Helen Stephenson's Bentley Trust Pictures

The Bentley Trust consists of a manor house, a motor museum and a wildfowl area.

The Manor House is a long low building which was sympathetically extended in the 1960s, although you can see the change in the colour of the brickwork where a gallery was added at one end and a drawing room was added at the other end, once it has been pointed out to you.

The four pictures of the exterior of the Manor House were taken on 100ASA slide film, and I experimented with several angles of view after I'd taken the "straight" shot above.

The rest of the pictures on this page were taken on 400ASA colour negative film.

I discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that there were no restrictions on indoor photography, even using flash, but as I'd left my flash unit in the car (not expecting to need it and having plenty else to carry) I made do with a couple of hand-held photos taken with my 50mm lens wide open.

The wallpaper on the left is in the drawing room and is mounted on battens. It is much older than the room. Apparently you took this sort of wallpaper with you when you moved, and it was purchased from another building and put on the walls in the drawing room at Bentley Manor.

The clock on the right is in the central older section of the building. It is across the front stairs, which have been blocked off as the upstairs section of the building is a private residence. (There are other stairs elsewhere which allow access to the upstairs!)

There is an extensive area of ponds beyond the Manor House where the wildfowl are kept.

Despite The Bentley Trust being a wildfowl reserve, the flamingo with the ducks swimming past (above) and the swan (below) are the only two pictures on this page where a bird is the main subject.

There is a bird in one corner of the picture on the left, but it's more about the reflections, and the bird just adds a "little something" to it.

I took the picture on the right because of the fungus growing at the root of the tree. I just think it makes a pleasing picture.

The Manor has gardens behind the house, and Stephen took a breather on a white painted wrought iron bench while I was photographing this water lily. He likes this picture of himself, but I think that the way he's got one leg hidden behind an urn makes his monopod look like a peg-leg!

You will be happy to know that despite our visit being on Friday 13th, neither I nor any of my camera equipment ended up in the pond when I photographed this water lily.

The cat sculpture below was on the roof of one of the buildings up near the visitor centre.

We went into the Motor Museum during our visit to Bentley, but neither of us used a camera while in there, so there are no pictures of the old cars, bikes and commercial vehicles we saw!