Back To Tissington

You may remember a post I wrote last year about Derbyshire Well Dressings, a custom where wells and springs are adorned with pictures made from flowers and natural materials which have been pressed into a clay base to dress the wells and give thanks for the water. We visited a few different villages last year to see their well dressings, on Sunday we decided to go back to a village we last visited in 2019 to see Tissington Well Dressing.

You can read more about Tissington if you click on the link above, I wrote about the village in my last post. You can also see how the wells were dressed five years ago, they change them each year.

There are six wells in Tissington, Hands Well, Children's Well, Hall Well, Yew Tree Well, Town Well and Coffin Well. The above is Hands Well.

It's a lovely atmosphere in the village with so many people coming to look at the well dressings. It's so well organised with a field given over to parking at a cost of just £3 per car. Tissington holds their well dressing early in the year, their tradition is to have the festival on Ascension Day. They certainly got the weather for it this year.

Children's Well.

These ducks had the right idea, taking a nap in the dappled shade of a tree.

Hall Well.

There's some pretty cottages in the village, some are holiday lets. It's a lovely part of the country to take a break with some stunning scenery a stones throw away and many places of interest in the vicinity.

Yew Tree Well.

Ornaments adorn many of the canopies over the doorways. I love the pig.

Town Well.

There were plenty of refreshment stalls as well as cafes, a plant stall as well as a nursery, a butchers shop, a candle shop, even a craft shop.

Coffin Well.

Afterwards, we made an on the spot decision to visit Ilam Park, somewhere we haven't been before. It's just across the border into Staffordshire but less than five miles from Tissington so it wasn't far to go.

Ilam Park is owned by the National Trust. It covers 158 acres and consists of Ilam Hall, the remnants of its gardens and woodland.

I love this time of year when everywhere is so green. We may have had a lot of rain in April but it's made for a lush May when the sunshine has arrived.

We watched the lambs with their mums.

Holy Cross Church stands in the grounds of Ilam Park, set amid beautiful scenery.

I enjoyed seeing the planting combinations in the borders. The purples looked pretty side by side with the oranges.

We stopped off in Ilam where the cottages resemble a Swiss village.

It was a lovely day out. Yew Tree Well is my favourite well dressing. Which is yours?