I stumbled across an advert for this Christmas Tree Festival the other week and decided to pay it a visit. I’ve been to St Mary’s a number of times and its a lovely church and always very welcoming. This festival event was in aid of Emmanuel House a local homeless support charity. I’m not sure the event is all that well known – I was the only non staff member there during my visit. There are donation card readers at the entrance so you can donate however much you like via contactless.
As you know from previous posts I really like the Christmas season and have decided this year to visit a few new places particularly Christmas markets/fairs as well as my usual Christmas trip with a friend. The first one was the Winter Craft Fair at Southwell Minster which I visited last Saturday. Incredibly the last time I visited the Minster (and wrote about it here) was in 2013! This is in part because it’s about a 40-45 minute bus journey from where I live but a pleasant route through some picturesque villages.
Back in the beginning of June I went along to the Open Gardens event in Burton Joyce, a village just outside Nottingham. I’m fairly familiar with the village as a friend grew up there but I’d never been to the Open Gardens event before. 11 gardens were open to the public with the ticket price (£6 if booked in advance) going towards Maggie’s, a cancer charity based at Nottingham City Hospital.
Taking advantage of the beautiful sunshine I ventured out to Holme Pierrepont Country Park recently to explore an area I hadn’t been to since I was a child. The park is home to the National Watersports Centre and British Canoeing and where many years ago I went on a school trip to try out kayaking. There are several walks around the site and I started by doing one that went through the woods but even though we haven’t had rain for a while it was surprisingly boggy so I recalibrated and went for a less muddy walk around the regatta lake instead.
This Friday and Saturday saw the return of Nottingham Light Night for its 17th year. Usually it’s at the beginning of February and I’m not quite sure why the dates moved so much, but of course this did mean that it was still quite light when I visited some of these places. I never do everything on offer as there is simply too many places to visit so this is just a highlight – Light Night is a two day event and finishes tonight (1 March).
Earlier today I went into Nottingham city centre to take photos of this recently unveiled sculpture in The Green Heart, Nottingham’s newest green space near the Central Library and on the way up from the train station. The statue represents a white lace worker and a black enslaved woman greeting each other. As someone from a long line of men and women who worked in the Nottingham lace trade from working in factories to designing lace patterns the fact that none of their work would have been possible without the cotton supplied by enslaved people has never been lost on me but it’s not something that gets highlighted as much as it should and this sculpture goes some way to rectifying that as well as emphasising the contributions made by women to the economy and society in general.
In mid November Nottingham, like many places in the UK, had its first snow of the season. We’d been expecting it but the amount certainly took people by surprise, myself included. It was perfect snow for going on a walk, compact and not slippery or icy. Since snow always helps get me in the Christmas mood I thought I’d share some photos of the snow, plus some of the Christmas markets/events I’ve attended so far this year.
Situated next to the entrance to the driveway down to Gedling House is the entrance to Gedling House Woods which I decided to visit after I’d been around the house. It was quite busy with dog walkers in the meadows area but I chose to follow the path through the woods and had them pretty much to myself, other than the squirrels.
I went to school in Gedling, right next to Gedling House, and so the building has always been a source of fascination – the house and grounds were naturally out of bounds for the pupils. One weekend in mid-September it was opened to the public for free as part of the Heritage Open Days and I jumped at the chance to have a look around. Built in 1790 as a home for a wealthy Nottingham banker it is now a Buddhist meditation centre.
A couple of weeks ago I headed out to Newark to find all the decorated book benches as part of an art trail by Newark Creates and Wild in Art. Many of you may be familiar with Wild in Art sculptures that pop up all over the country, and even as far away as Sydney and Sao Paulo. The last ones in Nottingham were the robins in 2018. You could pick up a free map from either the Palace Theatre, Newark Bus Station or download from the website. I was using a downloadable map on my phone until I fortuitously bumped into one of the people who’d organised the trail wrapping up some media interviews and she gave me a paper map. The trail finished on 5 September (this is one of a series of posts I had planned to put up before the event I was writing about finished but which got delayed due to a family medical emergency).
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