Wimpole Estate

Wimpole Hall

I bet you've heard of Rudyard Kippling, but I bet you don't know who his daughter was. She was Elsie Bambridge and she was the last owner of Wimpole Estate in Cambridgeshire. Last week, we met up with Tilly and visited the estate. It was amazing! We got to see the grand house, Wimpole Hall. We saw upstairs and downstairs, the church, the farm and the immaculate gardens. The gardens had been designed by "Capability Brown" a famous landscape gardener.

Elsie died in 1976 and left the estate to the National Trust so people like me could go and visit and see how people lived in the past.




First we started our tour on the ground floor. It was very grand. There was a large hallway and lots of beautifully decorated living rooms. The living rooms were decorated how Elsie would have had them back when she owned the house. She was definitely good with interior design! Mom said she would have loved to have a sitting room like one of the ones in the house. She'd be able to fit a couple of gigantic sofas in there!
In nearly every room there was a massive grandfather clock. One of the housekeepers was giving a demonstration of how they looked after and cleaned the clocks. She opened up the door of the clock and showed us the pendulum swinging inside. The clocks were very old and precious.




The impressive staircase

Upstairs, Elsie's bedroom was just as impressive as all of her living rooms! She had a gigantic bed with heavy curtains draped over it. I wish I had a bed like that. She even had her own en-suite bathroom!

Elsie's bed

Elsie obviously liked horses, as every single room had at least one horse painting or horse ornament in it. Some of the paintings were really beautiful. I wonder how much they'd cost to buy?


Next we explored the lower basement where the servants would live. The kitchen was very impressive with its store of herbs and spices. The lady there showed us some big blocks of sugar that were stored in special cupboards labelled "Sugar" That's how the sugar was back then. It had to be chipped off the huge block, not like today when it is granulated and packaged for us! We saw the servants' bedrooms and they weren't as nice as the bedrooms upstairs but the lady there told us that the servants were well looked after and had everything they needed. Still, I would have preferred a bed upstairs!
Lastly we took a look inside the little chapel

Outside of the manor, we walked around all of the incredible gardens until we reached the park area. There, we had lunch and played on the tiny, toddle go-karts. Me and Tilly were way too big for them, but it was a lot of fun!

There was also a bunch of large haystacks that you could jump across and play on. I'm not the best jumper in the world, but with a bit of encouragment from Tilly I could jump across most of them.

Right next to the park there was a field with goats and their kids in it. They were so adorable but quite mischevious as well. One of them managed to push its head through the fence. Mom thought that the goat had gotten itself stuck so she sent me and Tilly to go and get help.
We dashed as fast as we could up to the cafe. As soon as we got there, Lavinia caught up with us and said that the goat had gotten itself out. I'm sure that goat was trying to trick us!

On the way back to the car park, we passed the farm with the pigs in it. Most of them were really young. The youngest ones ones there were really adorable! The adults weren't quite so adorable, and they smelled really bad!


I'd definitely recommend Wimpole for a day out and I hope we'll be going back soon as we didn't get to see all of it!