Category Archives: Country Houses

Jumbled chronology

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Hoghton Tower, Lancashire

Hoghton Tower, Lancashire

I visited Hoghton Tower (pronounced ‘Horton’) in Lancashire because I happened to be passing on my way to Poulton-le-Fylde.  Consequently I drove up the steep avenue knowing nothing at all about the place;  I left knowing little more and considerably confused.

Most country houses are palimpsests, and Hoghton Tower more than most – a document repeatedly erased and rewritten.  Layout and chronology matter in understanding how the building fits together.

According to our guide, one particular room was apparently completed for the present owner’s father’s twenty-first birthday and had been a schoolroom when William Shakespeare was tutor to the family.  The panelling, I was told, was by “young Mr Gillow” (which must be eighteenth century, though it depends which Gillow).  There were two marble fireplaces of obviously different periods, but I decided not to ask.

The current volume of Pevsner identifies this room as “pure Victorian Jacobean, the work of R D Oliver”.  Indeed, the whole house is a fascinating concoction by different generations, all of them aiming to suggest an earlier history.

There may well have been a medieval building here, perhaps on the site of the Well House in one corner.  The earliest standing remains are known to have been begun in a conservative manner by Thomas Hoghton in 1561-2.  Civil War damage was made good by Sir Christopher Hoghton at the end of the seventeenth century.  Planned modifications by Lewis Wyatt (1816) and George Webster (1835) were unbuilt.  Sir Henry Hoghton, 9th baronet, commissioned a careful, scholarly restoration in the 1860s, and his next two successors continued the work until 1901.

This makes for a fascinating structural and decorative jigsaw which illustrates country-house lifestyles as well as attitudes to the past over four centuries.  I simply don’t believe that members of the general public are so dim that they can only cope with disconnected anecdotes about kings and banquets.  I think visitors to historic places value being allowed to think.  It’s more interesting, if skilfully presented.

The interiors now have an atmosphere of a museum and a wedding and conference centre, which is what the place is.  The extensive underground service area is littered with dummies and skeletons, as if it’s not interesting enough without artificial aids [cf Finding a secret tunnel:  Stoke Rochford Hall and More country-house railways].

If you visit Hoghton Tower, read it up first.  Or, as our guide disarmingly suggested, buy the guide-book.

Or, better still, go and stay there.  The Irishman’s Tower is available as a self-catering let for two:  http://www.hoghtontower.co.uk/accommodation.html.  I rather fancy that as a base for seeing Blackpool Illuminations.

Card-carrying Friends of the Historic Houses Association are admitted free to Hoghton Tower.

 

Deer little house

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Deer Park House, Scampston, North Yorkshire

Deer Park House, Scampston, North Yorkshire

When you look out of the upstairs windows of the south front of Scampston Hall your eye is caught by a red-brick castellated lodge in the distance.

This is Deer Park Lodge, built by John Carr of York in Gothick style c1768 as an eye-catcher across the lake.  Originally, it was stuccoed in white, so that it stood out from the now-vanished forest behind it.

As well as being an ornament to the view, the lodge served a practical function.  To each side of the central bay were arcades to provide shelter when the deer came to feed.  Behind the building was a modest cottage in which the deer-keeper and his family lived.

The three-sided bay, with its castellated gable embellished with a trefoil, contains two grand rooms, connected by a steep, straight staircase.  Both have marble fireplaces and were decorated, apparently, with marbled paper.  The upper room, where visitors from the great house would take tea and admire the view, has a delicate plaster ceiling decorated with hunting horns and sheet music.

The current owners, David and Jane Crease, have carefully restored the lodge, and Jane explains how the three sides of the bay offered completely different views – the forest to the right (nature), the house straight ahead (culture) and the mill to the left (commerce).

Mr & Mrs Crease entertained the members of the Art Fund South Yorkshire to tea on their way back from an art day in Scarborough.  It’s a rare privilege to enjoy a sumptuous afternoon tea sitting outside the lodge gazing across the lake towards Scampston Hall in the distance.

