Woolsthorpe Manor

Woolsthorpe Manor, near Gratham, is the birthplace and was the family home of Sir Isaac Newton.  It is now managed by the National Trust.  The half dozen rooms of the main house are presented as a typical seventeenth century yeoman's farmhouse. One of the former farm buildings now houses a series of hands-on demonstrations of basic principles of physics, as well as the essential NT cafe.

 

Of the interior spaces, I found Newton's bedroom the most interesting.  It was there that he did his experiments into the composition of white light.  Sadly, when it came to light, and as is usually the case with NT properties, there was limited available natural light in the room.  This meant that all images had to be at high ISO and thus quite noisy.  I decided to run a couple of shots through Nik Colour Efex and try to get a kind of old master painterly feel.

The orchard next to the house has 'the' apple tree, under which Newton supposedly pondered the nature of gravity.  It survives despite having been blown over in a storm in 1820.  It's not a pretty thing.  Neither are the apples. Those I could see still on the tree were all small and gnarled.