Fit for a queen

As T was too jetlagged to entertain the Queen at Windsor Castle two days ago, we thought we would take her to see a palace fit for a queen. It is not a royal palace but it does have many royal connections historically, and one that S and I wanted to see too.

Blenheim Palace - Britain's WWII prime minister was born here, in the home of his family since the early 1700s. Yes, this has been the family home for 12 generations of the Dukes of Marlborough. This is the front door.

It looks like a huge city hall to me but it was designed as a family home. 28,000 m2, the house covers 7 acres. That is just the house. It stands in 2,000 acres of land. It is too big to fit into my photo.

This is the foyer, the entrance hall with the front door down in the centre and the painted ceiling too high to fit in the photo.

On our tour we saw 6 living rooms ie, drawing rooms and state rooms for entertaining important guests, filled with extravagant furnishings, tapestries and 300 years of family portraits. And a few other rooms - about one third of the ground floor. There were also two kr three floors above us and the servants area downstairs that you had to pay extra to see. These would have been interesting too, but there are only so many hours in a day and we spent about 6 hours here.

These photos below only show about one third of each room. You will have to use your imagination.

This is about a quarter of the salon, a huge room used for entertaining. Its walls and ceiling are completely covered by decorative painting.

Now - this is a library! It is called the Long Library, it is 55m long with a huge pipe organ at one end and a grand piano at the other.

Looking up at the plaster ceiling dome at one end. If you zoom in you will see that every flower in the design is different.

A statue of Queen Ann, who was a close friend and enemy of the first Duke's wife and contributed funds to help build the palace to reward the Duke for all the battles he won for England against France. This poor woman had at least 17 pregnancies, some miscarried, some died in infancy, one lived until 11, none survived.

 The view from the library is not too bad!

This house has so much history I cannot possibly tell it here. It has a very long Wikipedia entry if you want to know more.

Here are a few more photos of the garden.

There are two large garden ponds (lakes)

A massive bridge that is just a garden ornament.

The Victory Column, another ornament.

The temperature was 30 degrees!

And I have not shown you the walled vegie garden, hedge maze, lavender garden, waterfall with bridge, aboretum, rose garden...it just goes on and on. Oh, did I mention the butterfly and finch house?

Tomorrow we start working our way north again, to cooler climates.