Megginch Castle, Perthshire

Startling plot twists and fairytale endings, staple elements of the standard popular novel – but sometimes truth can be stranger than fiction. Strange fiction, even. In the early hours of March 10, 2005, 74-year-old one-time romantic novelist Cherry Drummond, aka the 16th Baroness Strange, summoned two house guests to her bedside to witness a change in her will. The ailing matriarch of Megginch Castle, north of the Firth of Tay, would be abruptly subverting family expectation that all was to be inherited by Adam, the eldest of her six children, now stipulating that the entire estate should go instead to the youngest, daughter Catherine. Lady Strange died the following day.

”The new will has changed everything. It is all very confusing and quite a few people are very upset. Everything about that family is strange. Strange by name, strange by nature.”¹

That there was actually anything of significance beyond the title of baron to be passed on would perhaps have pleasantly surprised Cherry’s equally idiosyncratic father. In a memoir outlining his agricultural philosophy and innovations, John Drummond, 15th Lord Strange, had held out little optimism for the future: ‘I think, probably, the end of my plan will coincide with the end of the Megginch saga. In any case, the male line of this small landowning family comes to an end with me. I have no son.”²

see: Tatler

Slightly unusually, neither estate nor title were automatically entailed upon the eldest child, while the Strange peerage is among a minority which can be passed in the female line. Cherry did in fact inherit Megginch but faced a protracted tussle with one of her two sisters for the barony, their father having apparently lead each to expect that they would accede. Despite financial inducement to favour her sister’s claim, in 1986 the abeyant title was eventually granted to Cherry Drummond, subsequently an assiduous attendee of the House of Lords (surviving the 1991 cull of hereditary peers) for the rest of her days.³

“My Lords, is the Minister aware that when apples are stored in an apple loft or shed, it is essential to lay them out carefully and then to inspect them every now and again? The rotten apples must be taken out and thrown away before they can infect the other apples. Should not the same be done with terrorists?”

“I don’t quite know how to follow the noble Baroness,” would become a familiar refrain in Parliament’s upper chamber, Lady Strange importing a unique brand of folksy wisdom (not to mention a weekly supply of cut flowers from the abundance of her Scottish garden) to their lordships’ House. But while she prized her peerage its direct association with Megginch Castle was young, post-dating that of the Drummond family itself by some 300 years.

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’Although Megginch Castle does not present the appearance a highly defensive site today among its fine, level parks and woodlands, it was once secure indeed, islanded among spreading marshes and pools, as effective as any moat.’⁴ The fertile plain of the present-day Carse of Gowrie, between Dundee and Perth, belies its unpromising estuarine origins when the earliest (probably monastic) structure was erected on a rare elevated spot 50 feet above sea level.

see: Canmore

A branch of the Hay family, earls of Erroll – originators of nearby Errol Park – developed a C15 tower house subsequently incorporated within a significant expansion of 1575 by Robert Hay. Characteristic corbelling supports the watch-room and conical turret of this C16 block. But the Hays would not enjoy Megginch for much longer, financial exigencies obliging its mid-C17 sale to a cadet branch of another noble Scottish clan, the Drummonds, earls of Perth [see previous post: Drummond Castle, Perth].

see: Bing Maps

Having removed from their traditional fiefdom of Lennoch 45 miles west, during the time of purchaser John Drummond’s son and grandson Megginch would be enlarged, becoming an L-shaped house. The family’s sphere of influence also expanded as the grandson, John Drummond, became MP for Perthshire (1727-34) in the interest of James Murray, 2nd Duke of Atholl, 7th Baron Strange (who would later marry Drummond’s daughter, Jean). ‘John sent his children by boat from Dundee to be educated in Holland. They absorbed some Dutch ideas and translated them to Scotland.’ One result was the Beech Walk – one of several tree-lined avenues at Megginch – planted c.1750 by Adam Drummond, 4th laird.²

When his father died in 1752 Adam was in America furthering a military career which had begun – controversially for a Drummond – fighting the Hanoverian cause in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. Upon his return, marriage to a daughter of the 4th duke of Bolton oiled a passage into parliament where Drummond soon put his service experience to commercial use, forming a partnership which gained lucrative contracts to supply victuals to the naval fleet in the Americas. Tacking and trimming with changes of administration, valuable New World land and mineral rights followed but his business reputation would be dented when he turned his hand to banking.

