To the End of the earth

I had a delightful trip last weekend out to Audley End, in the far north-western reaches of Essex.


Essex has a bad reputation, but the bits furthest away from London are delightful -- proper East Anglian* countryside, the land of my origins.


It's also, of course, lush agricultural land, a place of giant Euro-fields and heavy crops. The effect can be reminiscent of a Rothko painting, all sharply-delineated horizontal bands of colour:


My objective was this, a vast Jacobean palace, newly re-opened by English Heritage after a major restoration project lasting a couple of years:


Extraordinarily the house you see today is just one-third of the size it attained at its largest extent.


The rooms inside are delightful (although for some reason English Heritage forbids any photography. Which is both churlish and annoying, especially after paying more than £11 for an entrance fee). Although I couldn't resist illegally taking this snap, part of an unexpected suite of Adam Brothers rooms tucked into the ground floor:


The house is in vast grounds which, even though they had large numbers of families enjoying picnics looked, as you can see, deserted -- an effect I rather like:


But then, this sort of countryside feels utterly familiar to me.


On a warm summery day it is completely beguiling, and I wouldn't even have needed to have the Jacobean pleasures of Audley End.

*Well, yes, alright, if you're going to be pedantic, Essex is not in East Anglia (the clue being in the name -- Essex = East Saxons, not the South Folk (= Suffolk) part of the Angles or the Cambridgeshire/Hertfordshire bits of (presumably) West Anglia). But at this point Essex is so close that it's good enough for me.