As Andrew’s just noted, this is the blog’s third year at Shugborough, so I’m going to assume you’ve either done your assigned preparatory reading on the 2016 and 2017 prequels, or have decided it wouldn’t leave you any the wiser. But for Margaret & me it’s our first visit, and we get two days and nights here before we chug on to Stone tomorrow where we jump ship.

We arrived shortly after midday yesterday, which was the last day of the heatwave. Paula & Andrew had reciprocal National Trust membership through the Bahamas one (no, really, it’s a thing) and so got to get into the estate free both days, but the nice lady at the gate explained we’d have had to pay twice over if we wanted to visit on two separate days, so Margaret & I went off to explore the public bits. First we made the pilgrimage to Hadrian’s Arch, which took us by way of this:

At first sight this looks merely like an inexplicable gate to nowhere set in a hedgerow of nothing. But Open Streetmap reveals that it is in fact the dimensional portal from which the nearby railway tunnel takes its name jointly with the hilltop folly.

Sure enough, passing through it we found ourselves in a land peopled only by cows where our minds recoiled beneath the shadows of cyclopean monuments of madness.

Then on the way back we went through another portal without realising and found ourselves inside the grounds, so we went round the gardens a day earlier than intended.

Shugborough had an artist-in-residence last summer whose multimedia project seemed to be themed around disappointment, comprising as it did a film that wasn’t playing plus three kinetoscopes around the grounds where children would queue patiently for the opportunity to turn a handle they couldn’t reach too slowly to illuminate an image they weren’t tall enough to see of what might have been a random patch of grass. On the upside, though, Shugborough is the motherlode of that most British of things you didn’t know were things, biscuit-flavoured confectionery; we particularly enjoyed the Bakewell Tart chocolate and the Jaffa Cake ice cream, both of which might have been laid on specially for the delighted looks of blank incomprehension they got from Paula.

Today we went back and did the mansion innards and Patrick Lichfield’s apartments (no photography, unless your name is P. Lichfield, or A.J. Conway while nobody is looking), plus the on-site farm with its display of historic animal torture implements, including devices to make cattle horns grow the wrong way and turn calf foetuses in the womb. (Obviously those were two different instruments, though the foetus-turner was marked by an empty space and so may for all we know have been in current use.)

This evening the Shugborough Park Farm was also the location for an open-air picnic-theatre dramatisation of Sense and Sensibility by Chapterhouse Theatre, who specialise in roving performances in heritage settings. Putting on plays in stately homes didn’t work out too well in Mansfield Park, and I toyed with the idea of bursting in unexpectedly at the interval to disrupt the performance in character as Sir Thomas Bertram, but decided Jane has probably spun in her grave enough by now to have developed a sense of postmodern irony about the business. Certainly it puts a piquant frame around the experience to be watching Austen played two centuries later in a former Pemberley that is essentially now a theme park of itself, and the immersivity was enhanced by the whiff of cow poo drifting in on the sunset winds with a 20% chance of the afternoon’s rain coming back. You forget how many characters there are in S&S till you see eight performers running around trying to be them all, but it does make you think that maybe all the male characters in Austen can be played by the same three actors. Here’s Colonel Brandon having a surreptitious coup de foudre at Marianne Dashwood’s deliciously warbling tonsils:

I’m proud to say we took the picnic part extremely seriously, leaving the portable chairs & table back at the boat in favour of a shower curtain repurposed as a groundsheet, with the result that (exactly as Andrew had planned) we got to occupy the designated picnic space at the front along with the sole other picnic party in attendance, the rest of the large audience having all brought chairs and tables for the privilege of watching us scoff Paula’s nectarine-weaponised chicken salad in front of them.