One of the ironies of an eye-catcher is that it commands at least as good a view as the view it belongs to.  No doubt that’s why the St Quentins and their descendants, the Legards, drove over to admire the big house in its setting.

Scampston Deer Park Lodge is a private residence and is not open to the public.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

 

Stop short of Scarborough

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Scampston Hall, North Yorkshire

Scampston Hall, North Yorkshire

Motorists hammering along the A64 to the coast have little chance of noticing that they fly through the Capability Brown park of Scampston Hall.  An understated road-sign indicates ‘Scampston only’.  It’s worth following.

Apart from its historic interest, Scampston Hall has a superb restaurant, offering better lunches than you’ll find within sight of the A64.

Its historic interest is considerable.  Five St Quintin baronets, all of them called William, developed this estate.  The 3rd baronet built the original house, parts of which are still visible at the back, in the 1690s.  The 4th baronet brought in Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown to landscape the park.  The 5th baronet accumulated a significant art collection.  His heir, William Thomas Darby St Quintin, employed the architect and interior designer Thomas Leverton to transform the house in 1800-3, so that it looks – inside and out – Regency in style.

The man who takes your ticket when you start a house tour is, in fact, the current owner, Sir Charles Legard, 15th Bt.  He and his wife Caroline took on the place in 1994 when it was, as Sir Charles puts it, “tired”, reroofed, rewired and replumbed it, and welcome the public on a limited number of days each year.  Their son Christopher’s family now lives there.

Lady Legard had, through her voluntary involvement in the National Trust, gained an invaluable apprenticeship from the interior designers John Fowler and David Mlinaric, planning the restoration of Beningborough Hall, Nostell Priory (after a fire) and Nunnington Hall.  She was more than qualified to take on the challenge of managing the restoration of her family home to the highest standards.  Scampston Hall was the Country Life House of the Year in 2000:  John Cornforth’s account of the house and family appeared in the January 27th and February 3rd 2000 issues.

Lady Legard then set about finding a purpose for the former kitchen garden.  She commissioned the internationally renowned Dutch designer Piet Oudolf [see http://www.oudolf.com/piet-oudolf/references] to create a flower garden to attract public visitors, and engaged the local architects Mark Bramhall and Ric Blenkharn to design the restaurant.  The Walled Garden opened in 2004.

The result is an utterly delightful visiting experience.  Sir Charles shows groups round his house in relaxed style:  visitors are encouraged to ask questions and to sit on the furniture.  Outside, a half-hour walk around the inner park, the Cascade Circuit, passes the Pump House with its plunge bath, the Palladian Bridge and the ruined ice-house.  The Walled Garden is a fascinating essay in contemporary garden design.  And the restaurant offers the sort of menu you need to return to.

You can always go to Scarborough another day…

Details of all that Scampston Hall has to offer are at http://www.scampston.co.uk/metadot/index.pl?id=0.  Card-carrying members and Friends of the Historic Houses Association are admitted free.

 

Arrested decline

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Brodsworth Hall, South Yorkshire

Brodsworth Hall, South Yorkshire

Brodsworth Hall, South Yorkshire, is remarkable because the entire house and garden were built and furnished within a short period, 1861-70, and have hardly been changed since.  It was designed by an Italian architect, the Chevalier Casentini, who appears never to have visited the site.

The money to build it came from the proceeds of the Thellusson will of 1797, which distributed the bulk of a £700,000 fortune in trust to the surviving descendants after three generations (or, in the absence of such survivors, to pay off the National Debt).  The protracted litigation that arose among Thellusson’s descendants is recognisably portrayed in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1852-3).

