Category Archives: Country Houses

Life-enhancing Leadenham

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Leadenham House, Lincolnshire

Leadenham House, Lincolnshire

As you drive eastwards along the A17 from Newark-on-Trent, it’s difficult to miss seeing a splendid Georgian house sitting on the top of the escarpment.  This is Leadenham House.  Despite its prominent position, it was virtually invisible when the main road clambered up the slope to Leadenham village;  since the by-pass opened in 1995 it’s become an attractive landmark for travellers.

Built for William Reeve by Christopher Staveley of Melton Mowbray in 1792-6, the house has a cantilevered staircase said to be the work of John Adam, oldest of the three famous Adam brothers.  It was extended by Lewis Vulliamy in the 1820s, and the morning room, originally the kitchen, was decorated with antique Japanese rice-paper panels discovered by Detmar Blow in 1904

Leadenham House is open to visitors on a limited basis:  William Reeve’s descendant, Mr Peter Reeve, uses visitors’ fees to support the Lincolnshire Old Churches Trust.

Opening arrangements can be found at http://www.stately-homes.com/leadenham-house which cheerfully advises prospective visitors to “ring the front door bell, as they aren’t open in any sort of commercial sense and all the money they receive from visitors goes to a village charity, so there is nobody waiting expectantly for anyone to arrive”.

There is a fulsome description of the house and its owners at http://www.lincolnshirelife.co.uk/uploads/files/homes_and_gardens/homes-0106.pdf.

The other reason to visit Leadenham is much more freely open.  The George Hotel is my favourite pit-stop on journeys along the A17, whether for morning coffee or a sandwich lunch.  The pub prides itself on using beef from Lincoln Red cattle.

It also has a world-beating collection of seven hundred malt whiskies, collected since 1970.  Just think:  if you lived within walking distance you could go to the George for what Denis Thatcher referred to as a “tincture” every night for two years without repetition.  Ranged round the walls of the bar is a positive library of malt whisky.

The only down-side is that the prices of a single single malt range from £2.10 to £350.

The George website [http://www.thegeorgeatleadenham.co.uk] recommends the malt liqueur Drunkeld Atholl Brose [sic] which you can sip on its own or with fresh cream floated on top.

Denis Thatcher would have been appalled: he avoided ice because, as he said, it dilutes the alcohol.

(Drunkeld Atholl Brose – it seems – is really spelled Dunkeld: http://www.royalmilewhiskies.com/product.asp?pf_id=10000000000819.)

 

Palimpsest of the Peak 1

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Chatsworth House, Derbyshire

Chatsworth House, Derbyshire

About fifteen years ago Andrew, 11th Duke of Devonshire, commissioned an extensive archaeological survey of the Chatsworth estate, a summary of which was published as John Barnatt & Tom Williamson, Chatsworth:  a landscape history (Windgather 2005).

It’s a revelation.

Chatsworth has, of course, been repeatedly written up, ever since the Bachelor 6th Duke produced his privately printed Handbook of Chatsworth and Hardwick in 1845.  The recent survey pulls together a full review of the archaeology and the estate’s enormous archive, backed by the evidence of maps, illustrations and modern photography.

This reveals a layered chronology of a significant area of the upland Derbyshire Peak back to prehistoric times.  In particular, since the mid-eighteenth century much of the landscape has been undisturbed, leaving evidence of prehistoric, medieval and early modern agriculture and industry that has been obliterated elsewhere in the county.

The shadowy presence of the great landscape designer, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, who is mentioned only once in the entire Chatsworth archive, is made clearer because almost all payments in the estate accounts were addressed to his “foreman” or contractor, Michael Millican.  Their work in creating the naturalistic landscape that stretches from Chatsworth House to the horizon began in 1759, financed to a great extent by the 4th Duke’s lucrative copper mine at Ecton in Staffordshire.

