Back on the Tourist Trail

Following an enforced hiatus, our "leisure visit programme" (i.e., what we do when we're not gardening or working) resumed last weekend with a trip up to Oxford to visit the exhibition of Macedonian artefacts from the royal tombs at Aegae which is currently at the Ashmolean Museum, followed by a visit to the nearby Pitt Rivers Museum to marvel at its eclectic jumble of ethnographic materials, all still arranged in their nineteenth century cases (and thus in many ways a museum of itself). Today, we went across to Harrow in northeast London to visit the recently restored (and thus re-opened to the public) Headstone Manor House, the only surviving moated medieval house in the London area and the centrepiece of Harrow Museum's collections. Not that there's much to the collections beyond the buildings themselves -- the manor house, the two post-medieval barns, and the granary, but since it was the old buildings we were going to see that didn't matter too much.

Here are some photographs of the Headstone Manor estate (the remnants of what was once a large working farm) -- the Small Barn, the Tithe Barn (so-called -- it never was one during its working life, but the moniker seems to get attached to any barn of this size), the Granary, and two views of (respectively) the front and back of the manor house. Note that, in the second of the manor house views, the oldest part of the structure is the yellow lime-washed tower to the left; the half-timbered part to the right is actually later, added in the eighteenth century (and the small lean-to arrangement at the extreme right is later still: a Victorian laundry, added in the nineteenth century). The front view shows the Georgian brick facade added in the eighteenth century to smarten it up by concealing the timber-frame and lime-washed wattle-and-daub of which much of the house is actually made.

For further information about these buildings (and the two Oxford museums), follow the links embedded in the introductory paragraph.