Our English House- Part 2

I was going to focus on the office area and my craft room for this post, but when taking pictures of the craft room, I realized there was so much more that needed to be addressed and so this post is going to focus on the outside and some of the history along with it.

As I mentioned in the first part of this series, this house was originally a blacksmith's home and shop. As you walk out my back door, there is a view of the little shed where my craft room is located (the landlord built it as an office for the days he works from home).

But as I walked out there, I realized there was so much more story to tell.  Here are the stairs leading up to the back part of the garden.

Before we go any further, let's step back inside the house a moment.  This is hanging above the wood burning stove in our dining room.  It is an old deed to the house and property.  I haven't tried to read it all, it is quite lengthy, but the landlord says that somewhere in the paperwork it mentions the well on our property and it's communal access to all the surrounding properties.  

The well has been filled in for safety purposes, but you can still see where it was, tucked up in the corner of the garden by the barn where the blacksmith had his furnace. It is the bricked off area in the picture below, right in front of the wood beams separating the trampoline.

This spot is the path that comes up the stairs and goes between the house and the blacksmith's shop which you can see in the above photo.  To my immediate left is a gate that enters this path from the drive going up to a cottage that is tucked on the other side of the blacksmith shop (barn).  That house used to be a bakery and the landlord says old photos of the properties show huge bread ovens in front of that house that are now gone.  The gate to my left (out of view of the photo) would be to the small cottage that used to stand on my immediate right.  When I pivot to the right, this is what I see.  

The craft shed. That area as well as the grassy green area used to be a cottage.  If you look closely at this picture, you can see the chalk wall in back and beside it.  These are original walls from the cottage being used as a divider between our garden and the home behind it.

Here is a closeup of the wall that runs beside the shed:

  Closeup of the shed with surrounding wall:

 The other side of the shed, with wall behind it:

This grinding stone was found with the ruins of the cottage- we were told most likely a gift to the cottage owner from the bakery which was just across the drive:

 Here is the barn/ old blacksmith shop.  The left half of it is used by the cottage behind it (the old bakery) for storage and the right half is ours.  Our landlord just has a bunch of old junk in it that he couldn't dispose of (it is hard to find places to dispose of things here- you can't put anything out for trash that doesn't fit in you bin- and the bin's are much smaller than in the US)

 Inside the blacksmith shop is the remains of the old furnace:

This is a little walled-off area (you can see the door that I opened on the right of the photo) that would have been the blacksmith's toilet.  The hole in the ground has been filled in as well.

In the play area, there is a swing set with slide, the buried trampoline you saw in the above photos and this adorable little playhouse that matches the shed.  Zoe loves it, but I can't get her to go outside and play in it!!

the view from the back of the garden back toward the house:

At the very back of our garden is another wall- on the other side is open area that belongs to someone else.  Currently, there are some very large geese residing back there.  They are SO LOUD it is unreal!  These are not the Canadian geese we saw so much in New Jersey, but the traditional (and very big and fat) white geese.  Although, they do have the Canadian geese here too. 

I took a video trying to get them making their noise.  They knew I was standing there, so they were being relatively quiet, but right towards the end, one of them can't stand it anymore and let's out one of the really loud "honks".  THAT is the noise I hear all the way in the house A LOT! (and FYI- I doubt I will upload another video to my blog anytime soon! This 39 second video took an hour to upload- gotta love the slooooow internet speed here)

I hope you enjoyed your tour of the outside and next time, I promise, we will go INSIDE the craft room and also take a look at our office back inside the main house.