Kingfisher time

For the first time since January 2012, before the deluge as it were, we visited Painshill last week, that well known visitor attraction near the A3/M25 interchange which has escaped the clutches of both English Heritage and the National Trust. A cuddly independent!

Started off in their handsome vistor centre - that is to say, shop, toilets and café - to take tea and sweet scone from said café, a café which appeared to be being run by a pleasant Italian couple as a concession. Despite which the cakes were firmly English, hence the sweet scone, so I was reminded how sticky sweet scones are, certainly compared with the cheese scones that I make from time to time, although I grant that some of the variation may be due to the things being sold from the freezer rather than from the oven.

Off along the path between the lake and the Mole, with the Mole being rather lower than the lake. Clearly something contrived about the lake although it was natural enough for me to collect my seventh lifetime sighting of a kingfisher, this one all blue and brown as it whizzed from the bank of the lake to an island. We pushed onto the water wheel at the end of the path, a water wheel which serves to lift water from the Mole into the lake. A slight whiff of perpetual motion about this, as one wondered what proportion of the water in a river it would be possible to lift up in this way. One also wondered whether building and maintaining all this elaborate wood and steel work was actually a better eco-proposition than having a small electric motor drive a modern rotary pump (the cylinder of this up-and-down pump being visible to the left of the illustration).

And so back down the other side of the lake to inspect the giant cedar (no sitting duck on this occasion, see below), the gothic temple (rather an odd phrase, given that we did not do temples at the same time as we did gothic), the rape of the Sabine women and the cork oak. See http://www.ivorabrahams.com/the-giambologna-commission/ for an interesting account of the rape.

And so back to the café for lunch, a very reasonable and reasonably priced meat lasagne.

Home via a garden centre where we were amused at the check-out by one of the lady shop assistants checking out a large plant as she went off-shift. She explained that not only did she work the garden centre but she also worked her own garden and often fell for some new arrival at the centre. An ideal employee! Just like the building workers of old who were encouraged to spend their hard earned earnings in the pub run by their employer for their greater convenience. And if that failed, in the attached shop.

PS: for the previous visit to Painshill see http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=painshill.