The Beautiful Blenheim Palace

Here goes my long overdue post on Blenheim (pronounced Blen-im) Palace visit. I went there on the first Sunday after coming to Oxford and wanted to write earlier but couldn't make it due to lack of time. But better late than never, so here's all about the beautiful palace.

The palace is situated in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, takes approximately 30 minutes from Oxford campus, and pretty easy to go, the bus will directly drop there. It's actually a monumental country house that was entitled as palace later on and remains one of it's kind as the only non-royal country house in England. The palace was built between 1705-1722 and is one of England's largest houses. It was designed by the architect Sir John Vanbrugh in English Baroque style. Designated as UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, the palace is a popular tourist destination here.

Palace gate, but this is not used for visitors

Palace exterior 

I personally thought the exterior was not very exquisite as many other palaces but found the interior more beautiful. At this time not all the rooms in palace are open for visit but those we could see were very nicely decorated. Especially the paintings on some ceilings were amazing. Also, the palace covers vast land area with multiple gardens, such as Italian garden, Secret garden, Lavender and butterfly garden and a maze (most fun part!). I found the bird sculptures curved out of shrubs in the Italian garden really cute. It was very windy and rainy that day and those birds were swinging slowly with the wind, which made them look even cuter!

Garden view

Dining hall

The maze with lavender garden and butterfly garden are actually not adjacent to the palace, it's a bit of walk, takes around 30 minutes. Or there's a toy train that takes from palace entrance station to that place and costs 50p one way. The maze was interesting but needless to say I couldn't figure out which way to go for a while (well, I guess it's normal!), and felt like a complete idiot :-/ People like me who have fear of direction loss shouldn't really go to maze, they should look from afar having people fun (-_-) Anyway, I could eventually climb one of the two bridges and took some pictures.

Blenheim Palace Maze

The lavender garden was actually smaller than I expected and couldn't take decent pictures of the butterflies at the butterfly garden but that's alright. It's overall a nice place, even to go for an afternoon/evening walk and I felt it was worth visiting. So, I ended up changing my one-day pass to annual pass thinking if I go there with some other friends by any chance. They just needed people to fill out a form and now I've an annual pass with my picture on it, which I think is pretty cool!

The following Saturday I visited London, so next post will be on my first London visit :)