Beware, Bull In Field (Ha Ha)!, Belmont Gardens

Today we had to escape the house for a couple of hours as we seem to be living in Power Tool Street at the moment. Two doors up the house was sold and the new owners are now in the process of ripping it to pieces (the whole back and front gardens have ben obliterated, walls are being removed and skip after skip is being filled up) and the noise has ben horrendous at times. Then just across from us lives a family whose son is a tree surgeon/landscape gardener who has decided to bring back huge logs of wood and proceed to chainsaw them in the front garden and then attack the smaller pieces with an axe. To nicely finish things off he then gets a huge leaf blower to blow all the sawdust into the road (if we're very lucky (not) he does this with his top off so he's earned the moniker "Top Off Boy"!) The next house to his has a bloke who uses a circular saw on his driveway to cut planks of wood into even smaller planks of wood. It's been driving us a bit doolally as we can't sit in our garden some days or even hear the telly properly and certainly not concentrate on a book. At no point have any of them thought to knock on the door and just say "sorry, I'm afraid it's going to be a bit noisy for a couple of hours" so we have no idea when it will all start up again.
Anyway, back to our trip out - we decided to head to Belmont Gardens near Faversham for a bit of tranquility and peace and quiet. We'd never been before (it was yet another Gardens down a narrow, twisty countryside lane but we found it quickly thanks to Google Maps) and it was only £8 each to get in which was a bit of a bargain. It was a great place to walk round and in no particular order featured the following : a walled garden (see extra for an image looking back towards it), a Coronation Walk (with a pet cemetery at the end!), a kitchen garden, a rockery, a pinetum, an orchard, a shell grotto, a woodland walk, a willow tunnel and some beehives (and that is not everything)!
The back of the house overlooks a sweeping lawn and the parkland beyond, and that's where I took today's image which has a bit of a story attached. At first glance I saw these ornate ironwork gates and the sign on them saying "Beware, Bull In Field" and saw what I thought must be a major flaw in its' design. Surely the bull can just walk (or charge) round the gates and head straight towards anyone standing on the lawn. There seemed to be no change in level between the lawn and the parkland but when I got nearer I spotted this sweeping brick curve. It turns out this represents part of what is called a Ha Ha. In essence a Ha Ha is used to deceive the eye (a bit like an infinity pool) as, from a distance, the landscape looks flat and uinterrupted  but is actually a turfed incline that slopes downwards to a sharply vertical face which is often made of masonary or , as in this case, brick. The drop from the top of the wall to the bottom of the ditch was over six feet so no chance the bull could get up and over. The ornate gates, of course, is where the ground is raised to allow people to cross the Ha Ha but anyone doing so would have to have a key as they are safely padlocked.
By the time we'd done all that walking we were hungry and thirsty so we headed to the converted stables which have been turned into a quirky cafe. We both had a coffee and a lovely piece of cake each and all was right with the world. No banging, no chainsawing, no drilling just a quiet contentment. On the way back home we stopped off in the lovely village of Selling for a pint at the idyllic White Lion just so that we could extend out time away from the house for a little while longer.