In the early afternoon, I headed out to nearby Lacock Abbey, about 30 minutes away near Chippenham in rural Wiltshire - another National Trust property.
Following the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the mid-16th century, Henry VIII of England sold it to Sir William Sharington, who converted it into a house starting in 1539, demolishing the abbey church. Few other alterations were made to the monastic buildings themselves: the cloisters, for example, still stand below the living accommodation. About 1550 Sir William added an octagonal tower containing two small chambers, one above the other. The Abbey also underwent alterations in the 1750s under the ownership of John Ivory Talbot in the Gothick Revival style.
The house is most often associated with William Henry Fox Talbot, who in 1835 made the earliest known surviving example of a photographic negative, a photogenic print of the oriel window in the south gallery of the Abbey. Talbot continued with his experiments at the Abbey and by 1840 had discovered the negative/positive process to record photographic images by chemical means.
Lacock Abbey and the surrounding village were given to the National Trust in 1944.
More recently, the abbey was the sight of filming for two of the Harry Potter movies: "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" (2001), and "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" (2002).
One of the statues is of a man with a goat - and on the goat's nose is a sugar cube. The story goes that in 1919 a visiting dinner party guest (a student) placed a sugar cube on its nose as a bit of a joke; the owner of the house enjoyed the joke so much that they left it there and replaced it as needed, a tradition which the National Trust continue today - it is nice to see the National Trust enjoying themselves and not taking everything too seriously.
The ceiling of the Great Hall is adorned with numerous heraldic shields - they are the wealthy families of the time of its reconstruction, whom Talbot wanted to impress!