Eleven Thousand Books, Two Faded Badgers and an Albatross

During our last holiday (the wash out, in June) we joined English Heritage on a special offer.  It would be wrong, therefore, not to make use of it.  So we visited Audley End.  We had planned to take the grandchildren, but it began to seem as though that wouldn't happen, so we went on our own.  We were met by a lady offering a guided tour of the servants quarters.  This sounded interesting, so we decided to go around with her rather than head straight to the restuarant.Very interesting it was too.  The most fascinating thing for me on the whole tour was the water system.  They installed something remarkable - something very like a modern hot water system, installed in the 1700s.  I asked about how the water was managed, how it was pumped up to the boiler on the second floor and was told there was a 40-page book on the subject (but not how it was done).  We saw the cold storage, a large room, always in shade with perferated zinc windows.  This is one of the things that I don't remember, but have seen evidence of in a house moved into when I was 5 years old.  The drying area for the weekly wash had many things in it I do remember - especially the dryers hanging from the very high ceilings and the ropes used to lift and lower them up.
The tour of the main house was also interesting as it has been through so many different periods of development, restructuring and decay.  There are 11,000 books in the house and none of them are unique, copies exist in other libraries, principally the Bodmian.  So, few scholars come to read them.
There is also a very large collection of stuffed animals and birds.  In different cases in the near dark there are creatures that look very like badgers, they have black stripes across their heads, but their enite body is a uniform dirty cream colour.  They are not a rare species of albino badger they are just faded with the passage of time.  Then there is the biggest gull I have ever seen, it is, of course, an Albatross.  It is a very impressive bird even with its wings closed and suffering from being stuffed!

Audley End is not cheap, but it is good value.  We visited once when I was a child, but I don't think we went in because all I remember of it is the outside view.