The Dairy Cottage, Boynton

Now I am back from hols I can begin a series of the usual sorts of posts about wells, museums, and other such pressing matters! Here was my location for the week: the Gothic Dairy Cottage at Boynton Hall in East Yorkshire. This fantastic folly is not a Landmark but is privately owned, the owners being the Marriotts who occupy the Hall and restored the Dairy Cottage from its previous ruinous state in the mid-1980s. I say 'Gothic', though in fact only the central bit of it is pointy, while the sitting room has a nicely Classical feel as you can see in the photograph below.



The interior fittings are not as precisely themed as they might be at a Landmark property, but have a charm of their own, ranging as they do from an 18th or early 19th century painting in a naive style in the dining room to theatrical costume watercolours in the sitting room which have the look of the Ballets Russes. They've sourced a set of Gothic dining chairs, though. The bedroom is above the dining room.

The oddest bit of furnishing is what looks bizarrely like an altar in the dining room ...

... behind which, to increase the religious atmosphere, are a set of Delftware tiles depicting various Biblical scenes. You might be able to recognise the weird episode of the bronze snake from the Book of Numbers:

The Dairy Cottage isn't the only folly on the estate. At the end of the walled garden which guests are welcome to wander around is an 18th-century hothouse with an arched brick entrance, and the Garden House sits within the main Hall garden, a building apparently plain and unremarkable before being Gothicised by a later owner:

The thing I found most trying about my stay was not being able to make my little travel radio work, something of a wrench for a Radio 4 addict.

While the housekeeper was showing me round she pointed towards a barred door and warned in tones which sounded slightly too offhand, 'And this door we never open.' I felt as though I might have strayed into a cheap 1970s horror film. It was somewhat disappointing to work out it only led to the outside.