Floyd's Travels and Thoughts on Life: Visiting one of England's stately homes

Whenever I visit the UK I usually manage to visit one or more of the many stately homes and manors that were once lived in (and in some cases still are) by England's rich and famous. Over the years I have visited many, and during a recent visit to England in October 2024 I was able to visit 3 more of the many stately homes in the country. Many of these homes are now owned or managed by the National Trust and many are not easily accessible by train or other forms of public transport. Usually they are visited by people with their private cars and thanks to a good English friend, Clive Renton, I was able to visit 3 of these opulent homes during my recent visit. Welcome to Dyrham House, a baroque English country house in an ancient deer park near the village of Dyrham in county Gloucestershire, England. The house has an attached orangery and stable block and is listed on the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. The house and grounds have been the location of many BBC productions and movies, includng "The Remains of the Day", "Sanditon", "Sense and Sensibility", "Tess of the d'Urbavilles" and others. In terms of a very brief history, in 1689 a man by the name of William Blathwayt inherited a run-down Tudor house at the same time that he married an heiress. He then began transforming the house into a late 17th Century stately home. Blathwayt amassed a fortune from his involvement with the slave trade in the Caribbean. He was well known by the reigning monarchs of his time and held the post of Secretary of War for Queen Anne. The home and grounds are magnificent to witness. Blathwayt once anticipated a visit by Queen Anne and made a special bed for her, but she changed her mind and never came. He built a "best" staircase leading to the best rooms on the second floor that was made entirely of red cedar from North America, an extraordinary and unusual use of American wood in an English home and an evidence of his influence and connections with America. Another staircase in the home -- the Old Staircase -- is made of black walnut from Virginia. The Balcony Room, a luxurious upstairs reception room, has two painted stands depicting enchained African slaves. In the downstairs "Bells Passage" there are 30 bells connected to 30 different rooms in the home. Each bell rang with a different tome that the servants were able to recognize. The bells are more than 150 years old.