Today’s post was supposed to be my plans for 2021 but I can sum that up in one line: I don’t have any plans. So instead, I’m going to treat you to more Christmas lights and more Dorset content: Ignite at Kingston Lacy.
Back in the summer or autumn, I went to Corfe Castle. Kingston Lacy is a big house near Wimborne, owned by the same Bankes family who owned Corfe Castle, and it’s the house they retreated to after they lost the castle during the Civil War. I haven’t been inside the house because plague but they have the castle keys on display in there to this day. It was the largest gift the National Trust has ever had, encompassing Kingston Lacy, a nearby Iron Age hillfort Corfe Castle and 6,810 hectares of land of land around Wimborne and Studland, including Old Harry Rocks and the beaches along Shell Bay.
As with Corfe, Kingston Lacy’s history actually pre-dates the Bankes family. It’s the second house on the estate and the first was part of a royal estate, it was a hunting lodge, it was let out to friends of the king and Henry VII’s mother grew up there. When I said “it’s the house they retreated to”, I guess it was really the first house. The current house was built by a grandson or a great-grandson and then another descendent demolised the village it’s named after and diverted the main road. A further descendant planted the beech drive, which is now part of the main road between Wimborne and Blandford. That’s a spectacular sight in the spring and summer, two miles of up-and-down road lined with huge mature beech trees. Too mature, really. Those trees are getting on for two hundred years old and there are a lot of gaps where trees have died or been blown down or become too badly infected to survive. New lines of trees have been planted outside the old ones but they’re still young and probably won’t start to look impressive during my lifetime. Because they’re so far outside the old lines, rumours circulate regularly that when the old trees are gone and the new trees are a spectacular enough avenue, they’ll make those two miles into a dual carriageway but that’s still fifty or a hundred years into the future and hopefully we’ll all have flying cars by then anyway.
I’d be more able to talk about the place and its history if I’d ever been inside and so maybe that post will come in future, when the plague’s finished. I’d tell you about the grounds but I’m the last person to talk about gardens. Kingston Lacy has extensive gardens but when I visited in June, a lot of the staff were furloughed and the gardens hadn’t been looked after properly for months. On the bright side, that meant a lot of accidental wildflower meadows which wildlife loves and I’d bet they were thinking about keeping some of it permanently, not least because they can do some environmental good as a side effect of saving money.
And so to Ignite. Obviously, it was an outdoor event and since it was a lights and fire event, it took place in the dark so I have no idea as to the state of the gardens, except that the grass must have been kept pretty short anywhere there was fire.
As I said in the Watercress Line post, a lot of places are bringing in winter visitors they otherwise wouldn’t have by putting up lights for people to admire from the safety of fresh air and since the house has been closed since March and people don’t tend to gather in their thousands to walk around gardens otherwise in December, we have a lights event. and it’s called Ignite. It’s in partnership with Sony Music but I don’t remember any music at all.
Unlike the other lights events I’ve been to this year, and in previous years, this one is primarily forged in fire. The main lawn is bedecked in LED lanterns, making my dad remark that he expected a Lancaster to come in to land, and the trail is marked by LED candle lanterns and white light pillars but the majority of the features were flames, fuelled by soya wax and charcoal, according to the FAQs, although it smells quite strongly of paraffin or Trangia fuel in places.
Then there are scenes in the woods, which are LEDs again – a woodland unicorn, scenes of fairies and mushrooms with illuminated caps, some oversized stripy bedside lamps, teapots and teacups pouring streams of lights, trees of pink luminous blossom, an uplit avenue in oranges and golds and the rose gardens have become gardens of glowing white flowers. I was at Longleat’s lights a week earlier – their lights are very showy and I think I underestimated both the popularity of Kingston Lacy and the imagination of the National Trust. There’s not as much drama at Kingston Lacy – no bewildering tunnels of flashing lights and video game music, no holograms projected onto the lake, no lights-and-music show on the front of the house – and not as much social distancing either, but there’s something that manages to be just as spectacular in a, dare I say it, more tasteful and more National Trust-y way.
At the beginning of the trail there were food vans for mulled wine, hot chocolate and burgers but naturally we had to hurry and get started on the trail, no time to stop, need to get ahead, and then there was no way back to it at the end. The cafe in the stables was open at the end but it’s just not as Chrismassy as illuminated burgers and mulled wine. I did go so far as to make myself a mug of hot chocolate when I got home and that’s better than the paper cup I would almost certainly have been given if I’d got one at Kingston Lacy but it would have been nice to have the option and it did all smell very nice. But if you want to go for the food, you need to do it before you go out on the trail.
The trail is about 2km long but as it was surprisingly busy, it was quite slow going, and you stop to take photos of everything anyway, so it’s not hard work. For the sake of the garden, they keep it out of the grass and the mud – where you should be walking in the grass to pass the Philae Obelisk, they’ve put up an illuminated bridge to protect the garden and then you’re back on the gravel path, so the whole thing should be entirely accessible. Parts of it are dark, especially in the woods between illuminations, and most it is marked, either with big arrows, big white lights or a member of staff. I’d have liked it to be less busy or for the groups to have any comprehension that there’s still a plague but at least it was open air and you could create gaps by stopping to take photos of each little scene.
Not the most high-octane Christmas lights I’ve ever seen but pretty and definitely unique and I suspect we’ll be back next year.