Founded in 1769, Ayr Bank ‘was to provide one of the most dramtatic incidents in the history of European banking’. A private operation founded upon the ‘seemingly limitless credit’ of blue chip Scottish landowners, Ayr Bank ‘was a most obliging source of funds’  for increasingly fanciful property schemes at home and abroad. But when an allied banking house went under the domino effect quickly exposed Ayr’s speculative dealings and it too collapsed in 1772. Facing unlimited liabilities ‘many of the landowning families had to sell up’ yet Adam Drummond appears to have survived relatively unscathed.⁵

Indeed, three years later he would be invited by Thomas Coutts to replace Coutts’ incapacitated brother as partner in his private London bank. The recently-widowed Drummond lived on the bank’s premises on the Strand but before too long Coutts concluded that money management was not the Scotsman’s metier. Requesting his resignation in 1780, Thomas Coutts would later recall his erstwhile partner as ‘a useless incumberance’.⁶

see: Simon Forder

Generally, ‘the fourth laird preferred London life, Megginch being somewhat neglected’ during his tenure.⁷ Dying childless in 1786, his heir was nephew John Drummond who promptly sold off the ancestral Lennoch lands in favour of developing Megginch Castle to which a transverse, bow-ended drawing room wing would be added. ‘Unsubstantiated tradition alleges that this was the work of Robert Adam. The now-reconstituted ceiling was certainly good enough to be by him.’⁸ But as funds again became stretched Drummond now elected to sell Megginch itself, the buyer being his younger and considerably wealthier brother, Robert.

see: Craig Frew

see: Sandy Stevenson

In the grounds of the castle a hexagonal dovecote is topped by a weathervane commemorating the ‘General Elliott’, the vessel which intrepid East Indiaman Robert Drummond had captained to Bombay in then record time. Having invested £29,335. 16s. 4½d. of his trading fortune acquiring the family estate Drummond soon set about adding some visual flourishes.⁷ The dovecote would be surrounded a striking stable range with neat Gothick fenestration; this fashion also informed the north lodge which these days abuts the A91 (see below) and a folly arch at the end of his uncle’s Beech Walk.

see: Google Maps

Paintings by fashionable portraitist George Romney now adorned the castle walls, Drummond paying 25gns upfront for his own at the first sitting. It would take a dozen sittings for the artist to capture a satisfactory likeness of Robert’s mother (‘a large number for a work this plain’) and a remarkable 17 sitttings for a portrait of his sister. ‘It must be supposed that Miss Drummond or her mother, or both, were difficult clients.’⁹

The one member of the family Romney did not encounter was Drummond’s brother, Adam, who became the third sibling to succeed as laird of Megginch when Robert died childless aged 50 in 1815. A year earlier Admiral (as he would later become) Adam Drummond had stepped back from a lively, full-time naval career spanning more than three decades. With his wife, Charlotte Murray, daughter of the 4th duke of Atholl (and 9th baron Strange), he now set about making significant alterations at Megginch.

see: Canmore (annotated)

see: Nichola Dawson

A large armorial tablet records their further development of the bow-ended Georgian south wing (↑) including ‘an off-centre Roman Doric portico [see], removed in 1928′.¹⁰ In the north and east a new L-shaped two-storey wing now wrapped around the C16th block.

Following the admiral’s death in 1849 his eldest son Capt. John Drummond’s tenure as laird lasted forty years but perhaps the most singular legacy of this era was that created by his younger brother, Henry Drummond-Hay. Remembered as ‘a noble specimen of the true field naturalist’, a peripatetic military career enabled Henry to assemble ‘one of the largest ornithological collections in the country’, hundreds of species of European bird life all personally shot, stuffed and mounted, most of which remain in the billiard room at Megginch. (Drummond-Hay himself would retire to Seggieden House, just ten miles down the road, having married its heiress and added her family name.)

see: Carsesus.org

Meanwhile, Henry’s brother and sister-in-law made their mark in the Castle gardens. ‘The outstanding historical value of the designed landscape at Megginch is in its great age and the continuity of gardening by the Drummond family since the C17.’ Arboreally, 1000-year-old yews face competition as king of the trees hereabouts from the oldest Giant Redwoods in Britain (r), cultivated from Californian seeds supplied by a C19th neighbour, pioneering grower and evolutionary theorist Patrick Matthew.