Another recent discovery is the complexity of the patterns of drives and roads around the estate.  It seems that the eighteenth-century landscape was primarily designed to be seen from and near the house, and largely enjoyed on foot, rather like the characters’ explorations of Mr Rushworth’s Sotherton property in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814).

During the early Victorian period, the time of the Bachelor Duke, the park was crisscrossed with wide drives, carefully contrived to give advantageous views.  Many of these have since been grassed over and largely forgotten.  It seems that in the Bachelor’s time visitors were encouraged to enjoy the mature landscape in the comfort of a carriage.

When I take groups to Chatsworth, particularly visitors from outside the UK, I make a point as the coach climbs the steep road (realigned in the early nineteenth century) from Beeley Bridge (1759) of explaining that everything within sight – buildings, grass, trees, water – is in fact contrived by man.  And you wouldn’t get planning permission for it now.  Especially as it lies in a National Park.

The portal for information about visiting Chatsworth is http://www.chatsworth.org.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley tour, with text, photographs, maps 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.

Plenty of room for guests

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Wentworth Woodhouse: east front

Wentworth Woodhouse: east frontThe Sheffield Star for May 21st 2011 announces 1,500 jobs in £200m plans to open Black Diamonds stately home, the first public news that Wentworth Woodhouse, the vast Palladian mansion on the borders of Sheffield, Rotherham and Barnsley, will become accessible to the general public for the first time, possibly by 2015.

Without doubt this is one of the greatest classical Georgian houses in the British Isles – actually two houses, because the rarely seen “back front”, a baroque west wing built for the Lord Malton who became 1st Marquis of Rockingham, is overshadowed by the enormous Palladian east wing designed by Henry Flitcroft for the 2nd Marquis, who served as prime minister from in 1765-6 and again briefly in the year of his death, 1782.

Flitcroft’s façade is 606 feet long, with pavilions each the size of a small country house.  The great rooms inside include the magnificent Great Hall, decorated with fluted Ionic columns in Siena scagliola, embellished, like the wooden doorcases, with verde antico, and the Whistlejacket Room, which still houses a reproduction of Stubbs’ famous painting (c1762) of a Fitzwilliam stallion, now in the National Gallery.

This house figures in architectural, political and social history as strongly as the celebrated Stowe, which survived as the centrepiece of a public school, its landscape now maintained by the National Trust.  Arguments over the family inheritance, leasing to the county council as a teacher-training college, the malicious excavation of the park by a vindictive Minister of Power, Emmanuel Shinwell [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Shinwell], and the family’s refusal to resume the liability when the college closed in 1986 have made Wentworth Woodhouse a mystery house.

The circumstances in which the family loosened and then released its grip on the place are vividly described in Catherine Bailey’s superb Black Diamonds (Viking 2007).  The house and ninety surrounding acres were sold as a private residence in 1989 to Wensley Haydon-Baillie, who went voluntarily bankrupt nine years later.  Latterly it was sold by the administrators to a retired London architect, Clifford Newbold, who at the age of 85 is setting out on a scheme to incorporate a seventy-bedroom hotel and a spa while opening the main house as a museum, in anticipation of up to 150,000 visitors.  In this scheme John Carr’s stable block, built to house a hundred horses, will become a business park.

This development represents a very welcome change of direction, after years when the house and its immediate surroundings were strictly off limits to locals and visitors.  Now, with the backing of English Heritage and Rotherham Borough Council, Mr Newbould’s scheme is the first piece of optimistic news about the house since the Fitzwilliams packed up their possessions at the start of the Second World War.

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.

Minimalist Georgian

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Wardour Castle, Wiltshire: entrance hall

Wardour Castle, Wiltshire: entrance hall

When I was reconnoitring a ‘Country Houses of Wiltshire’ tour some years ago, I was particularly kindly treated by Nigel Tuersley, who was then coming to the end of his magnificent renovation of James Paine’s Wardour Castle, near Tisbury.

