Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

This week’s Pho­to­Fri­day Chal­lenge: HOME

This week’s Pho­to­Fri­day pro­ject is “Home”. This image fea­tures Epping Forest as pho­to­graphed from the car win­dow as we drove by on a rainy sum­mer day.

I have lived in the Epping Forest area of Essex, Eng­land all of my life. It is where the major­ity of my fam­ily was raised and for the most­part, con­tinue to live.

Epping Forest is an area of ancient wood­land in south-east of Eng­land. Accord­ing to Wiki­pe­dia, it formed in approx­im­ately 8000 BC after the last ice age and it cov­ers nearly 6,000 acres.

As a res­ult, it car­ries a lot of Brit­ish his­tory as vari­ous mem­bers of the royal fam­ily (such as Henry VII, “Bloody” Mary and Eliza­beth I) were said to have lived and hunted there.

Henry VIII owned and reg­u­larly vis­ited the “Copped Hall Estate” (a Stately Home, local to where I live) in the town of Epping, which is twinned with the Ger­man town of Eppin­gen. The Estate was then given to his son, Edward VI who had the future Queen (“Bloody”) Mary kept there as a pris­oner (due to her being Catholic).

From the 16^th Cen­tury, the Estate was passed on vari­ous roy­als and Brit­ish aris­to­crats until it suffered huge dam­age dur­ing World War One.

Now, the Estate and pic­tur­esque forest are pro­tec­ted and restored by vari­ous local trusts. I have fond memor­ies of spend­ing time in both places as a child, on school trips and dur­ing his­tory les­sons. Accord­ing to local press, Copped Hall is hav­ing an “Open Day” and is wel­com­ing tour­ists this weekend.

Cam­era: Nikon CoolPix 3200
Set­ting: Sports

Many thanks to those who voted for my last Mac­roDay Chal­lenge, I made 3^rd place!

EDIT: Also changed the image to a higher qual­ity ver­sion — I was on a bor­rowed com­puter when this was ori­gin­ally pos­ted, hence qual­ity loss.