see: GardenVisit.com

‘The top walled garden created c.1575 is still in use, its brick walls harbouring figs and nectarines,’ while the orchard at Megginch is home to a national collection of cider apples and pears. Capt. Drummond’s wife Mary was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria and amongst the quirky topiary ‘is an extraordinary crown-shaped yew (left) planted to commemorate the monarch’s golden jubilee and concealing a delightfully gloomy chamber within’.¹¹

Son Malcolm succeeded in 1889, marrying Geraldine, a daughter of Lord Amherst of Hackney the following year. Their children would enjoy summers at the latter’s country seat, Didlington Hall in Norfolk, in the halcyon years just prior to the discovery of the calamitous embezzlement of that estate by Amherst’s trusted solicitor (see also: Narford Hall, Norfolk). And the prospects were also none too rosy at Megginch when John Drummond eventually came into the estate in 1929.

‘I inherited a bag full of moonshine. I knew, of course, that we were broke. I had found the place slightly more dilapidated every time I came home, but no-one seemed unduly worried. Things went downhill but they went on as if there was no bottom to the hill.‘²

see: Hillandale News

Being ‘by some way the largest farmer in the district’, Drummond committed, in the face of sceptical counsel, to a belief that the Carse of Gowrie held more promise than the socio-economic landscape, introducing forward-thinking farm practices. Despite an upbringing which ‘fitted me to be nothing more than a good sport’, John Drummond had many strings to his bow.² A some-time novelist and restaurateur, his most unlikely estate enterprise was Great Scott Records, one of the earliest record labels outside of London, established in 1933. With a roster of local talent, ‘most of the recordings were made in the great hall at the castle and the manufacturing carried out in a factory in the stable buildings’.

When the 9th duke of Atholl died unmarried in May 1957 his subordinate Strange barony fell into abeyance; John Drummond’s claim to be the 15th Lord Strange would be ratified seven years later. Alas, not long after Megginch gained this added distinction it would be writing a rather less welcome (and only too familiar) chapter in its country house story, ie. The Year of the Ruinous Blaze. Being 1969, when much of the interior of the south wing was lost or damaged. But over time the cupola-lit stair hall and Adamesque ceilings would be reconstituted while many fixtures would be replaced with pieces from other local historic houses.

‘The restoration was a magnificent act of faith by Cherry Drummond and her husband, Humphrey, who had moved in with their large family only a few years before.’⁷ But this episode possibly strained the already marginal economic position at Megginch and by the late 1980s the estate was in a ‘financial mess’. Enter a fairy godfather with a nearby castle of his own.

see: Press&Journal

‘Sir James Cayzer, 5th Bt., had inherited vast wealth derived from the shipping business founded by his great-grandfather and devoted most of his life to entertaining himself and friends in the style of a bygone age.’ Cayzer owned Kinpurnie Castle and his largesse would extend to his friends 20 miles south at Megginch when circumstances obliged the sale of a 330-acre farm. ‘Rather than let the estate be broken up,’ Sir James stepped in, buying the property and promptly gifting it to the Drummonds’ eldest son, Adam…¹²

… today the 17th Baron Strange, and perceived to have been the principal ‘victim’ of his mother’s dramatic change of heart in her last hours. Of his five siblings, the best placed to summon a degree of equanimity in the fallout of the great 2005 will revision was perhaps middle sister Amelie – or, as she was by then more formally known, the Duchesse de Magenta. Rewind twenty years:

‘Dressed in a crinoline gown spangled with gold, leaning against the wall of a ballroom in a vast house, she spotted someone starring at her. Across the room was a tall lean man wearing a daffodil-yellow tailcoat with red velvet collar and cuffs, full white tie and hunting boots. In his hand was a silver-topped malacca cane. Moments later they were chatting and a few moments after that Amelie decided she was talking to the man she would one day marry.’¹³

see: Julliieen@Instagram

Amelie Drummond is today chatelaine of splendiferous Chateau de Sully in the Loire Valley, with its ‘moat, wonderful state rooms and premier cru vineyards’.¹³ Her husband Philippe, 4th Duc de Magenta, died in 2002; ‘since 2012 she has been able to call on her sister Charlotte Drummond to help with the running of the estate.’ And there’s probably no better preparation for managing a castle than being raised in one. Perhaps the pair compare notes with their younger sibling, Catherine, present mistress of Megginch?

see: Irina Tolubenko

Doubtless it’s not all a bed of roses (though the gardens at Megginch do contain over 100 varieties of such, some centuries old) but Handed on would like to imagine that the words of the Drummond sisters’ grandfather, John, may to some extent still pertain:

‘I realised .. that I was brought up in a fairytale and was still living in one.’

