Audley End My Favourite Place In Th Whole World

A Memory of Audley End.

My mother and father met at the cricket ground at Audley End in the early 1930's - my father was a shepherd on the estate and my mother was a ladies maid at the Mansion. My father's hobby was beekeeping, later to become his sole profession and he always housed his bees on Audley End Estate with the permission of Lord Braybrooke.We lived at Gamages Lodge which sits in the middle of the wood behind what is now the little railway.
The bees used to swarm inside the stone lion which sits on top of the main gates to the mansion, and my father took his first swarm from here which started off his passion for the bees. There is a photograph of him in later years, also taking a swarm, in what is now the café at Audley End - this used to be the servants' hall according to my late mother.
My father told me once, that when he was a shepherd, if they had a stillborn lamb, they would plant its little body under the grapevine in the orangery as this was supposed to make the grapes grow more prolificly.
I still live very close to Audley End and the beauty of it, both the mansion and the village, never fails to astound me.
It is my most favourite place of anywhere I have ever been throughout the world.

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