Early snowdrops

A little early for snowdrops, but last Sunday we thought we had better check whether global warming had reached the snowdrop world and get ourselves to Nonsuch Park. Bright and clear by 1000 and off we went, with me sporting my red skiing jacket just in case the wind got up. A fine jacket which has never been on a ski slope, although I have to admit to it having been near one.

Crows

Plenty of cars in the Stoneleigh-side car park that we usually use, with plenty of crows in attendance. Maybe they know that people means dropped food, even at this time of year. The park itself was looking very well in the bright winter sun, with the frost just lifting. Plenty of dogs and plenty of joggers out on the various paths.

Fungus

The park contains quite a lot of old trees and quite a few of them had come down or been taken down over the past few months. Fortunately, someone has been busy and there are plenty of young trees coming on to replace them.

Herald Copse

Snowdrops coming on well at Herald Copse, perhaps a couple of weeks off their peak. Just the one dog owner being a bit insensitive about where he allowed his dog to go - and following it into the copse.

Cabbages

Fine show of ornamental cabbages around the corner, with their colours seeming very bright. The sort of thing which were - and perhaps still are - popular in contract window boxes in central London. By which I mean window boxes that you don't bother to plant or water yourself, finding it more convenient to get some contractor to supply, maintain and water.

Fake?

Not altogether sure what was going on here, with a row of what looked like filled in windows. But filled in a long time ago as the buttresses have clearly been there for quite a long time to. Perhaps change of use rather than window tax, as featured at reference 2? Clearly something for a closer inspection next time.

New readers may not know that five hundred years ago there was a palace at the southern end of what is now the park, while the present house is in the middle of the park, with the council struggling to find a sensible use for it. The Nonsuch Volunteers do what they can to help to keep things going and are now open every Sunday, not just high days and holidays, so we were able to take another look at their splendid model of the palace, construction of which had been supervised by the chap who led the excavation back in 1959. The post which first talks of this model, at reference 5, talked of folly, whereas on this occasion I thought of Marx's surplus value. A society in which most people had a very low standard of living and in which common people left little material trace, but which could find the money for such an ostentatious and expensive palace. Not to mention all their ridiculously fancy clothes, not here on display. In their defence, they did recycle the building materials after around a hundred years. Were the Tudor aristocrats and parvenus the people who came closest, in our modern era, to the people who are very rich now?

A palace in roughly two halves, with the end when the work was done, kitchens, stables and the like, being built of stone, while the display end was timber framed. With the fancy decorative panels so framed being made of a very hard variety of fast-setting plaster. The lump on display looked very like stone to me.

We also took in the circular or octagonal game larder of the present house, at least from the outside. Occupying what had been a courtyard.

PS 1: according to Wikipedia: 'The 1959 excavation of Nonsuch by Martin Biddle was a key event in the history of archaeology in the UK. It was one of the first post-medieval sites to be excavated, and attracted over 75,000 visitors during the work. This excavation led to major developments in post-medieval archaeology'. See references 3 and 4.

PS 2: some time later, visiting the modellers at reference 6, I find that another of their bigger projects was a model of the Auschwitz concentration camp for the Imperial War Museum near Waterloo Station: 'the model represents the arrival and dispersal of a trainload of over 6,000 Jews from the Berehovo ghetto in June 1944'. Not sure about the propriety of this myself, so I hope they took proper advice before commissioning the model.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/02/snowdrops.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/fake-52.html.

Reference 3: Nonsuch Palace: The Material Culture of a Noble Restoration Household - Biddle, Martin - 2005. Oxbow Books. £60 or more from either Abebooks or eBay. Too strong for me!

Reference 4: The Gardens of Nonsuch: Sources and Dating - Biddle, Martin - 1999. Garden History.

Reference 5: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=nonsuch+model.

Reference 6: http://www.modelhouses.co.uk/.