Nigel has a distinctive career-trajectory – ecologist turned property-developer – with a particular love of Georgian architecture.  He took over this 75-room Georgian house, that had previously been used by Cranbourne Chase School and was built in 1770-1776 for the 8th Lord Arundell, and converted it into ten apartments, the biggest of which, in the rustic and piano nobile floors of the central block, he occupied with his wife and two children.

To resolve the dilemma of decorating and furnishing the vast rooms with their 24-foot ceilings designed by the most understated of Georgian architects, Nigel Tuersley commissioned the minimalist architect John Pawson to design his apartment.

When Nigel gave me free rein to photograph the place I had to use ambient light, simply because I couldn’t find the light switches.  When subsequently he allowed me to take not one but two groups of Nottingham University adult-education students to visit, he challenged us to find them.  They were concealed in the architraves of the doorcases.

Pawson’s intention, throughout the house, is to retain the smooth lines of Paine’s classical minimalism.  Bathrooms are grand rooms within grand rooms, and the kitchen contains everything you’d expect to find, though not necessarily where you’d look for it.

As Nigel Tuersley remarked to Victoria O’Brien [‘No-frills Georgian’, The Sunday Times, February 22nd 2004], at the time the house was commissioned and designed “it was considered inappropriate…to show your wealth in any sort of obvious way”.  It’s easy to make cheap jokes about minimalism but Nigel, whose development company is called Classical Order, says, “Minimalism is not a fashion or passing phase.  It’s as enduring a design aesthetic as classicism, and (at Wardour Castle) the two work seamlessly together.”

Nigel Tuersley has now moved out of Wardour Castle, and it belongs to Jasper Conran, who comes from a noted design dynasty.  The house, which Nikolaus Pevsner described as “the most glorious Georgian interior of Wiltshire”, attracts a succession of careful owners.

Wardour Castle is private, and is not open to the public.

Wardour Castle is one of the houses featured in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture English Country Houses – not quite what they seem.  For further details, please click here.

 

No sign of Mrs Rochester

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North Lees Hall, Derbyshire

North Lees Hall, Derbyshire

North Lees Hall, near Hathersage in Derbyshire, is a highly significant building, built for the Jessop family of Broom Hall who belonged to the sphere of influence of George, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, custodian of the captive Mary, Queen of Scots and long-suffering husband of Bess of Hardwick.

Many of the Earl’s associates built “high houses”, with tall turrets, gridiron mullioned windows and skied chambers and galleries.  The plasterwork at North Lees Hall includes the arms of the Rodes family of Barlborough Hall;  other families with Shrewsbury links and comparable houses included the Sandfords of Thorpe Salvin Hall and the Hewitts of Shireoaks Hall.

Because North Lees Hall was more or less continuously let from the mid-seventeenth century until after the Second World War it was hardly altered, but at times unoccupied.  Sometime before 1792 the tenancy came to one Thomas Eyre, whose descendants stayed here until 1882. Their occupation had an interesting effect:  a whole procession of scholarly visitors assumed a quite spurious connection with the ancient and prolific Catholic family of Eyre.  The resulting legends are extremely attractive.

A more famous connection came from the 1845 visit of Charlotte Brontë, who is often assumed to have based Thornfield Hall at least partly on North Lees in writing the novel she entitled Jane Eyre – “…three stories high, of proportions not vast, though considerable…battlements round the top gave it a picturesque look. Its grey front stood out well from the background of a rookery.”  She may have taken her heroine’s family name from the occupants, and named the nearby fictional village Morton after the actual landlord of the George Inn, Hathersage.

After the Second World War the house was neglected, and at one stage was used for storing grain.  It was converted it into holiday accommodation by Lt-Col Hugh Beach.  It was purchased by the Peak Park Planning Board in 1971, and in 1987 it was leased to the Vivat Trust, who restored and reopened it as self-catering holiday apartments in 1989.  A further restoration took place in 2002, and it is now let as a residence.