When the last descendant of the original builder gave Brodsworth Hall to English Heritage in 1990, the decision was taken to restore the house as found, in “arrested decline”, rather than return its decoration and contents to their appearance when new.  This is not a “house that time forgot”, like Erddig or Calke Abbey or Mr Straw’s House at Worksop;  it retains evidence of each of its occupiers from the date of building to the late twentieth century, and chronicles the increasing difficulty of maintaining a home on the scale that was common among prosperous landed families before the First World War.

Walking through the front door, crossing the hall and glancing up the impressively grand staircase gives a very powerful feeling of stepping into the 1970s on some errand to meet Mrs Grant-Dalton.  The light, the colours, the patina of the furniture and walls look exactly as if the place has been untouched for decades.

On the route through the principal rooms it’s easy – apart from the apparently new carpets – to imagine oneself into almost any decade since the house was built.

But further into the tour, upstairs, bleak bedrooms with folded bed-linen on bare mattresses, presumably unoccupied since early last century, are interspersed with spruced-up facilities for visitors, complete with interactive computers belting out canned historic voices.

And there are several rooms simply displaying found objects, like a lugubrious version of a trip to Ikea.

Here English Heritage is playing to the crowd, as perhaps it must in economically straitened times, where visitor footfall is the name of the game.

That said, Brodsworth is worth exploring:  the long-neglected gardens are well on their way to recovery, and the café deserves more than one visit per visit.

Details of opening arrangements at Brodsworth Hall are at http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/brodsworth-hall-and-gardens.

The 56-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 tour Country Houses of South Yorkshire, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  It includes chapters on Aston Hall, Brodsworth Hall, Cannon Hall, Cusworth Hall, Hickleton Hall, Renishaw Hall, Wentworth Castle, Wentworth Woodhouse and Wortley Hall.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Strawberry Hill forever

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Strawberry Hill: Gallery

Strawberry Hill: Gallery

Horace Walpole (1717-97) didn’t expect his house at Strawberry Hill to last much longer than he did:  he built in plaster and papier-mâché and decorated his “little plaything-house” with wallpaper.

The house that gave its name to a style, “Strawberry Hill Gothic”, was for amusement only, so small that one of his visitors, Lady Townsend, declared, “Lord God!  Jesus!  What a house!  It is just such a house as the parson’s where the children lie at the end of the bed.”

As a reaction to the stern mansion at Houghton in Norfolk built by his father, the Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole, and indeed to his own town house off Piccadilly, Walpole extended Strawberry Hill between 1749 and 1776 asymmetrically, as if built over centuries, because he was “fond of the Sharawaggi, or Chinese want of symmetry”.

He commissioned a group of friends as his “committee of taste” – among them John Chute (1701-1776) and Richard Bentley (1708-1782) – to advise on designs based on medieval originals.  This is why the chimneypiece in the library imitates John of Eltham’s tomb in Westminster Abbey, and that in the Holbein Chamber is based on Archbishop Warham’s tomb at Canterbury, while the gallery ceiling is derived from the side aisles of Henry VII’s chapel at Westminster Abbey.

The house was a cabinet of curiosities, a Schatzkammer, filled with every kind of object from Cardinal Wolsey’s red hat to the gilded armour of the French King Francis I, James I’s gloves to a lock of Edward IV’s hair “cut from his corpse in St George’s Chapel at Windsor”.    Stripped of Walpole’s collections in a sale of 1842, its rooms currently stand virtually empty.  Yet they have the unmistakable feeling of what Walpole called “gloomth”, which inspired his Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1765), an important milestone on the road which leads to Frankenstein, Dracula and Hogwarts.

For a building that was outrageously against the prevalent architectural fashion, it was the object of insatiable curiosity.  Walpole was so pressured by visitors that he issued timed tickets.  “Never build a charming house for yourself between London and Hampton Court,” he wrote to a friend.  “Everyone will live in it but you.”  He declared that he should marry his housekeeper, because her gratuities were such that she had more money than he did.

Strawberry Hill, for many years the core of a Catholic teacher-training college, is now – at a cost of £9 million – as bright and crisp as Horace Walpole would have remembered it.

Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham, is open to the public by timed ticket:  see http://www.strawberryhillhouse.org.uk/visit.php.  The café, called The Committee of Taste, is superlative:  I couldn’t bring myself to eat the cheesecake until I’d photographed it:

Cheesecake

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

Chatterleys not at home

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Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire

Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire

Sutton Scarsdale Hall may have provided the nucleus of the idea for D H Lawrence’s characters Clifford and Constance in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, because the marriage of William Arkwright, the last owner, was blighted by the consequences of a hunting accident.

Sutton Scarsdale is not, however, Lawrence’s “Wragby Hall” – “a long, low old house in brown stone, begun about the middle of the eighteenth century, and added on to, till it was a warren of a place without much distinction”.  It’s generally agreed that Lawrence was visualising Renishaw Hall, in the north-east corner of Derbyshire, though the actual house is anything but lacking in distinction.

The late eighteenth-century owner, Sitwell Sitwell (his name is another story) built the elegant apsed dining room in 1794, and the grand east wing, with plasterwork by the local sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey, in 1803-8.  When it was finished the Prince Regent visited, and made Sitwell Sitwell a baronet.

Lawrence and his wife Frieda met Sir Osbert Sitwell, who invited them to call at Renishaw on one of their rare visits to Derbyshire in the 1920s.

When they eventually visited there was no-one at home but the butler, who took against the odd-looking couple:  it’s likely that their accents wouldn’t quite fit the bill, he the son of a Derbyshire miner, she the daughter of a German baron.

Consequently, all they saw of the house was the front hall.  They were shown in the front door and straight out the back into the garden – with the result that Wragby Hall is based on, but is only a shadow of, the actual Renishaw Hall.

The gamekeeper called Mellors, by the way, worked at Welbeck.

UPDATE:  The Observer of November 13th 2011 contained an edited reprint of Dame Edith Sitwell’s account of the Lawrences’ visit.  Evidently they met only once.

“He talked to us a great deal about our parents, explaining their characters to us.  Mrs Lawrence…explained the natives of Bloomsbury to me…”

Afterwards, in a lecture she gave in Liverpool, Dame Edith described Lawrence as the head of the Jaeger school of poetry – hot, soft and woolly.  The Jaeger company took exception, saying that their clothes were indeed soft and woolly, but not hot.  Dame Edith was contrite, and told Messrs Jaeger that “their works were unshrinkable by time, whereas the works of Lawrence, in my opinion, are not”.

Renishaw Gardens, Museum and Galleries are open regularly through the summer.  The Hall can be visited only on pre-booked tours.  Details are at http://www.sitwell.co.uk.

The survival of Sutton Scarsdale

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Sutton Scarsdale Hall, Derbyshire

Sutton Scarsdale Hall, Derbyshire

Southbound travellers on the M1 in Derbyshire are sometimes intrigued by a splendid ruin on the offside which is virtually invisible travelling north.  This is Sutton Scarsdale Hall, second only in scale to Chatsworth among the surviving classical country houses of Derbyshire.  It has survived, but only just.

It was built in 1724-9 for Nicholas Leake, 4th Earl of Scarsdale by the major provincial architect Francis Smith of Warwick.  Smith’s grand façades are oddly oriented because he built around a much older core which stands alongside the medieval parish church, so the main entrance is on the north front.  When the house was intact its chief glory was the plasterwork by the Italian stuccadores Giovanni Battista Arturi and Francesco Vasalli.

Lord Scarsdale died without heirs and deeply in debt, and Sutton Scarsdale passed through a succession of owners until it was bought by Richard Arkwright of Willersley, the financier son of the cotton inventor, for his younger son, Robert Arkwright, who married the “single-minded, simple-hearted” actress Fanny Kemble.

Their descendant William Arkwright is thought to be the model for D H Lawrence’s Clifford Chatterley, though the novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover is not set at Sutton Scarsdale.

