Heritage day one

It being heritage time of year again, about ten days ago we picked out two heritage offerings from our Surrey booklet of same: the Catholic church at Leatherhead and special needs operation at the Grange, just outside Great Bookham.

The Calvados

First stop was Majestic Wine to stock up on Villa Maria. Where we found that Villa Maria had moved on to the 2019 harvest and that they had dropped their middle Calvados, leaving a top one which was rather dear and a bottom one which was not. A slightly suspicious looking own brand affair, which turned out to smell of cider (which most Calvados does not, despite the ingredients), but also to drink rather well. I dare say we will be buying it again. Not least because we were charged roughly the same for a 750ml bottle as Waitrose charge for a 500ml bottle. And with the one at reference 4 being even dearer.

We had failed to get inside the Catholic church on the occasion noticed at reference 1, so we thought to try again at a time when it was advertised as being open for an hour.

Juxtaposition

While we were waiting for the morning service to end, along with several other heritage lovers, we noticed a curious juxtaposition of shrine and fungus outside. Including also floral offerings still in their plastic, a practise which I find rather unsightly but which is now common in cemeteries. It seems to be the fact of the flowers which is important, not their arrangement.

View of the interior, from the balcony

Larger inside than you might think from the outside. Quite richly decorated, but a decent and dignified space nonetheless.

The northern chapel

Site constraints meant that the church was orientated towards the north east, rather than towards the east, which puts the shrine above in the northern chapel, to the left of the altar. A sanctuary light was present (left), but not lit on this occasion.

First detail

Second detail

Third detail

Some of the detailing caught my eye. First the rather cluttered window, as seen from the balcony. Perhaps the balcony was an afterthought. Plus I did not think that they had got the junction of the vertical and horizontal elements of the window frame quite right. Which they had got right in the second snap, highlighted with a paint job. While the third snap was a reminder that it is hard to keep maintenance work up to the standard of the original construction.

Picking apart, it was, as already noted, a decent and dignified space.

Extra cow

First tree

And so onto the Grange, a place lucky enough to have some handsome trees in their grounds. According to gmaps it also has one of the fake cows noticed at reference 5, but we did not see it on the day.

A place which started out as a place to train nurses who had been damaged in the first world war in needlework, hopefully enough for them to become economically active again. They took over the present premises, which started life as a large private house, in 1938, and gradually expanded their brief to provide various kinds of support, including supported living, for those with special needs more generally.

In the heritage room, we learned something of the lace industry from a lady who makes the stuff. It seems that in the olden days it could be a hard way to make a living, with a lot of poorly paid home-workers, gang masters, company shops and all the rest of it. With one curious fact being that a gang of them made their way down from up-north to Tiverton in the far-west and set up shop there. Perhaps with ties to the Honiton lace industry? While I muddled up D.H. Lawrence writing of drafting patterns for lace in 'Sons and Lovers' with actually doing same in real life, which he did not. He did a short stint in the office of a manufacturer of surgical appliances.

Shed - Google

Shed - Bing

Good tea and cakes in what had been the ballroom when the Grange was a house. A rather grand affair with lots of nice cubbyholes for private chats and so forth. I associated to the heavy wooden snogging sheds scattered about the gardens of Ham House, which get a mention at reference 6. I asked both Bing and Google for an image of one of these snogging sheds and while both turned up various garden furniture, neither turned up the sheds that I remember, with the snap above being the best that they could do; something to do with something called the silent garden. Maybe my memory is defective, with the snogging sheds being real enough but having got attached to the wrong bit of heritage.

Ballroom ceiling

Plenty of volunteers about who seemed to know their business. I was also impressed by the smart appearance of the place, it being all too easy for places of this sort to slip into a sort of institutional shabbiness. Perhaps they attract plenty of donations from all the rich people round about.

Contraption

What I took to be a contraption for taking wheelchairs up and down the stairs. A sort of specialised wheelbarrow. Made by a German company called Bartels who make a large range of such things. See reference 7.

Gold fish

We took our picnic by the handsome fish pond, including, for once, goldfish which actually were gold in colour. We thought that the wire strung around the perimeter, part of which is visible bottom left, was to do with keeping the herons away, although the gentleman standing hard by was very doubtful; he thought that they would just land in the middle of the pond, instead of surveying the scene from the bank. While my view was that if the wire wasn't doing it, it was hard to see what was: I couldn't see the Grange people taking a couple of hours or so each day to take a cover off in the morning and then to put it back again in the evening. And even then, would the herons not come in at quiet times during the day?

Second tree - birch

Third tree - oak

Pumpkins

Through the splendid trees and on into the walled garden, several acres of it, donated by the owner of the house to the south of the Grange. All manner of stuff being grown. Including some handsome looking cordon apple trees which seemed to be largely without apples. A gardener explained that for some reason unknown, it had been a very bad year for apples.

In any event, one hopes that they have a big enough canteen operation on-site to make good use of all the produce.

Fourth tree - left

Fourth tree - detail

On exit, the fourth tree, on the basis of peering at the leaves, was ruled to be a poplar. Happy to be corrected should there be a reader who knows better.

An interesting visit to a place which, in some ways, was quite like the Camphill operation which we know in Buckfast, in Devon. No way of knowing whether its rather smarter appearance is a function of its being located in a rich area near London, of its customers being less disabled or what.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/07/two-failures.html.

Reference 2: https://www.grangecentre.org.uk/.

Reference 3: https://www.grangecentre.org.uk/our-history/. A brief history.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/02/click-ncollect.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/09/pit-stop.html.

Reference 6: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/07/thrones.html.

Reference 7: https://bartels-germany.com/catalogues/bartels_stair_climber_catalog_2017.pdf.