DAY OUT:Blenheim Palace Location: Woodstock, Oxfordshire, OX20 1UL [map] Open: daily from 10am Admission: £32 (but 30% off if you arrive by bus, train or bike) Website:blenheimpalace.com Three word summary: lavish palatial estate Time to allow: a day Ten photos:here
All England's palaces have either a royal or an ecclesiastical foundation except this one. It was built just over 300 years ago on land gifted by Queen Anne to the Duke of Marlborough after he did a particularly good job at the Battle of Blenheim, hence the name. It's where Winston Churchill was born, although that turns out to be a lucky accident. It lies eight miles north of Oxford and is one of the UK's 28 World Heritage Sites. It's not a cheap day out but in normal times attracts a million visitors a year. I visited in those far-off days when Britain was ruled by completely different leaders, i.e. last Monday.
Top Tip: There are essentially three things to do at Blenheim - explore the palace, explore the grounds and eat. The grounds are extensive, and had I realised it was going to chuck down with rain later I would have explored these first. Instead the palace beckoned seductively.
The palace is a massive limestone building poised between a massive courtyard called the Great Court and a massive lawn called the South Lawn. It was designed by John Vanbrugh in English Baroque style, and looks its best when there hasn't been a flashy car symposium the day before with umpteen marquees still to be cleared away. It's deliberately imposing, with colonnades and snazzy clocktowers added for effect, and deliberately aligned to offer a fabulous view along the central axis towards a distant Column of Victory beyond the lake.
Top Tip: Don't faff around trying to download the app which offers an audio guide of the interior. Most people haven't brought their headphones so you're likely to be able to listen to their phone blaring out the facts about each room instead. Also the staff do have proper audio guides available, they'd just rather you used your own phone because that means less wear and tear on their equipment.
The Hall is as dramatically ostentatious as you'd expect and of the fullest height. Vanbrugh didn't bother with a grand staircase because all the state rooms are on the ground floor, including a run of nine in sequence along the southern flank. These were also designed with wow in mind, with blindingly literal names like the Red Drawing Room and the Green Writing Room. Many are hung with large tapestries commemorating the War of the Spanish Succession, inevitably each with John Churchill looking prominently heroic.
It soon becomes clear that generations of the family loved nothing more than commissioning portraits of themselves to be admired centuries later. They've even kept the note John scribbled to Queen Anne on the back of a bar bill to confirm he'd won his great victory (and which it seems they managed to wheedle back out of royal hands). The glitziest room is the Saloon with its swirling trompe l'œil commemorating the Peace of Utrecht. The longest is the Library, formerly the picture gallery, in which space for books is vastly outnumbered by space for dancing and entertaining.
Top Tip: Mobile reception within the palace is poor, possibly due to the thick walls. This can be problematic if, for example, you're trying to discover the identity of the just-announced Conservative Party leader. How strikingly apposite it was to finally get a signal just before entering the penultimate room...
Here we are in the room where Winston Churchill was born. Blenheim may be his ancestral home but his parents were only visiting for a party when Jennie went into labour and was taken to a sideroom, conveniently located for current tours. A separate Churchill exhibition has been shoehorned under the Colonnade featuring several artefacts from his life and multiple boards of potted history. You can even stand beside a wax model of the great man for a none too convincing selfie or, more relevantly at present, grab a photo outside a door pretending to be 10 Downing Street.
A separate block to the north houses the stables, which is a great place to hide in case of torrential rain. The horses are long gone but the tack room survives, and each of the stalls now contains a different quirky feature from a fairground race game to a fake tree to a sit-in landau. After you've nosed them all, and discovered that little Winston learned to ride here during a summer stay, you're then delivered into the Stables Cafe (where the most popular item on a limited menu is a molten lake of mac'n'cheese).
Top Tip: Blenheim has a hierarchy of eateries, from a posh restaurant for the better dressed to a bogger-standard pantry offering takeaway sandwiches and cakes. The newest addition is a somewhat unexpected pizzeria, but you have to walk all the way down to the Walled Garden for that.
The formal gardens lie to either side of the palace, one with an Italian flavour, the other with a series of water parterres. It was memorable to sit beneath a dripping awning and watch the surface erupt with rainy splashes as a pair of ducks swam and jumped their way from the lower levels to the top, while various bedraggled visitors wandered in from outlying parts of the estate. Apparently there's also a secret garden but I didn't find that.
The Walled Garden, as previously hinted, is either a decent trek away or a short ride on the miniature train. It's not as horticulturally lush as it must once have been, being mostly uncultivated space, so has had to be enlivened with a butterfly house and a mini Bygones museum. A substantial portion of the far end has been filled with what's apparently the second largest hedge maze in the world, or was at time of planting.
Top Tip: I now know the maze is laid out to represent a cannon, two trumpets, two spears and two stacks of cannonballs, because it's yet another tribute to the first Duke's battle victory, but none of this is recognisable at ground level and has resulted in a labyrinth that's frustratingly dull to solve.
Capability Brown naturally dropped by to upgrade the landscape, in this case by flooding two streams to create a chain of lakes. The Great Lake is planted with lush tree cover on one side and has a path for promenading on the other, which I expect will produce a spectacular autumn backdrop in a month or two's time. Hidden up one end is a large but ultimately unnatural rocky cascade, but don't expect to get that far unless you've at least half an hour to spare.
Top Tip: Children can be lured to Blenheim with the promise of seeing 'Harry Potter's Tree', a 300 year-old cedar with a hole in its trunk which was used as a backdrop in one of the films. But it didn't feature during a proper Harry bit, only a Snape flashback, so don't come specially and expect to be satisfied.
Other things you might find on a lengthy wander round the grounds include an ornamental Grand Bridge, a rose garden, an arboretum and a heck of a lot of pheasants lurking in the undergrowth. What a racket they were making. But do the stuff in and around the palace before you wander off too far, rain permitting, because the wider estate is very much an added extra.
Top Tip: Keep an eye on the website because not everything's open all the time. At present the Chapel's closed for restoration and the area around Queen Pool is sealed off for dredging and silt removal. But never fear, your ticket's valid for 12 months so you can always come back and see the bits you didn't see first time.
I definitely didn't see all of Blenheim, indeed I'm kicking myself now for not checking the map properly and exploring several special crannies. But I saw the main parts and enough to recognise that World Heritage Status was rightly bestowed. And yes what I really should have done is walk up to the church in Bladon where Winston Churchill was laid to rest after his state funeral in 1965, but it was this time last week, remember, and state funerals weren't on anybody's mind back then.
