Roman invaders to Italianate Palazzo

Holidays are fabulous, aren't they? The freedom to sleep until you awake and to spend your time as you will. Sometime soon this blog will be a year old and, like last year, I'm in Dorset.

I've been coming here all my life and so I'd think that there aren't that many attractions that I haven't visited already but I'm always surprised by how much this county offers. My family hail from the area around Corfe Castle which was thoroughly wrecked in the Civil War. This week I got to visit the home, Kingston Lacy, that the Bankes family moved to following the destruction of the castle.

It's a very imposing Italianate building and set in stunning grounds.




My favourite room was the little attic room where little Bankes children slept in a room decorated to look like a tent.





The National Trust think about all their visitors and are great about putting out toys for children who might find herbaceous borders less than interesting. My son had a great time playing cricket and tennis against his Grandpa and joking that the mummy sarcophagus playing backstop moved a bit faster than me as fielder.




Kingston Lacy's grounds are famous: particularly the quiet grace of the Japanese garden.







After we finished at Kingston Lacy we went to the Iron Age fort at Badbury Rings The weather had been gloriously sunny all day whilst in the refined gardens of Kingston Lacy but the sky turned grey and brooding for our trip to the fort, very appropriately.








When up on the ramparts looking at Dorset rolling into the distance you get a real sense of how alien Dorset must have been to the Roman centurions sent here all those millennia ago.


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