Wet. And Arts and Crafts.

It was a very wet day - an English Summer Holiday day, to be sure, but a wet one.   Here's Lake Windermere, from below our hotel:

the hotel's main house belonged, it seems, to Wordsworth's landlord, and Felicia Hemans rented it for her summer holidays in the late 1820s and early 1830s (probably it rained then, too).

So we went through Bowness to Blackwell, a really stunning Arts and Crafts house built by Baillie Scott for Sir Edward Holt - a future mayor of Manchester - as a holiday retreat: completed 1901, and full of stained glass

and with a notable white sitting room with views over the lake (or over where the lake would be, if there wasn't rain and cloud);

and tiles.

A wet view from our room;

some wet boats;

and some gunnera - or giant rhubarb (so-called) - a crazed native of Brazil, and something imported into damp Victorian gardens.