Ham House

Yesterday was a somewhat miserable rainy Sunday/my birthday. To celebrate both of these things, I opted to go to a stately home near my own non-stately home, the fabulously named Ham House near Richmond. It was built in the early 1600s along the river Thames, at one point belonged to one of the King Charles' (I or II, I don't know) whipping boys, then became the home of a family with a silly name (let's go with Tollemache, they might have been Earls) for 100s of years before passing to the National Trust in 1948.

To get to aforementioned stately home, we took the district line out to Richmond, dined on some delicious train station pasties, and started walking through town. It was my first time in Richmond and my general knowledge of the place was that it was on the river and very expensive to live there. Now we can add 'has good shopping' to the list. We popped into a few stores, but this was mainly to avoid the rain. Ham House is a little less than 2 miles down the road, along a river front path. The paved part was very nice, but then things just became a gravelly mess ridden with puddles that was quite uncomfortable to walk on.

We eventually reached stately home, but then we got side-tracked when Mark spotted some horses off to our left. There was a polo game! I'd never seen actual real live polo so we went over to take a peak. After about two minutes I thought : sucks for the horses, not too bad for the people.

It was an interesting stately home. It wasn't as big as Blenheim Palace, and there wasn't any ham. There seemed to be an awful lot of sitting rooms. Like I couldn't figure out how anyone could need so many. I can understand one for morning and one for afternoon in the days before electricity, but there were like 10. Some had tapestries! All in all it was quite intriguing. And I'm trying to think of what stately home I shall visit next! Actually, I'm not sure if it's technically a stately home, but Mark has gotten us tickets to go see the state rooms at Buckingham Palace this Saturday!