Thursday 30th July: Cragside

It rained during the night and was much cooler first thing, after a bit of necessary maintenance (new seal in the loo!) we booked in for a further week on this site.
Cragside was our destination for the day, via Wooler and the inland roads.We stopped on the way for a cuppa and the last of the Grasmere gingerbread

before arriving at Cragside just as it opened.
Pat wanted to see the Formal Gardens so we headed there first and really enjoyed the riot of colourful flowers, and unusually this year there were even a few colourful butterflies to photograph.
This was taken with the 55-205 Nikon zoom, hand held and suffers a little from movement caused by a quite strong wind in the garden.


We took the free shuttle bus round to the restuarant in what wa in the past the stables and garage, and after the usual delicious (expensive) meal walked to the house.
I walked down through the rock garden and took some photos looking up the cascade towards the house, this is a composite of three images in Autostitch..


Pat sat this out as it is far too steep and rocky for her arthritic joints to cope with.
When I got back it started to rain heavily, fortunately the shuttle bus turned up in the nick of time and we were quickly back at the car and on our way