The tour begins at Victoria Coach Station, London with a morning departure to Harrogate by private executive coach. Our first port of call is Renishaw Hall just North of Chesterfield, where we have lunch and later enjoy a tour of the building and the Italian gardens. Renishaw Hall, dating from 1725, is the seat of the Sitwell family and is remembered particularly for being the home of the famous literary trio, Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell. Today, the house belongs to Alexandra, granddaughter of Sacheverell, and it still retains the family’s wonderful collection of books, art and furniture. We continue our journey to Harrogate with a brief visit to St Wilfrid’s Church, Harrogate’s only Grade 1 listed building (time permitting). St Wilfrid’s was designed by the architect Temple Lushington Moore and is his most celebrated work. We then check into our hotel where we stay for four nights. After a welcome drink we have dinner together in the hotel.

Following our morning lecture on The Pirates of Penzance (in preparation for this evening’s opera) we spend the day in the locality of the city of Ripon. First, we take a tour of Markenfield Hall, a privately owned moated Medieval manor house dating from 1310, and claimed to be the most continuously inhabited house in the country. The changing fortunes of Markenfield will be discussed as we explore the building, but the true joy of the Hall is to see how little it has changed in the past 700 years. We stay at the Hall for lunch and then make our way to Ripon Cathedral, one of the smaller, but among the most magnificent of English Cathedrals. The building is famous for its early English Western front, as well as for its Anglo-Saxon crypt – the oldest surviving of its type in any equivalent structure. We return to Harrogate for an early dinner, followed by Brussels Light Opera’s performance of The Pirates of Penzance in the Royal Hall, which is a short walk from our hotel.

Day 3