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.
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.
Every so often I do a post about the birds and animals I’ve photographed in the garden. We’ve had quite a few interesting visitors that I haven’t managed to photograph or that we’ve only caught on our nature camera overnight such as cats, hedgehogs, foxes and once quite memorably a badger but there are others that stuck around long enough for me to grab my camera. One such creature was this rat which had taken a liking to the seeds I put out for the birds (I moved the bird feeder around and took a break from re-filling it and this worked for a little while). [Since starting to write this post I found the rat dead in our garden – RIP].
On Sunday afternoon I headed out to the Victoria Embankment in Nottingham to watch the Nottingham Carnival Parade. In fact, because my bus dropped me off at one end of Wilford Grove I walked along to the end of that stretch of road as I knew that was part of the parade route, rather than heading closer to the river. It proved to be a pretty good spot and I got there early enough to be at the front with plenty of space around – it definitely got busier as time went on.
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