Isabella plantation

On Saturday to Richmond Park to pay a visit to the Isabella Plantation, not named for an Isabella, rather for dingy yellow, an old meaning of the word with the first recorded use in my OED being an entry in a stock take of the dresses of Elizabeth I.

Name notwithstanding, clearly a May place with the three recorded visits being in May 2009, 2010 and 2011 (see the other place, http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/).

There via the A3, which gave us an opportunity to inspect the giant B&Q at New Malden, at least on a drive-past and also last visited in May (see May 13th 2013), and back via Kingston, on this occasion without getting lost in the one way system, although I did earn a few honks from an impatient builder's van driver, presumed hot, bothered and hung-over.

The Richmond Park inner ring road was alive with cyclists in both directions, making driving a bit tiresome. - to the point that one would have thought that there must be accidents. My instant solution, given that banning cars would make access for most people a bit difficult, would be to make the ring road one-way for all traffic. They could have a very intense debate about it, Richmond being just the place for intense cyclists to lock horns with equally intense motorists, bent on getting to the Isabella Plantation.

The Plantation was a little past its azalea best, but there was still plenty to see, altogether an attractive place. But the managers have a bit of a problem with there being so many old trees of roughly the same age. A bit drastic to cut them all down (as they did, rather successfully, at the Long Water in Hampton Park), but a bit shabby just to let them slowly decay and fall down: I think they are going for some sort of compromise, which seems fair enough - and I imagine that the managers are fully alive to the need to provide supplies of dead tree to provide supplies of beetle habitat.

Onto Pembroke Lodge for lunch. Busy, but being a hot day most people wanted to sit outside, which meant that there was plenty of space in the cool interior for us. Quite decent sandwiches too. After lunch to inspect the gardens, in particular King Henry's Mound, which would have been a wonderful place to play the aeroplane game, with a view of the flight path all the way down to Heathrow, if only they would cut all the trees down. There was a view of Heathrow itself and they had cut  hole in the trees so that one could see St. Paul's, but that was not quite the same. There was also quite a decent telescope to look at St. Paul's with and, oddly for such a thing, free. No need to put pennies, or even fifty pennies, in the slot.

I was thinking of the aeroplane game again yesterday, on the Horton Clockwise. Absolutely no aeroplanes on the flight path down into Heathrow, which seemed a bit odd, late on a Sunday morning, but there were a number of aeroplanes, more or less in formation, flying high and west over Heathrow. I got as far as four and nearly made it to five. First thought was that there had been an emergency at Heathrow and that the aeroplanes coming in to land were having to pull up, but on reflection they were flying far too high, more or less at cruising height, for that to be plausible. They seemed a bit high for trans-Atlantic flights coming out of Stansted so perhaps they had come from some continental airport, further away. They were high enough that one could hardly complain about the noise, so we could not reasonably insist on their being routed round the channel.

PS: the illustration is of a rather pretty red hawthorn we came across in the Plantation, an illustration which does not do justice to the deep redness.