Other sites associated with Jane Eyre are described and illustrated at http://walk2read.com/books/jane_eyre.html.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley tour, with text, photographs, maps 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.

No place to rest

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Tower of Elphinstone, Dunmore Park, Scotland (1982)

Tower of Elphinstone, Dunmore Park, Scotland (1982)

Before the Murray Earls of Dunmore built Dunmore Park House, the place was called Elphinstone, after the family that had lived there in the sixteenth century, and the residence was a substantial 57-foot-high tower, alternatively known as the Tower of Elphinstone or Elphinstone Tower.

A curious structure with enormously thick walls, and major rooms on the first, second and third floors, it seems to have been unoccupied after the 3rd Earl of Dunmore bought the Elphinstone property in 1754, until in 1836 the barrel-vaulted ground-floor room was converted into a mausoleum.

In 1840 the two-storey service wing was cleared away to give space for St Andrew’s Church, a modest Gothic building with a bell-turret.

By the time I visited the place in 1982 the Tower had collapsed, and St Andrew’s Church had been completely demolished, leaving free-standing wall monuments surrounded by thin air.

Since then, the Tower has been neglected and vandalised, and the Falkirk Local History Society’s website [http://www.falkirklocalhistorysociety.co.uk/home/index.php?id=126] indicates that it may not survive for many more winters.

The corpses that had been interred in the vault have apparently been removed, but not – so it seems – the coffins, which were left to tempt passing vandals.  The 2009 state of the place, and also the ruins of Dunmore Park House, are illustrated at http://urbanglasgow.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=1532&start=0.

It’s not a pretty sight.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Victorian Cemeteries, please click here.

 

 

Could have done more

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Dunmore Park House, Scotland (1982)

Dunmore Park House, Scotland (1982)

When I stayed at the Dunmore Pineapple in 1982, we walked across the park to the ruins of Dunmore Park House, which was built for George Murray, 5th Earl of Dunmore (1762-1836), son of the builder of the Pineapple, by William Wilkins (1778-1839).

Wilkins is best known for his work in the Greek Revival style such as the National Gallery, Downing College, Cambridge and the Yorkshire Museum in York.  He could turn his hand to other styles, however, and had built Dalmeny Castle in what was called ‘Tudor Revival’ for the 4th Earl in 1817.

It follows that Dunmore Park House, built for the same family in the same style as Dalmeny, is an architecturally significant building.  The Murrays left Dunmore in 1911, but the house remained a home until 1961.

When we explored it in 1982 it was already derelict, having been abandoned after a short spell as a girls’ school in 1964.  Since then, it has become entirely a ruin, and remains the subject of seemingly intractable planning debate, which figures on the Scottish Buildings at Risk register http://www.buildingsatrisk.org.uk/BAR/detail.aspx?sctID=1393&region=Falkirk&div=&class=ALL&category=AT%20RISK&Page=1&NumImg=5.  (See also http://www.ads.org.uk/what_we_do/design_review/reports/295_restoration-and-residential-development-of-dunmore-park-house.)

The house is illustrated at http://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/main/showthread.php?t=5742, a series of images shot in 2007.

Edmund Burke’s sonorous remark that “The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is for good men to do nothing” is customarily applied to more grave and significant matters than planning policy, but the fact remains that while private owners and public bodies prevaricate, a worthwhile and once habitable building disintegrates.

Summer house

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Lyveden New Bield, Northamptonshire

Lyveden New Bield, Northamptonshire

The last of Sir Thomas Tresham’s three buildings is in some ways the most intriguing.  Whereas the Triangular Lodge is a complete entity, Lyveden New Bield is incomplete, presumably abandoned on Sir Thomas’ death in 1605.  It has sat on its hilltop in the wide Northamptonshire countryside for over four hundred years now, and only recently has it begun to make sense fully, thanks to a smart National Trust researcher and the German air-force.

