The Temple, Swinithwaite

My residence last week in Yorkshire was The Temple at Swinithwaite, a delightful little folly dating from the very turn of the 18th/19th century. I can't recall quite how I came across it - it's not a Landmark, as it belongs to Swinithwaite Hall about a mile away to the east, and was refashioned and restored as a holiday let in the 1990s. The website doesn't reveal (as far as I can remember) the quite important fact that to go to bed you have to venture outside, leaving the cozy if bijou downstairs room with its underfloor heating and scaling the stone steps to the balcony around the first floor, eventually finding the door into your lovely Georgian chambre. It didn't make a difference to me, and I only faced one morning when I had to brave the rain on first rising, but it might do to some!

Halfway through Monday morning I had a call from the estate office to apologise for a plague of flies at the Temple. Did I still want to come? Well, I was by that stage a considerable distance up the M1 and wasn't going to be put off by a few flies. So on taking up residence I swept them off the windowsills of the bedroom, without thinking further about it. Tuesday evening saw a positively Biblical infestation, requiring disposing of some hundreds of houseflies: after that the problem very swiftly declined. I suppose they must have been coming down the chimney, though what attracted them remains mysterious.