Join Us for an IRL Manor House Weekend in Wales!

Strong Sense of Place | Travel Through Books

Melissa & Dave

Books, Arts

5.0 • 559 Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2025

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Spend a bookish weekend with us in a country manor house! For centuries, nobles and ne'er-do-wells have gathered on country estates for a bit of leisure, a lot of sumptuous food, sparkling conversation, and general good cheer. You’re invited to join us at Trevor Hall for a modern take on the traditional manor house weekend. Together, we’ll make ourselves at home in this historic Georgian mansion surrounded by the picturesque North Wales countryside. We’ll talk about books, share gourmet meals in the Great Hall, play parlor games, ramble in the Welsh hills, listen to stories by candlelight, and be dazzled by an illusionist from London. Our weekend begins in Manchester, England — a UNESCO City of Literature. We’ll take over a boutique hotel in the city center where we’ll enjoy an evening pub meetup, spend the night, and start our morning with a breakfast fry-up. Then we’re off to the Elizabeth Gaskell House for a private tour of the Victorian villa where the author wrote her classic novel ‘North and South’ (and entertained literary friends like Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens). After a restorative tea-and-cake break, we’ll ride together via private motor coach — just over an hour — through the rugged countryside to Llangollen, a charming historic town on the River Dee in North Wales. Our destination: Trevor Hall. The Hall is a Georgian mansion on a wooded hilltop overlooking green slopes dotted with sheep and horses. After a tour of the house and gardens, we’ll ease into country living in the Hall’s luxurious (and tastefully eclectic) rooms. With literary activities, entertainment, and surprises planned throughout the weekend, you’re sure to be delighted — and have plenty of time to connect with old and new bookish friends. For complete details about the weekend and lots of photos, visit strongsenseofplace.com/weekend. For early access to tickets for a Readers' Weekend at Trevor Hall, join our Patreon. To be notified the minute tickets go on sale, join our free Substack newsletter. Parts of the Strong Sense of Place podcast are produced in udio. Some effects are provided by soundly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, welcome to a very special episode of Strong Sense of Place. Today we are going to tell you about a project that we have been working on for months.
0:19.2	Seriously. I think we've done more work on this than we did on our wedding.
0:23.6	I am fairly certain that's true, yeah.
0:26.4	And our wedding was really important to me, so put that in context.
0:31.1	Yeah.
0:31.7	So here's the thing.
0:32.7	Next October, we are taking over a manor house in Wales. We're kicking everybody out, and it's going to be ours.
0:42.6	And we're hosting a Reader's Weekend. And you are cordially invited. Now, it's going to take us a little while to
0:50.8	unpack all of this. There's a lot to talk about. It's a loaded weekend with many, many details, but let's just zip over some of the highlights and then we'll circle back.
1:00.6	For starters, we're staying in a gorgeous house. It's a historic Georgian mansion just on the
1:07.8	border of Wales, on a huge plot of land with rolling green hills and sheep and horses, it is the manor house of my dreams.
1:17.9	Yeah, there's been a house on that land for at least a thousand years.
1:23.2	But the house we are going to be in has only been around for the last 300 years or so.
1:28.8	It was purchased by a music impresario and his wife about 25 years ago.
1:34.5	Also, they are adorably named Lewis and Louise Parker.
1:37.8	Yeah.
1:38.6	Louise showed us around when we went to visit, which was a delight.
1:42.5	She is charming.
1:43.6	I hope she's going to pop in when we're there to say hello.
1:46.1	She has done just a fantastic job of making this house a really charming mix of old and new.
1:54.3	So the bones and the architecture are definitely Georgian and Victorian.
1:59.7	There's a room that looks like it's straight out of the Middle Ages.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Melissa & Dave, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Melissa & Dave and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.