Jolly Adventures: Blenheim Palace

Having stayed overnight at a hotel in nearby Oxford, we got the bus to Blenheim Palace where we met up with our friends Rosemary and Ian. A little tip for those taking the bus is that you can get a 30% discount off admission if you buy your entrance ticket with your bus ticket. Then you can convert your ticket to an annual pass for no extra charge.

We walked down the imposing entrance towards the main house observing the grounds shaped by Capability Brown.

After a cup of tea, we set out in earnest to explore the Palace taking in first a Disneyesque audio animatronics history exhibition which was surprisingly good. The exhibition entitled “The Untold Story” involved us walking through a number of rooms where the state of the art technology guided us through the palace’s history with a light and sometimes saucy twist.

Next it was on to explore the Churchill exhibition taking us on the journey of his life, starting with his birth at Blenheim Palace. The exhibition is brought to life with photographs, letters, artefacts and a number of other elements, giving visitors a real sense of our ‘Greatest Briton’. We learnt that he was quite a romantic and was with his beloved wife Clementine for 56 years.

Next we explored the extravagantly ornate and sometimes gaudy State Rooms, full of portraits, tapestries and furniture, much of which originated from France. This was led by

a delightfully rude guide, snapping comments and telling off people with amusing regularity, this had us bursting with laughter made all the funnier by our attempts to hide our amusement. The tour ended at an amazing dining table we fell in love with but would have to buy our own palace to accommodate it!

After a much needed lunch we spent the afternoon exploring the palace park and gardens with its beautiful trees, lake, fountains and waterfall.

Our favourite was the peaceful and secluded secret garden “hidden” in the trees but given away by the big sign pointing to “The Secret Garden”.

More of a secret was finding the maze which seemed to us to be hidden over the other side of the building. After a fruitless search we stopped for tea and directions. Refreshed we just missed the train to the pleasure gardens so had instead a 15-minute trek up the road.

So after an exhausting day at Blenheim Palace we finally confronted what we thought was a historic and famous maze, however it turns out it celebrates the amazing age of just 25 this month - my son is older than that! And I’m twice as old! We did the maze in record time using my theory about always going right.

The Maze, has over 3,000 individual yew trees and covers an area of 1.8 acres. According to the Head Gardener, it takes six people with hedge trimmers a week to prune the maze's three kilometres yew hedges every October.

With a spare 10 minutes before catching the train back to the main palace we checked out the butterfly house where one intrepid butterfly took a liking to Eva’s leg and had to be gently persuaded to give it back so we could leave.