Derbyshire 36 - Great Longston/Thornbridge Hall /toll tickets /Black Horse Farm/a change to the train

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D - D minus 45 - I find myself trying to find different ways of counting time down to our next trip. I have tried one more swimming payment. So many more weekends or weekdays. I have not yet resorted to counting each minute down . That comes in a few weeks.

We thought about the first part of our trip. We are heading off early on the Friday morning so we could change the train the next day from a lunchtime departure to an early morning one. A quick phone call to the tunnel and a chat with a lovely helpful adviser and £8 paid over and we are booked on the 8.30 train. The next job was to book an overnight camper stop. Black Horse Farm is handy . Most people use it as a stop over for the train or the ferry. We booked one night on line. Within a couple of days we got a text to ring them. They wanted to change our booking for one night from a plot with awning to a ferry spot . Fine with us and we handed over £21.60. We ordered on line a Via card and toll box for Italy to be picked up on the way down from Harbour Shipping and a vignette for Austria to be delivered to our home address in a couple of weeks . The resulting e-mail arrived and said that both would be delivered to us . Wrong - so a quick e-mail was made to Germany to explain what had happened. The next day they returned our message and changed the pick up details . Finally we found a 2 for 1 offer for Hever saving us a packet .

We have planned our first night stop in Belgium and done our homework on Trier. Our second visit will be to the city of Ulm before we head into Italy and are staying by a lake . We keep planning but find it hard giving everything that is going on in our lives .

After our abortive visit last week to Melbourne Hall we needed somewhere to go this week. I have run out of places to go and in the end googled and found a few gardens to visit locally . Of the three we picked Thornbridge Hall just the other side of Bakewell. Next week could be Hopton Hall and I have found somewhere for the week after.

From the 12th to the late 18th century, Thornbridge Hall was the seat of the Longsdon family. In 1790, John Morewood bought Thornbridge Hall for the then very large sum of £10,000. He made his money exporting linens from the city of Manchester to St Petersburg. Later the Morewood family considerably enlarged the house. In 1859, Frederick Craven rebuilt the house in a Jacobean style - a sort of dark grey Gothic pile and installed the William Morris/Burne-Jones window in the Great Hall.

In 1896, George Marples, a businessman and lawyer from nearby Sheffield extended the house to nearly its present form, built lodges and cottages, landscaped the park and gardens, added his own private railway station. We entered up that long drive and were amazed at how many people were visiting. Cars were parked everywhere and we thought "Oh no - not again". We parked on the drive and walked up through the pretty impressive gates. It felt like the whole of pensioner Derbyshire were out looking at the gardens. A house ahead of us that looked as if it had come straight out of a Gothic novel.

The house which currently is not open to the public was owned from 1929 by Charles Boot a Sheffield entrepreneur who designed and built Pinewood Studios in London . His company Henry Boot Constucion was contracted to demolish Clumber Hall after a fire in 1938. He did buy many statues and fountains from Clumber . Sheffield City Council took the house over in 1945 and it became a teacher training college, In later years, the hall was used as an educational and conference centre by the council, providing residential facilities for teachers and pupils in the house itself and in various outbuildings. By 1997 the house was taken over and restored by the Hunt family . It eventually fell into the hands of the chief executive of the Company A4E which provided support to the unemployed.. Had I known this fact I probably would not have visited the property. It was a bit of a sombre place uilt in grey gritstone. I imagined money being pulled in through weddings . Shots of the bride and groom taken in front of the impressive gates. The bridal party in front of the gothic clock tower. Bridesmaids and brides family somewhere else . Shots in the garden surrounded by vegetables or flowers.

The first thing that struck us was the queues. We had to queue to pay alongside people waiting to buy their lunches . What an odd arrangement . Surely it needed two queues - one for food - one for the garden or was that too simple . With our blue badges stuck to our clothing we entered the gardens. The 12 acres of formal gardens were designed at the end of the 19th century by Simeon Marshall, working for the internationally acclaimed James Backhouses & Sons Nursery. They were inspired by the vision of the owner, George Marples, to create a '1000 shades of green' to be viewed from his bedroom window.

The first garden we visited was the potage garden full of fruit trees and vegetables. Cordons full of apples and pears . Blackberries and Tayberries hung along the branches which were trailed along an iron structure . Green beans hung from pergolas. Herbs grew at ground level amongst the flowers. Mints and Rosemary through which we walked . The scent hung heavy where we had walked . The gravel crunched under foot. . Great long yellow Angelica grew spikily up the walls. Strawberry plants covered the edges of the plots .

The flower garden was pretty - purple Loosestrife , day lilies , african daisies and crocosmia in bright orange. We walked around the gravel paths admiring everything and imagining how we could use them in our own small garden. Pots of Agapanthus blues and whites were placed strategically along the retaining walls. How pretty they looked . My own blue were not flowering and were just all leaves and one lonely white spike graced my white variety .

The italian garden was bounded with box hedging and yew . The signs admitted that they would be dug up later in the season as they were suffering from box blight . The knot garden box had been dug up already and replaced with grass planting. It looked odd at first but over time it would age I guess and look lovely. Statues were everywhere .We stood on the end of the garden looking down over the Derbyshire countryside . It looked very beautiful today. What a place to live with such wonderful views. It was not hard to imagine the bride blushing in her white dress standing in front of the stone cave like arch with the countryside providing a green and leafy backdrop. Grass lawns stretched for acres with stone statuary placed strategically to take advantage of the vistas. Brightly coloured seats were placed inside some and would make ideal photo opportunities .

If I had to compare this garden with others it was not a bad one . I have seen better and worse gardens Perhaps it was more stunning a few weeks ago . Would it be a good Spring garden ? Who knows we had no plan of the garden. There was a pond but we never found it . What about an Autumn garden ? Again little idea - a few mature trees which might provide good Autumn colour but it was no Capability Brown landscape .

. There were plants for sale and glasshouses and greenhouses full of different plants. Perhaps a few weeks ago it would be at its peak . Now it was going every so slightly over . At least the rain kept off and gave us time to walk and enjoy the sunshine . We needed an escape from life and all the blows it sometimes hits you with .

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