chain ferry, where I managed to bump into an old work colleague who I haven’t seen since I finished work back in 2014. As he lives in a totally different part of the country I had to do a bit of a double take before believing it really was someone I knew ... who would have imagined it?

By now we were starting to flag so it was back across the chain ferry to the car for an early check in.
Looking back now at how much we did, it's hard to believe that we fit it all into a day but it had been the loveliest of days and were both looking forward to seeing what the morrow would bring 💜💜💜

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