Ruthie at the manor house

We took Ruthie out to see a bit of history because she said she kind of missed seeing the castle in Ashby. But we've been to the castle and we know a lot of it has fallen down and it's quite scary when you go up the tower and so we took her to a place where there's lots more to see and it's not scary and high up and tumbledown and you don't get wet when it rains. It's called Donington le Heath.

There are lots of things to see at Donington and loads of history because it so old. You can see how old it is just looking at the walls but the garden is good and has lots of tall hedges in it like they had in the olden days. If you look in the pictures you can see that the house has lots of wood in it and there's this clever thing they can do with wood to find out how old things are. They take out a really small bit and count the rings and they can tell when the tree was cut down. They have to compare it with a big sheet that goes back thousands of years, to check the pattern, but it means they can tell you an actual proper date like 1066 or 1776 not just some century or other. So they know the house was built between 1288 and 1295, which means the builders must have been REALLY slow!

The kitchen at Donington is dead good. They've got it all set out like it was working and there's food all over the table but none of it is real. It's plaster and things except the bread and that's real but they coated it in something to stop it going off so you can't eat it but it looks like you can. We spent ages looking at recipes and medicines that you can make out of herbs and there was this massive plastic cheese on the table and if it had been real it would have been yummy except they didn't have fridges then so it might have gone a bit runny in summer. We thought it would be nice to sit round the big kitchen table and eat cheese and bread and fruit and chicken and stuff.
The curly things on the plate are called jumbles. They are a local tasty biscuit.

There's lots of good rooms in Donington and we liked them all but you couldn't see much in some because they had an exhibition thingy on but we liked the bedroom. It had a big bed with curtains and they said that King Richard the Third had slept in it. I hope they changed the sheets since then because it was supposed to be before the battle of Bosworth in 1486. I don't know how they know but it was probably written down somewhere because they have lots of records about the Manor House and they can read up all sorts of interesting stuff. Like back in the 1960s the house belonged to a farmer and he used it to keep pigs in. I wonder how they managed to get upstairs?

Don't forget to check out Ruthie's own blog to find out why she came to visit us.