Woolbeding Gardens

I didn't take as many pictures as usual on holiday, for various reasons (weather, shortage of comical lions etc) but looking at them now, I see that almost half of the pictures I did take were taken at the same place: Woolbeding Gardens. To reach these National Trust gardens one must engage in quite a Quest, since there's no parking at all at the site (except for pre-booked disabled spaces.) It's only open two days a week, and is strictly pre-bookings only, in which you book a 10 minute slot with very stern warnings that you Must Not Be Late. There's a free minibus from a car park in Midhurst, but since the Gardens were only about 5 miles from our cottage, we decided to walk. I mean, Galahad never took a courtesy minibus to take him to the Grail, did he?

Obviously, doing a 5 mile walk in unfamiliar terrain to reach a strict 10 minute time slot is not really advised. But Midhurst was en route, with many eating options, so we decided to walk to Midhurst in the morning, have lunch outside the tea room on the Cowdray Estate, then, depending on how long lunch took, walk either 1 mile along a lane or 2 miles along the river to our destination. We took the river route in the end, and arrived right on the dot of our arrival slot, much to the surprise of the person at the ticket booth, since the minibus for our time slot hadn't yet arrived. "How did you get here?" she asked in astonishment, as if we'd arrived by magic.

Anyway, to the gardens. ( They're great! )