After yesterday’s challenging day of cycling I took the opportunity today to spend some time relaxing by visiting National Trust‘s Montacute House and Tintinhull Garden.

Both places are just a few miles from Yeovil. First of all I visited Montacute House, arriving mid-morning on an overcast but thankfully warm morning.

Montacute House is an example Elizabethan Renaissance architecture and design. It commands a central position in the village sharing its name.

The mansion was built as a statement to impress by Edward Phelips, a wealthy and ambitious lawyer who rose through societal hierarchies to become an influential member of Queen Elizabeth I’s royal court and a member of parliament.

I decided to join one of the guided tours of the grounds.

It seems that in Tudor times glass was very expensive and yet, with money no object, Montacute House contained plenty of it.

Even the workers residences windows included glass.

  

With the aim of advertising Edwards Philips status and impressing the most important members of society, opulence was everywhere.

  

After the guided tour and a break for lunch I decided to take a peek indoors.

The house also included a major collect of loaned national portraits in the long room.

The long gallery is certainly that – long. Indeed it is the longest in England of those still surviving.

Some of the many portraits …

    

I had originally only considered visiting Montacute House, however I left the mansion early in the afternoon and decided to move on to Tintinhull Garden. This property is a series of gardens built around a seventeenth century manor house. You can view a couple of the houses rooms but really it is the gardens that are the reason for the visit.

Largely the creation of Phyliss Reiss who moved into the manor in the 1930’s, the gardens were a pallet for the plantswoman to create flowering pictorial compositions.

  

I found this to be a wonderfully serene place to be

  

There were places to rest and take in the peaceful surrounds everywhere you looked.

But of course it was nature and the flowers that were the stars of the show.

  

Tintinhull Garden had a delight waiting to be found around every corner,

By the time I left and headed back to our hotel I was thoroughly relaxed having enjoyed a wonderfully peaceful, invigorating and inspiring day.