Easton Walled Gardens

Tuesday, April 1, 2025

It’s our last full day of the trip, and we decide to take it super easy, so today’s journal is low on words. What else is there to say?

We drove out to Belvoir (pronounced “beaver”) Castle (via Grantham – don’t bother) and had morning tea in the farm shop café. Scones for me, carrot cake for Grant. As we weren’t visiting the castle itself we could have saved ourselves the £3 parking and parked at the retail centre. Hey ho.

Drove back through some really pretty villages, and again we commented on how this is such an underrated part of the country. It’s just… nice… here. Not spectacular in the way that it is in the north, but pastoral and lovely. It’s been especially nice watching spring happen. In the few days we’ve been here, the horse chestnut buds have burst, almost as we’re watching. Well, not quite, but you get the idea.

After morning tea, we skipped lunch, and I spent the afternoon wandering through the gardens and lanes, thrilled to see hares and deer as I walked. Sadly, none of my close pics of the hares were clear. I’ve decided I’d be very happy to walk lanes like these all the time, although Grant told me that would get very old very quickly if the weather turned and I was trudging in mud. Way to rain on my parade.

Before we leave here, I probably should tell you a bit more about the estate we’re staying on, Easton.

The Cholmeley (pronounced Chum-lee) family (originally from Cheshire) purchased the Manor of Easton in 1592.

Sir Montague Cholmeley, the first Baronet of Easton, demolished the oldest part of the original house in 1805 (or thereabouts) and began building what became Easton Hall. By the turn of the last century, Easton Hall was quite the place and featured in magazines. Franklin D. Roosevelt visited and declared it to be “a dream of Nirvana … almost too good to be true.’

During WWI, it was used as a sanctuary for convalescing officers, and in WWII, it was requisitioned as a barracks. The house was pretty much trashed, so much so that it was demolished in 1951.

The current baronet (the 7^th) and his wife (Sir Fred and Lady Ursula, who live in the Dower House) have brought the gardens back to life. The gardens now attract over 20,000 visitors a year. Besides these, the Cholmeleys run five holiday lets and The Cholmeley Arms.