Vorosmarty house Kapolcs

Telegraph Travel T 11 about Kapolcs and the „Vörösmarty” house

The carriage began to list like a ship taking in water as the driver inched it down the bank. The two bay mares continuously tested their grip, picking up their feet in dainty steps.
We were crossing a wide ditch, about to join a bigger track on the other side. Flecks of sunlight filtered through the trees, butterflies tottered in and out of the shadows. It was hot and the horses were shiny with sweat.

Around us spread a puffy landscape of soft hills applied in huge arcs of colour – tan, gold and green. Sandy tracks, bright in the sunshine, were scored across the heathy painted villages, with little white churches, lay submersed in trees: dark strokes of woodland were daubed on the hills like caligraphy between fields brassy with wheat .
I had been like this since we left the farm. For an hour we had been driving, ducking under oak trees and jolting over stones. The only other people we had seen had been two men and a women hoeing maize.

It was a scene from Victorian England. At any moment I expected a Thomas Hardy here to come striding in the opposite direction asking the way to Casterbridge. Except that this wasn’t England but Hungary, just north of Lake Balaton, the biggest freshwater lake in Europe.

György Ráth ownes the carri