While I was in Oxfordshire, the lovely family I lived with took me to see Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill’s birthplace. And I was impressed already at the front gate of the building. It’s enormous!
And a quick ImDb search also revealed that parts of the palace can be seen in several well known movies such as Spectre, Cinderella (2015), The BFG (2015), Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, just to mention a few.

The palace was built between 1705-1722, is one of England’s largest houses and became a world heritage site in 1987. It is now the residence of the 12th Duke of Marlborough.

 The facade itself was breathtaking, and the inside even more so.
We went for a walk around the main visitor’s route, and then I decided to do the “downstairs tour” afterwards, a guided tour of the staff’s quarters. Despite having a guide who just rushed through the facts and explanations and seemed a bit bored of his job, it was a fairly interesting tour “behind the scenes”. I’m not sure if those exact quarters were in use though, as they looked more like an exhibition than a work place. Same with the guy we encountered polishing the old copper pans, for some reason I have a feeling that he was just there as a part of the tour, not actually one of the working staff.

We weren’t allowed to take photos on the guided tour as we walked through private parts of the palace, but I took some on the main visitor’s route. I really wish (again) that I had a wide angle lens though, as the rooms were huge and covered in enormous tapestries and paintings from top to bottom.

I would like to see the gardens too, but it was freezing cold that day. So they had a rest at the cafeteria while I was on the guided tour, and after browsing through the gift shop we went home.
We had a lovely day despite the cold though, but I am definitively going back some day (preferably in the summer) to explore the gardens!