Tea the Fifteenth

Now I know just why Franz Schubert 

Didn't finish his unfinished symphony 

He might have written more but the clock struck four 

And everything stops for tea.

Featured in Jack Buchanan's 1935 film, "Come Out Of The Pantry" 

(Goodhart / Hoffman / Sigler)

Wrangham House Hotel, Hunmanby, North Yorkshire - Sunday 7th July 2013

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Tea Takers

Sarah Ryan

Paul Ryan

Olivia Ryan

Lucy Holland

Kit Holland

Isobel Holland

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Tea on the Yorkshire coast had been on my wishlist from very early on.  It was both a beautiful location and also a chance to take tea with a very old and dear friend Lucy, who comes each year from Dubai to visit her in-laws at Hunmanby, near Filey.

Taking a recommendation from the 'locals' we repaired to the Wrangham House Hotel, a former  vicarage, situated, perhaps unsurprisingly, just behind the church, for the ceremonials.

The hotel is an attractive rambling Georgian house. Pevsner informs me that the east wing was added in 1803 by Archdeacon Wrangham to house his library.  Those were the days, when country parsons had the means to add wings to their houses, and had libraries expansive enough to merit them.

It is a very attractive setting and the glorious summer day meant we saw it at its best.  We took tea in an elegant wood pannelled drawing room, with leather armchairs and chesterfields, and low tables, accompanied by the harmonious cooing of wood pigeons from the leafy garden - a very English idyll.

Kit practising for his dotage, when he snoozes in a chair at his club:

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Tea was a very generous affair with large plates of sandwiches, freshly made scones, an enormous pot of clotted cream, chocolate cupcakes and a large and very enjoyable raspberry sponge cake, all accompanied by a very generous heap of fragrant strawberries.

It very satisfactorily satisfied the needs of all those present.

After a while the children headed out into the garden and found the slightly less Georgian delights of a trampoline to keep them occupied, while we enjoyed more tea, cake and highly sophisticated conversation, at our leisure.

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Fifteenth Tea - Fifteenth Year

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Visiting Lucy and the children on their summer residences in the area has been a great excuse to revisit the beaches of my childhood at Filey and Flamborough. I'm sorry, South East England, but when this is your standard, then the Sussex and Kent coast doesn't quite cut it.

After tea we drove down to Hunmanby Gap and spent several hours enjoying the perfect weather on the sands of Filey bay, framed by the white cliffs of Flamborough head and the red brown of Filey Brigg.  A kite, some badminton racquets, a beach ball, a child who thought it was perfectly reasonable to swim in the North Sea; a sailing ship with vast white sails on the far horizon - such a very fine day.

Oh, and I seem to recall that somebody British won Wimbledon today, which seemed only fitting on such a beautiful British summer's day...

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Tea the Fourteenth

A Proper Tea is much nicer than a Very Nearly Tea,
which is one you forget about afterwards.
A. A. Milne - Winnie the Pooh

Ashdown Park Hotel, Wych Cross, East Sussex - Saturday 29th June 2013

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Tea Takers

Sarah Ryan

Paul Ryan

Olivia Ryan

Pat Ryan

Marion Ryan

Marie Ryan

Kathleen Sands

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A Ryan family tea, this time - with Paul's parents, sister and aunt - not only as part of my ongoing fortieth but also to celebrate the birthdays, just this last week, of Marie and Paul.  All excellent excuses to indulge in another rather lovely country house hotel visit.

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Ashdown Park and the Notre Dame connection

We had spied the hotel on a day out on the Ashdown Forest some time ago, and it looked a very likely tea venue; it certainly did not disappoint. 

The first record of Ashdown Park comes from 1693 when it was enclosed as part of the Ashdown forest, and a mansion has stood on this site since the early 1800s. The heart of the building is still a Victorian neo-Gothic construction from the 1860s. However, on arriving, the extensive wings and inclusion of a sizeable chapel immediately indicate that it has been rather more than merely a fine house.

In 1919 it was purchased by the Order of the Sisters of Notre Dame of Namur, to be training house for novices. The Sisters built two large wings and a church, and ran a convent here until 1971.  As I was educated at a Notre Dame school, this seemed a wonderfully serendipitous link (and has made me feel emotionally proprietorial about the place), and whilst the chapel has been deconsecrated and subsequently converted into function rooms, the legacy of the order's life here remains in lots of small (and not so small) details.

After subsequent incarnations as an American international university and a large bank's training centre, it has been a hotel for some twenty years and is a beautiful setting with its manicured gardens, a lake, woodlands and grazing land roamed by wild deer.

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We took tea in an elegant and comfortable room, with very English understated stately home charm. Service was attentive and prompt, but unobtrusive, and it was a most relaxing setting and situation.

The scones were delicious; fresh and light, and were accompanied by plentiful clotted cream and a choice of jams and honey.  Sandwiches achieved much approval. The cakes were beautifully presented and little chocolate pots filled with raspberry mousse and topped with mint jelly were a pleasantly unusual sweet.

I think we may not need to eat again for some time.

It was, then, both necessary and desirable to wander the grounds after tea, and to make the most of the surprisingly seasonal sunshine.

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Fourteenth Tea - Fourteenth Year

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The Ashdown Forest and the Enchanted Places

The Ashdown Forest is an area of open heathland, on the sandy northern ridge of the High Weald, with  beautiful views across the wooded hills of the Weald itself, to both the North and the South Downs. Despite its name it is only about forty percent wooded, and this is likely never to have been higher. From Norman times the area was hunting forest, and this term applies not to a landscape covered with trees but to a royal hunting ground with special powers to protect the deer within it.  Henry VIII still had a hunting lodge here and from this courted Anne Boleyn at the nearby Hever Castle.  The many place names with 'Hatch' and 'Gate' recall the ancient entrances to the forest's 'pale' or fence.

Originally much larger, in 1693 more than half of the forest was taken into private hands, but the remaining common land of just under ten square miles, is still the largest area with open public access in South-East England.

We often drive across the forest and are gradually exploring more of it on foot.

A.A. Milne lived on the northern edge of the forest and it was here that he set the stories of Winnie-the-Pooh et al.  Numerous locations are easily identifiable, and still recognisable from E.H. Shepherd's illustrations.  On our way to tea today, we stopped off at Gills Lap - named Galleons Lap in the stories  - where one of the 'clumps' of pines, planted on forest summits from the 1820s, affords expansive views.

They walked on, thinking of This and That, and by-and-by they came to an enchanted place on the very top of the Forest called Galleons Lap, which is sixty-something trees in a circle; and Christopher Robin knew that it was enchanted because nobody had ever been able to count whether it was sixty-three or sixty-four, not even when he tied a piece of string around each tree after he had counted it. Being enchanted, its floor was not like the floor of the Forest, gorse and bracken and heather, but close-set grass, quiet and smooth and green. It was the only place in the Forest  where you could sit down carelessly, without getting up almost at once and looking for somewhere else.  Sitting there they could see the whole world spread out until it reached the sky, and whatever there was all the world over was with them in Galleons Lap.

From The House at Pooh Corner

Tigger and Eeyore, or should that be Piglet and a Heffalump, approach Galleons Lap.

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