Marble Hill memories

We live very close to Marble Hill House, the beautiful Palladian villa built for Henrietta Howard, mistress of George II in the 1720s. There are plans to refurbish the house and grounds and a request to local residents to send in pictures that reflect the house in modern times.

I once had the idea of taking a series of photographs to show all the ways that the park surrounding the house is used nowadays, but I soon realised how impossible that would be. There was this enthusiastic chap in the cricket nets.

A woman with more trans-Atlantic taste was playing baseball.

But you can see kids in the background playing football and, of course, there is rugby on the rugby pitches and hockey on pitches set aside for that. The there are more informal games - frisbee is very popular in summer and there are always children playing chase games. Kites are flown, runners jog round the park, keep-fit enthusiasts form earnest circles and do press-ups. Just outside the park boundary we even have annual dragon boat races.

Then, of course, there were the concerts. This was back in 1989, when they were relatively small-scale affairs and many local families took their children for picnics.

There was just too much for it to make any sense to try to record it all, so I contented myself with pictures of the house and grounds. The trees are astonishingly beautiful in autumn.

There are so many professionally taken photos of the house that there is little point in adding mine. Where I win out over the professionals, though, is that I get to see the house at different times and in different weather.

There has been the odd extreme weather event over the years. Famously there was the October gale of 1987. Trees were blown down in parts of the park, while other parts were untouched. Here's the remains of one of the trees that didn't make it. (In those days you could sit on fallen trees, even with a baby. Now they are taped off as a Health & Safety risk.)

This was a freak snowfall in November 1993.

More dramatic are these photos of flooding taken sometime between 1985 and 2001. Sadly we don't have the exact date.

The most recent flooding was in 2014, but that seems a lot less dramatic.

Of course, the most exciting weather combined flood and freezing. People don't believe that you could ever ice-skate in Marble Hill House but some time between 1985 and 2001 I photographed us doing just that.

People round here love Marble Hill. That's because it's magical.