Chartwell

 

Monday 26th August 2024

Edenbridge was a good choice for spending the night, a very quiet sleep except for aircraft activity until about 11pm.

We were up quite early and after a quick visit to Waitrose, we headed to Chartwell.

Famously Winston Churchills home.

Sitting in the rolling chalk hill slopes of the Kent Weald, between the North and South Downs it is easy to see why Winston said "a day away from Chartwell is a day wasted"

We wandered around the grounds of formal gardens, herbaceous borders, orchards, lakes, ponds and woodland.

We then had a tour of the house which remains just as it was when he lived here.

There are extensive collections of his paintings, some quite good and some not so refined lol.

He has a large collection of medals from his army career and many honorary medals from his leadership in WWll.

There were plenty of cigars which will forever be not enjoyed.

After the war he received many gifts from grateful leaders of other countries, including some impressive silver and crystal glassware from J Stalin as a gesture of the Russians gratitude to the allies in enabling them to halt Hitlers advances in Russia.

That was of course before putin re-wrote history and they did it single handed, without any help from the allies.

It was a great place to spend the day and one that's been on my list for a long time, so I can consider it ticked off now.

Tonight we're at a pub stop, The Plough at Dicker, a little village that seems to be dominated by a rather posh private school, Bede's, that appears to occupy most of the property in the village for one purpose or another.

The Plough at Dicker

Marycot

Churchills seat in the garden where he went to meditate