After the First World War, the Arkwrights sold up the Sutton estate, but couldn’t get rid of the house, which was first vandalised and then stripped by a speculator for the value of its materials.

Fifty tons of lead were removed from the roof, and a collection of interiors including the drawing room, the main staircase and some fireplaces were shipped to the United States.

Three rooms, their proportions altered and their provenance irreparably confused, can now be seen at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a fourth, purchased by William Randolph Hearst for San Simeon, remained in a New York warehouse in packing cases until it was bought by Paramount Studios and used as a set for the film Kitty (1945).

This was donated in 1954 to the Huntingdon Library, Pasadena, but remains, apart from two doorcases, in storage.

Chairs made for the 1724 house are now at Temple Newsam House, Leeds and in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum and the Frick Collection.

The shell of the house stood abandoned, until it was rescued by Sir Osbert Sitwell in 1945, just before bulldozers were about to clear the site.

By the time his nephew, until then Mr Reresby Sitwell, inherited it in 1969 the ruins were unstable.  Sir Reresby found himself caught in a bureaucratic maze:  the then Ministry of Public Buildings & Works wouldn’t help because Sutton Scarsdale was built after 1700, while the Historic Buildings Council, as part of the Ministry of Housing, couldn’t support a building which, being roofless, was no longer a house.

Eventually, after a change of legislation, it was taken over by what is now English Heritage, and travellers who can find their way through the by-roads from the M1 junction 29 at Heath may wander the ruins that were very nearly flattened in 1945.

Opening arrangements for Sutton Scarsdale Hall can be found at http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/sutton-scarsdale-hall.

Des res

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Wingfield Manor, Derbyshire (1976)

Wingfield Manor, Derbyshire (1976)

Ralph, Lord Cromwell, was a big hitter in the politics of the reign of King Henry VI.  He made a great deal of money and owned five major houses, two of which still survive – Tattershall Castle in Lincolnshire and Wingfield Manor in Derbyshire.  (The other three were Collyweston Manor House, Northamptonshire, Lambley Manor House, Nottinghamshire, and Ampthill Castle, Bedfordshire.)

Its position at the top of a steep hill, its dry moat and its robust High Tower indicate that it was seriously defensible, yet Wingfield has a much more domestic atmosphere than Tattershall.  Nevertheless, it was – and is – a magnificent complex of palatial dimensions.  John Leland, the Tudor antiquary, commented, “Winfield, or Wenfield, in Derbyshire, is but a maner place, but yt far passith Sheffeld Castel”.

Significantly, when it passed on Cromwell’s death in 1455 to the 2nd Earl of Shrewsbury, it needed no major extension for the grander nobleman.  Only when the 6th Earl, long-suffering husband of Bess of Hardwick, used it to accommodate the captive Mary, Queen of Scots were extensions made.

Mary took against it, saying the air made her ill, and Shrewsbury retorted that “the very unpleasant and fulsome savour in the next chamber” came from “the continual festering and uncleanly order of her own folk”.

It was slighted – rendered indefensible – after the Civil War, and the Great Hall was adapted as a two-storey residence by the astronomer Immanuel Halton (1628-1699), whose connection with the first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, is explained in http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1996JBAA..106…22B.

His successor, Immanuel Halton III, took stone from the ruins to build his Georgian house in the valley below.

Wingfield Manor has been for generations the site of a working farm, so that although it is conserved by English Heritage, public access is extremely limited.  Arrangements are set out at http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/wingfield-manor/visitor-information.

Otherwise, public access to the site is strictly prohibited.

Camp castle

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Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire

Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire

Tattershall Castle is a designer castle – practically capable of being defended but primarily intended to make a statement.

It was built by Ralph, Lord Cromwell (1403-1455) who did very well out of the post of Treasurer of England under King Henry VI.  His badge of office was the tasselled purse and crossed money-bags.  Tattershall was one of his five residences.

