THROUGH MY LENS - Dr Neil Watt's Talk (Part 1)

Dr Neil Watt is the House and Collections Manager at the National Trust Property of Mount Stewart. He was the leading guest speaker at the 16^th Annual Historic Houses Conference in the UK and he kindly agreed to do the same presentation to staff and volunteers recently at Mount Stewart House.  All his slides were Black and white and I photographed them off the screen so they are not great.   However. as he had some lovely old photos when Lady Edith lived in the house, I thought I would show you them.  He firstly took us back to how the area looked in 1790 and brought us through the life of the house especially when the National Trust had bought the gardens in 1957 and later the house in 1977 and showed us the many changes that it had undergone until the present day.

Part 2, the final post will be published on Wednesday.

Lady Marie who was the youngest daughter of Lady Edith was born at Mount Stewart and lived most of her days there.

Lady Edith was a wonderful horse woman and rode with her daughter Lady Marie every morning. Also she and her husband Charles flew quite a bit.

 When the Trust took over the house they discovered quite a bit of damage  to the structure of the building.

Lady Marie had the beautiful stone floor covered as it was too hard to keep clean and replaced it with the black and white vinyl covering.

However a few years ago it was decided to restore the house and floor to the way it would have been in Lady Edith’s time.

I leave you today with Lady Edith and her beloved Pekingese dogs.

I hope you pop in on Wednesday to see the rest of the slides from Neil's talk.

I am linking this post with THROUGH MY LENS.

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