The architecture is actually quite easy to read.  It was clearly intended as a small residence, capable of supporting a small number of guests for meals and probably overnight.  There is, for instance, a kitchen with a bread-oven.  But the building seems never to have been roofed or floored.

The façades have the same combination of classical proportions and Elizabethan mullion-and-transom windows as the Rothwell Market House.  Lyveden New Bield, however, is much more obviously cruciform in plan, and it bristles with religious symbolism that quietly asserts Sir Thomas’ Catholic faith.

The cruciform plan, for instance, consists of five squares.  Sir Gyles Isham explained, in the National Trust guide-book, that the end of each wing has seven faces each five feet wide, because in Christian numerology five is the number of salvation and seven is associated with the Godhead.  The Biblical and liturgical inscriptions around the entablature each have eighty-one (9×9) letters, adjusted so that the names ‘Jesus’ and ‘Maria’ appear symmetrically on the wall alongside the end bay.  The frieze between the two principal floors carries carvings of the symbols of the Passion, Judas’ money bag, the scourge, the pillar, the crown of thorns and the sceptre of reeds, together with the two Christograms, ‘IHS’ and ‘XP’ representing the name of Christ.

If you were a pious Jacobean Protestant, you might accept that the theme of the decoration is the Passion of Our Lord.  If you were a knowing Catholic, you’d realise that it also celebrates the sufferings of the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows.  Catholicism in that dangerous age was a sort of Freemasonry, communicating to its adherents through secret signs and signals.  In the year that Sir Thomas died, a group of Catholics including his son, Francis, attempted an audacious act of terrorism that we still commemorate on November 5th.

So what was it for?  The answer has recently become clearer.  From the main house down in the valley, Lyveden Old Bield, of which very little now remains, guests were invited to walk up through Sir Thomas’ new fruit garden, climb to the top of a spiral mount that was restored in the 1990s, where their ultimate destination, the New Bield, was suddenly revealed in the distance.  Once there they could enjoy the view with refreshments in comfort.  Sir Thomas might have kept “secret house” there when the Old Bield was being cleaned.  I’d be very surprised if he didn’t also intend to celebrate Mass:  no Protestant spy could get within a quarter of a mile of the place without being seen.

We owe a clearer understanding of this layout to a the crew of a German spy-plane who photographed the site in 1944.  Chris Gallagher, National Trust gardens and parks curator, found the images in the US National Archive in Baltimore, and realised that they showed that a previously unsuspected labyrinth formed part of Sir Thomas’ formal garden.  [See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/8112577/Photos-taken-by-the-enemy-in-Second-World-War-shows-lost-Tudor-garden.html and http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1327165/Luftwaffe-WW2-photograph-reveals-lost-Tudor-garden-National-Trust-site.html.]

As a result the site has been regraded to Grade I by English Heritage.  It will be exciting to watch its restoration over the next few years.

The Old Beild, more commonly known as Lyveden Manor, was acquired by the National Trust in 2012 so that, in due course, the two properties will be reunited and both open to the public:  http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM66XE_Lyveden_Old_Bield_Near_Oundle_Northamptonshire_UK.

The conceit of the man

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Triangular Lodge, Rushton, Northamptonshire

Triangular Lodge, Rushton, Northamptonshire

Sir Thomas Tresham had a lot of time to kill while in prison for his Catholic faith.  Like many of his generation he was fascinated by what they called “conceits”, intriguing visual or verbal puzzles which concealed meanings, whether for frivolous reasons or for deeply serious purposes.

His Triangular Lodge in the park of Rushton Hall, Northamptonshire, is an astonishing puzzle.  Its practical purpose was as a base for the warrener who looked after the rabbits which provided fresh meat.  Lodges also served as a destination for outings from the main house, and occasionally for “secret house”, when the owner retreated from the main residence while it was spring-cleaned.  It could just as easily serve as an unobtrusive location for the illegal celebration of the Catholic Mass.

