After spending the last few days eating, drinking, playing board games and not being particularly active, Lolly and I decided we needed to get out and go for a wander.

We are both members of the national trust so we consulted our national trust stuff book to see what wasn’t that far away.

Polesden Lacey is an Edwardian house (expanded from an earlier building) and estate. It is located on the North Downs at Great Bookham, near Dorking, Surrey, England. It is owned and run by the National Trust and is one of the Trust’s most popular properties.

This Regency house was extensively remodelled in 1906 by Margaret Greville, a well-known Edwardian hostess. Her collection of fine paintings, furniture, porcelain and silver is displayed in the reception rooms and galleries, as it was at the time of her celebrated house parties.

There are extensive grounds, a walled rose garden, lawns and landscape walks through part of the estate of 1,400 acres (5.6 square kilometres).

The future King George VI and Queen Elizabeth spent part of their honeymoon here in 1923.

There are a couple of walks you can do as well as visit the house, it was pretty busy and all the house and garden tours had sold out so we decided to go for a wander. We downloaded the big walk from the national trust site, our last experience of a national trust walk was the skywalk at Bath, the directions were confusing, especially the start point and this walk was no different.

In no time at all we were pretty lost with no real idea of where we were, Lolly was starting to worry about the fading light and all that surrounded us was woods and fields with no signs pointing to anywhere. After walking down some narrow lanes, tramping through some woods and crossing a field we saw some signs that looked familiar and within a moment or two back pretty much where we started by the Italian bridge.

Lolly told me that she had kept an eye on where the sun was so thats why she knew roughly where to go, she also later admitted that a good bit of luck was probably involved too.

As the sun started to set the world turned a funny colour blue so I grabbed the camera out and took a few shots, as with all our travel reports there is always the obligatory shot of Bumblebee so here is below:

 

We celebrated finding our way back to the van with a cup of tea, it was also bloody freezing so a brew warmed not only our insides but our hands wrapped around a hot mug !

 

Despite getting lost and not being able to see the house we had a really good time, will definitely be heading back there in the spring to see how the garden changes and also to do that walk and not get lost !