He was described by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as “a tenacious man with a great gift for administration, a tidy mind, a faith in accurate records, and an ability to steer a safe course amid the intrigues of the age of Henry VI.”  He built the huge brick Great Tower within the inner bailey of an earlier castle, and established a college of clergy – the customary medieval insurance against damnation – to worship in the adjacent parish church.  In his will he asked his executors to restore to their previous owners lands worth almost £5,000 “for conscience’s sake”.

The Great Tower is a series of splendid state apartments, stacked one on top of the other rather than laid out in a line.  From the roof it’s possible not only to drop missiles on unwelcome visitors, but to see the towers of Lincoln Cathedral and Boston Stump.

This medieval skyscraper was characterised by the guide-book writer Dr M W Thompson as reminiscent of “the self-dramatisation so characteristic of fifteenth-century life”.  The finished building would have been startling to contemporary eyes, just as its surviving remains are impressive to ours.  It was designed for someone who had a clear idea of the effect he wished to create.

It’s possible that the whole tower was originally rouged with ochre.  It’s not so much a masculine building as a butch one.

We owe its survival to a particularly quirky personality in early twentieth-century politics, the Viceroy, Lord Curzon (1859-1925), who went through life, poor man, encumbered with the anonymous undergraduate ditty –

My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,
I am a most superior person.
My face is pink, my hair is sleek,
I dine at Blenheim once a week.

This much derided, stiff, unhappy man, when he wasn’t working incredibly hard in the “Great Game” of British politics in which he rose to be Viceroy of India (1898-1905) and Foreign Secretary (1919-24), purchased the derelict site of Tattershall Castle in 1911, renovated the Great Tower, restored the moats and reinstated the original fireplaces which had been crated up ready for sale to the USA.  His action provoked the passing of the Ancient Monuments Act of 1913.  He bequeathed Tattershall to the National Trust, along with Bodiam Castle in Kent which he bought in 1916.

Tattershall Castle is open to the public throughout the year, but not every day:  see http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-tattershallcastle for up-to-date details.  The ladies of the parish serve excellent tea and cakes in the collegiate church of the Holy Trinity most days between Easter and the end of September:  check at http://www.httf.org/heritage.html.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

 

Milntown – more than a cup of tea

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Milltown House, Isle of Man

Milltown House, Isle of Man

The Isle of Man’s latest historic site to open is Milntown, a country house and garden on the outskirts of Ramsey.  (This is a reversal of history, for Ramsey was, until the late 1880s, on the outskirts of the Milntown estate.)

The house is a delightful early-nineteenth century Gothick confection, built around a seventeenth-century core on an estate that belonged to the McCrystyn, later Christian, family from the early fifteenth century at least.

This was the birthplace of the great Manx hero, William Christian, otherwise Illiam Dhone or Brown William (1608-1663) [See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illiam_Dhone].  Fletcher Christian, the instigator of the mutiny on the Bounty was of the same family.

After the Christian family left, Milntown was a school, a hotel and then a private house belonging to the owners of Yates’ Wine Lodges.  The last owner, Sir Clive Edwards, left the estate in trust to the Manx people, and it’s now gradually opening up for public enjoyment.

In an interesting reversal of UK National Trust practice, visitors enter through the tea-shop to reach the proudly organic gardens, which provide produce for the kitchen and an array of the sort of flowers that the monochrome photographer Cecil Beaton sourly described as “retina irritants”.

Designed by Richard Lucas, the garden is a vivid, crowded, complex place to wander, with woodland walks, seats and a mill-pond.  The waterwheel of the 1794 mill turns idly, and the mill will one day open to the public.

This will be a site to return to – not least for the serious catering.  When you walk in to pay your admission, you see satisfied customers tucking into the full cake-stand for afternoon tea.  It’s difficult to resist the temptation on the way out.

Details of Milntown’s opening arrangements are at www.milntown.org.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.