Mrs Popple talks about Horningsea Park in Liverpool, interviewed in 1986

Mrs Linda [Lyndon] Popple was born in 1901 and was interviewed in 1986 for the 'Looking Back at Liverpool: An Oral History of the Liverpool Region 1900 to 1960.' She moved to Liverpool in 1914 from the alpine town of Cooma in New South Wales. She talks here about a grand historical residence in Liverpool: Horningsea Park.
Transcript

LINDA: My uncle lived here when we came here, he came from Bega, and he bought all Horningsea Park. There might be five or ten acres with it [now] but it was hundreds of acres [then] and there's big stone gates and I think it's 'HP': Horningsea Park on the stone gates as you go in. My mother's brother came there from Bega, he and auntie Annie, to live, and they bought it in 1908 I think it would be, and lived there and she never liked it. But that's old Horningsea Park built by the convicts but it's all been renovated. Some relations used to go there for school holidays, to Uncle Joe's, that was before we came here to live.

INTERVIEWER: Why didn't your aunt like living there?

LINDA: She just didn't like it. They'd been used to a big old country home but I think it had about three hundred acres of land with it then and they sold it and went to Chatswood and I think they ended up going to Bega or Cooma. They had a lot of land near Berridale, near the snow, because they had plenty of money.

INTERVIEWER: Did it have a reputation for being haunted, or not?

LINDA: Yes, it did have. And I've love to get a photo because now you can see it. They've cut a lot of the old pine trees that were dying away and you can see it stands out. It's only two and a half miles from the Cross Roads Hotel. You can't miss it, it's a huge place.