Here's the dovecote just outside the main gardens. They've tidied it up a bit, and added a description board, since I was last there. It was just down the slope from there that me and my sister and our Welsh friends found a mole, just before it scrabbled back into its tunnels. We used to climb over a fence at the back of the Crem and paddle in the stream, and build dams, and explore in the woodlands. The gardens seemed enormous, and wild (again, they've been tidied up a lot since then).
Once, we took our friends' little sister with us. She slipped over in the stream and was swept away (it must have been about twenty feet, I suppose, down a concreted section) before we could haul her out. She was fine, but we spent the next hour or so running round a field waving her clothes in the air to try to get them dry, so her mum wouldn't find out!
Another time, we took my gran there with us. When it came to climbing over the fence (she was over eighty!) she lost her balance and fell into the middle of the lane, and crouched there on her hands and knees, laughing so much she couldn't get up.
We went to the daffodil meadow, when we finally helped her over the fence. It was glorious, and our friends picked huge armfuls: "Here's some for my Auntie, and some for my gran and some for...." So we thought it was all right (because they were local) and we picked daffodils too.
As we were climbing back over the fence, a very smart man in a blazer stopped his car, and challenged us. We weren't supposed to have been picking them at all! He took the great armfuls away from us - apart from Nana's bunch, because he thought she was such a respectable lady that it must have been an honest mistake!
When she died, the funeral was at the crematorium, and we all decided that there was only one place her ashes could be scattered - so she's part of the daffodil meadow forever!
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