My One Street - The Victorian stable yard

Continuing the One Street series, I walked to the Victorian stable yard, which is built into the walls of the old kitchen gardens about 2oo metres from the mansion house.

Back in the day, there would have been carriage and riding horses stabled here. The stable yard is built in a traditional U shape and in the two corners there are grooms cottages, you can see the roof of number one, stable cottages here.

The closeness of the stables to the kitchen gardens was traditional so the manure from the horses could be easily used to fertilize the gardens.

Raised hot beds, built on top of deep layers of fresh manure and straw in glass houses, relied on the heat produced from the rotting manure to grow exotic fruits such as melons and pineapples to be grown without using any additional heating.

Sadly none of the glass houses, built into the south facing walls of the gardens remain, but there is a row of potting sheds that have subsequently been converted into additional stables.