Rogue Male

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We went over to meet the boys at Plas Newydd this morning for coffee and a walk and talk in the grounds there. Although the place was quite busy, we went in the opposite direction to the vast majority there, away from the house towards the Rhododendron garden, which is a kilometre or so back toward Llanfair P.G through the woods. Whilst the small (an acre?) terraced garden near the house was a riot of colour and variety [above], the cool dark of the woods was very pleasant indeed, and a good gentle stroll on which to converse about something and nothing and this and that, so to speak. We turned it into a circular walk, ending up near where we'd started, above the terraces and near the cromlech that sits in the field behind.

One thing that was noted on returning through the 'National Trust Retail Experience' that starts and ends a visit there, was that the fifth Marquess, Henry Cyril Paget, the erstwhile black sheep of the family, is now being rehabilitated as somewhat a bit of a tourist feature, despite his having frittered away most of the family's fortune during his short tenure as head of the estate in the late nineteenth and turn of the twentieth centuries, dying at twenty-nine in 1905. He was always our favourite feature anyway: flamboyant, theatrical and a gay man at a time when being such was - although much easier for the landed gentry - a perilous  path to tread. Apparently, although 'polite' society thought him a wastrel, he was much liked by the people of Bangor...

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