The Grade II listed lodge stands at the Mansfield Road entrance to the Forest Recreation Ground which used to be a racecourse with the first meeting there taking place around 1690. A race stand was erected in 1777 where the Keeper of the Forest lived until the purpose built Lodge was built for him in 1857, by Henry Moses Wood.
As in previous years we headed out for Nottingham Light Night this past Friday to take photographs of the various light installations. We concentrated this time on the Market Square, Nottingham Castle and around the Lace Market area. Last year the Nottingham Wheel was all lit up in the Market Square but this year was the turn of the 70 metre high Starflyer ride, which plenty of brave souls seemed to be enjoying!
This striking looking building is Cheniston Lodge in Kensington, designed in the Queen Anne style and dating from 1885. During the Second World War it was used as an Air Raid precaution store and depot and then converted to a Register Office, and now appears to have returned to being a home. Interestingly the Lodge itself was built on the site of what had been the Catholic University College, set up by Thomas Capel in 1874 to provide higher education to Catholics who were banned at the time from attending Oxford and Cambridge. The site was sold off in 1879 as the University’s experiment ended in failure, mostly due to lack of funds.
The Shambles is a medieval street in York, though these days the description encompasses the whole general area. Mentioned in the Domesday Book the name comes from the word “shamel” meaning the stalls or benches where meat would have been displayed – the Shambles itself was a street of butcher’s shops and houses with often a slaughterhouse at the back to provide fresh meat. You can see one of those surviving shelves on the left hand side of the below picture.
The YMCA International Community Centre on Mansfield Road is housed in what was the Bluecoat Charity School. The school was founded in 1706 as the first charity school in Nottingham and classes were at first taught at St Mary’s Church and then in a building on High Pavement. They moved to the Mansfield Road Site, a building designed by Thomas Chambers Hine, in around 1853.
Last Christmas my brother had sponsored an elephant for me and once I’d filled in the registration form I received a free ticket to Colchester Zoo, which then became the focus of a few days away in Essex. Opened in 1963 it now cares for over 260 different species over 60 acres of parkland and lakes.
Whilst driving back from the Bo’ness and Kinneil Railway we were admiring the Forth Bridges in the distance when we came across a designated lay-by where you could stop and take photos of the bridges and managed to get the last unoccupied spot to park the car for a few minutes.
Further to our visit to Creswell Crags to go on the Rock Art Tour, this time we took part in an Ice Age Tour of Robin Hood Cave, the largest cave on the site.
I’m taking part this week in #travellinkup where the topic is Once in a Lifetime Experiences. I was trying to decide exactly what to write about since “once in a lifetime” usually conjures up the image of the kind of adventure holidays that I don’t really go on, partly because that’s not really my thing and partly because I have kidney disease, so a lot of those kind of holidays are things that I just can’t do. But really once in a lifetime experiences to me are those that take you out of your comfort zone, be it travelling to a new city, or a new country or jumping out of an aeroplane.
Two trips immediately spring to mind. The first was in between ending my degree and starting my masters when I travelled solo around Europe for about six weeks by train. That was back in the days before I had a digital camera so was carrying loads of film around (and lost a whole days worth of photos somewhere!) and staying in youth hostels. My itinerary took me from Paris (which became one of my favourite cities and where I ended up staying an extra day due to a train drivers strike), to Geneva then on to Vienna and up to Berlin (via a night train which was a horribly uncomfortable experience with no working toilet), from there on to Copenhagen and then to Luxembourg City, then Brussels (I hated the hostel so much I ended up booking into a hotel) and then back to Paris before returning home.
There are many interesting sculptures in London’s Hyde Park and the two below are simply those that I took a quick detour to investigate while on my way from Marble Arch Tube to Tyburn Convent.
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