This is the place where I record and then archive my monthly updates and what's new in our hunt for castles UK.

In September it was off to Hastings again, well the Castle Spotters number 1 son had dropped in the day before, so it was only right that we took him with us because we couldn't get in his house without him. We head down the A1, it's Monday morning but not that busy, in places the A1 is still a quaint 2 lane A road, it's like an old friend. We go past the Battle of Losecote Field, Empingham where on the 12th of March 1470 King Edward IV soldiers, broke the rebel army of Sir Robert Welles. The rebels fled and many didn't fancy being caught wearing jackets with the livery of Warwick and Clarence, so they discarded them in 'Losecote Field'. We past Peterborough and the A1 now (M) turns into a 4 lane monster, why we need 8 lanes around here I just don't know. We turn off onto the A14 to hit the M11 and No.1 spots the sign for Hemingford Grey, it's where the house of Green Knowe is, lets go we have all day.
Hemingford Grey with its thatched timber-framed cottages is a lovely village, we park up by the church and walk along the towpath beside the river Great Ouse to look at the house. Looking over the low wall at the immaculate gardens, the house is at the back and there's a group of people by the door, some turn to look at us. The note on the garden gate, says that it's a tour and theirs room for more, so Spotter and No.1 head off down the path, with me at the back, well the house looks Georgian, I'm no lover of Georgian and I haven't read the Green Knowe books.
The tall lady giving us the tour is Diana Boston and she leads the way into the house, gives us a bit of the old elf and safely, it's an old house and the floors are uneven and mind your heads. We go through the scullery and up the stairs into a bedroom, she tells us that there was once a big chimney stack on this stone wall and the round headed window had been made into a doorway, now this got my attention, this house is older than it looks. Next it's back down stairs, passed the shop and into the dining room, this is where Lucy Boston wrote all her books and sewed her patchworks. It's a lovely room, with a big inglenook fireplace and stone walls 4 feet thick, the house was doubled in size in the 1730s but only the Georgian north wall remains, the rest burnt down in 1798, luckily the three remaining medieval walls stopped the fire.
It's back up stairs and into the first bedroom again but this time we get to see some of the fantastic patchwork quilts made by Lucy Boston each winter. Then we go into the main bedroom and unlike the dining room it's full of light, them big Georgian windows are doing their job, in the walls you can see the change from medieval to Georgian, when they made the house longer. The next room is the upstairs hall, for me its the best room of all, I spot the original doorway, this is a first floor hall house me thinks (started in the 1130s by Payn Osmundson its Norman) and it would have been one room before it was modernised by the Tudors and a big chimney stack put in the middle of the house. A 1929 EMG gramophone with a huge papier-mache horn sits on a platform, during the Second World War Lucy Boston gave gramophone recitals once or twice a week for RAF airmen who were based nearby. We sit down, the gramophone is wound up and the bamboo needle placed on an old 78 record, we listened to part of one of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, the EMG still plays beautifully, this is how music should be heard.
Next its up to the bedroom in the attic, which is full of toys from the Green Knowe books but all this goes over my head, then we get to look around the gardens and the outside of the house. Close to the house heading towards the river, is a narrow straight ditch full of bulrushes, this house was moated, well it just gets better and better, going round the back I find it's complete and water filled, it curves round and heads past the house. I trace the rest of it back to the river and go to find the Spotter and No.1, who are still busy looking around the many gardens, it's warm, so to finish we head to the pub, what a totally out of the blue day, such fun.
I've posted pictures of Green Knowe on the CastleUK Facebook page, go take a look.

For more information, click on the pictures or the Facebook link