Visiting Bath

Reynolds may or may not have painted this portrait of the grandmother of the Bath Holburne Museum's founder, tucked away high on one of the Museum's walls. The Museum's website records a cleaning in 1992, which included the removal of "a rosebud which had been added to the sitter's décolletage at some point".

The sitter was born Frances Ball in 1719, and brought up in Barbados. Aged 12, she was married off to a man 17 years her senior, and bore him - esides four other children - two sons. On her husband's early death, she married Admiral Holburne by whom she had more children, before dying in her early forties.

The younger son of the first marriage, Francis had a granddaughter, Frances, who in turn had a son Francis: his posthumous daughter, another Frances, has a great-granddaughter Ida Frances, who was looking up at her ancestor's portrait with me yesterday afternoon.

Welsh Newton House

Caroline has Welsh ancestors, and this is the view they constructed from the rear of their Carmarthenshire mansion, near Llandeilo. I say "constructed", as it apparently involved razing a village and getting in Capability Brown to do the necessary. The result - after a couple of centuries' bedding in - is certainly pleasing.

We hadn't visited Newton House before: it's a stark place, with little but some family pictures to tell its story. Nevertheless, the setting with White Park cattle grazing is alone worth the National Trust's admission fee. Who would be a volunteer at such a place though?