That would explain not only its triangular shape, but also the complex inscriptions which cover its walls.

Its plan is an equilateral triangle, each side 33 feet long;  each face has three pinnacled gables;  there are three storeys, each of which has three windows on each of the three walls.  The inscription round the frieze contains 33 letters on each side.  Inside on each floor, the triangular plan is divided by cross-partitions into hexagonal rooms, which of course create further equilateral triangles.

The inscription above the door translates two ways:  Tres testimonium dant can be “There are three who bear record in heaven” [John ch 5, v 7] or “I, Thomas Tresham, bear witness”.  The three inscriptions on each gable are verses from the books of Isaiah, Romans and Habakkuk.  The innermost room has the acronym “SSSDDS” [Sanctus Sanctus Sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth].  The numerical inscriptions, many of which are divisible by three, relate to Biblical dates of the Creation and the Flood, and the ages at death of Jesus and his mother, subtracted by the AD date 1593.

The blogger Scriblerus [http://everything2.com/node/1241850] suspects obsessive-compulsive disorder;  Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, that austere German scholar, took a more serious view:  “…as a testament of faith this building must be viewed with respect”.

Scriblerus comments, “I’ve never known a building so ostentatiously incognito.”

It is a curious building to look at.  Buy the guide-book and seek out the puzzles.  There’s nothing like it anywhere.

The Triangular Lodge is in the care of English Heritage:  see http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/rushton-triangular-lodge/.  Be aware that there are no facilities, though there are a number of pubs and garden centres nearby.  Rushton Hall Hotel http://www.rushtonhall.com/restaurant.asp?id=42&sid=79 is luxurious:  afternoon tea starts at £24.00.

 

Three who bear witness

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Market House, Rothwell, Northamptonshire

Market House, Rothwell, Northamptonshire

Sir Thomas Tresham II (1545-1605) occupied a place at the very top of Elizabethan society.  At the age of fifteen he inherited a huge estate from his grandfather, Sir Thomas Tresham I.  He knew the most powerful courtiers in the kingdom – William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, and Sir Christopher Hatton, the Lord Chancellor, both of whom had seats within a few miles of Tresham’s estate at Rushton, Northamptonshire.  Lady Tresham was a daughter of the Catholic Sir Robert Throckmorton, who withdrew from public life as soon as Queen Elizabeth took the throne.  One of their sons was implicated in the Gunpowder Plot and died (of natural causes) in the Tower of London.

Brought up a Protestant, Tresham appears to have undergone a conversion to Catholicism in 1580.  Despite his wealth and status, his uncompromising allegiance to the Catholic faith for the latter part of his life drained his fortune and often restricted his freedom.  When he had his freedom, he spent freely.  His lasting legacy consists of three buildings he created, with much ingenuity.

The earliest of these, though it wasn’t roofed until the nineteenth century, is the Market House, Rothwell, begun in or shortly after 1578.  Apparently entirely secular, it is cruciform in shape, ostensibly built as a covered market and meeting room to celebrate and carry the heraldic emblems of himself and his neighbours.  Its classical proportions are remarkably correct for a building of its period.  The design of the Market House is credited to William Grumbold, but it seems extremely likely that the decorations were tightly specified by Sir Thomas.

Its Latin inscription records that it was built “to the perpetual honour of my friends” and “as a tribute to [my] sweet fatherland and County of Northampton, but chiefly to this town [my] near neighbour”.

It’s unclear whether building-work was never completed or whether it had at some point been partly dismantled:  Sir Thomas was described as “more forward in beginning than finishing his fabricks”.

Finally completed by the Victorian architect John Alfred Gotch, it continues to serve the community, as Sir Thomas wished, as the council chamber for Rothwell Town Council:  http://www.rothwelltown.co.uk/rothwelltowncoun.php.