Byron's House

After the excesses of Christmas, it felt like the right time for a weekend away. Naturally, that meant replacing one kind of indulgence with another: a few days of eating far too much. That said, we did at least make a token effort to balance things out with some walking — around gardens, through grounds, and, of course, back and forth to the car between stops to go and stuff our faces again. So it wasn’t all eating… just mostly.

Our first day took us to Newstead Abbey, which turned out to be a really lovely place to start. The day began exactly as all good days should, with a sausage baguette from the coffee shop — an excellent foundation before heading off to explore the house itself. I realised pretty quickly how little I actually knew about Newstead Abbey. The headline fact, of course, is that it was once home to Lord Byron. He inherited the abbey as a child and moved in about a decade later, though he eventually left due to financial difficulties.

What I’d half-forgotten until now is that Byron’s only legitimate child was Ada Lovelace — widely regarded as the world’s first computer programmer. She worked alongside Charles Babbage and was clearly an extraordinary woman, later honoured with a programming language named after her. Not a bad bit of history for one family.

The house itself is beautiful, even if the route through it feels a little confusing at times. Still, we managed to find our way around without too much trouble. The Great Hall, the Chapel, and the Japanese Room are all well worth visiting in their own right. Once you’re done inside, there are extensive grounds to wander through. I suspect they’d be even more impressive under blue skies and with everything in full spring bloom — rather than under leaden skies with winter-bare plants waiting patiently for life to return. Even so, it was still a pleasant place to stretch our legs.

One of the highlights is the waterfall you can actually walk behind. There’s a doorway to the right of the falls that leads you through, allowing you to take photos from behind the curtain of water. I’m not entirely sure what I expected to see, but it wasn’t this. Instead of droplets or streams, the water looked almost gel-like, forming a sheet at the top before tearing apart as it accelerated downward. You can see holes forming halfway down, which makes for a surprisingly mesmerising sight.