On Sunday we were WWW1 Land Army girls for an event called Bonnets to Breeches at Clumber Park. This was a dramatisation of a short story about the WWW1 Land Girls who were at Clumber, written by one of the property volunteers and performed by Talegate Theatre.

One of the things that Ellie found while researching was this wonderful video where talking cows were used to appeal to women to join, so we did 😉

Here we are in our costumes, all sourced from charity shops.She even made herself this wonderful badge.

The production took place in the walled kitchen garden and was a walking performance with each scene taking place in a different part of the garden. It was performed five times during the day by the four actors, assisted by guides who were all Clumber Park volunteers and during the day about 130 people saw the production.

 

While the performances were taking place and in between them our role was to be in another part of the garden with some of the old tools to display them to the public. We had a lovely time talking to lots of people who remembered using the tools we had and to lots of children who had to guess what they were used for.Here is Ellie demonstrating the mattock.

I also got to see the performance and to hear a very moving talk on the history of the Land Girls in both world wars by Cherish Watton who runs the Women’s Land Army website.

The walled garden is beautiful, I have only been there before in winter and it looked stunning with great displays of my favourite alliums.

 

 

This was such a lovely day, I really enjoyed myself and would love to be able to do more volunteering there if I can in the future.Here are all of the cast and volunteers at the end of the day.

 

I am still working on the headress for Kate, some busy stitching in front of the TV, a nice relaxing thing to do after marking all day. I am just going to attach the final bits of braid and smaller pearls and then I can reveal all.

Hopefully we will have lovely weather this weekend so she can wear it and I can get some action shots for you. Hope that you have a lovely rest of the week and a nice Bank Holiday weekend if you are in the UK.

Take care and thanks for visiting.