[Megginch Castle][Listing]

1. Daily Telegraph 20 Apr 2006.
2. Drummond, J. Inheritance of dreams, 1945.
3. Financial Times 10 June 2006.
4. Tranter, N. Tales and traditions of Scottish castles, 1993.
5. Checkland, S. Scottish banking: A history 1695-1973, 1975.
6. Healy, E. Coutts & Co. 1692-1992, 1992.
7. Montgomery-Massingberd, H. Family seats: No.54, The Field 12 Oct 1985.
8. Lindsay, M. Castles of Scotland, 1986.
9. Kidson, A. George Romney: a complete catalogue of his paintings, 2015.
10. Gifford, J. Buildings of Scotland: Perth and Kinross, 2007.
11. Campbell, K. Policies and pleasaunces: A guide to the gardens of Scotland, 2007.
12. Daily Mail 16 Apr 1988.
13. A Renaissance chateau with a fairytale story, House & Garden Oct 2015.

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Narford Hall, Norfolk

On April 28, 1733, a calamitous blaze took hold on the premises of White’s Chocolate-house – later to become exclusive gentlemen’s club, White’s – in Mayfair, central London. The incident would feature in the sixth of the eight images which comprise ‘A Rake’s Progress‘ (1733-34), William Hogarth’s series of paintings and wildly popular engravings. ‘The Gaming House’ (left) sees Tom Rakewell, the hero of Hogarth’s morality tale, losing all (again). And for one contemporary art lover in particular this scene would have held an acute resonance.

For long-time local resident Sir Andrew Fountaine had stored a significant slice of his prodigious collection of art and antiquities in the upper rooms of White’s in the first months of 1733 ahead of imminent retirement to his country seat, Narford Hall in Norfolk. Among other things, the greatest accumulation of miniatures then in private hands would be lost to Fountaine (and national art heritage) in the fire.

see: Philadelphia Museum of Art

But the renowned connoisseur still remained possessed of plenty including an earlier William Hogarth ‘conversation piece’ of c.1729 featuring Sir Andrew (centre), his sister, niece and the latter’s future husband, Fountaine’s ‘right-hand man in collecting’, Capt. William Price. X-rays and a near-contemporaneous copy of this picture confirm that the satisfied figure of Andrew’s younger brother and then likely heir, Brigg, originally also featured, recumbent in the foreground.¹ ‘An ignorant, worthless scoundrel-rake’ in the estimation of Fountaine’s close friend, Jonathan Swift, this particular rake’s progress would terminate some seven years before the death of his brother, his likeness subsequently painted over.

The doctored Hogarth is now in an American gallery, part of a steady stream of contents sales over the past 135 years that has seen the collections which gave this place renown significantly denuded and Narford Hall beat a C20th retreat into mildly notorious obscurity. “The most beautiful room in England” (in the view of one who has seen more such places than most) remains largely intact, however. Still the private home of the Fountaine family, ‘barely disturbed archives’ preserve the fascination of perhaps the least documented Grade I house in the land.²

see: Google Maps

Displaying quite differently in each of its principal aspects, Narford Hall’s distinct irregularity is the product of four main phases of evolution across 150 years from the turn of the 18th century.

see: Evelyn Simak

But while the house is foremost associated with the lauded discernment of Sir Andrew Fountaine (1676-1753), Narford’s ‘beautiful 7-bay south front, of carstone with a stone-faced centre’ was in fact created for his namesake father.³ Nor was Narford the first new country house fashioned for Andrew Fountaine (1), the ambiguous manner by which he acquired the means having its roots in his remarkable relationship with a scion of the largest landowning family in the county.

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see: Salle Farms

As the third son of Norfolk barrister Brigg Fountaine, young Andrew (b. 1634) was naturally at the back of the queue for the property which had been accrued by this family in the parish of Salle since the mid-14th century. (This would in due course descend to the great-granddaughter of his brother, James, whose husband, Edward Hase, built Salle Park, left, in 1761.)

At the age of 18 Fountaine was dispatched in 1655 to study for the bar at the Inner Temple where he soon formed a bond with fellow Norfolk native John Coke, two years his senior. That same year Coke suddenly became heir to his family’s considerable estate at Holkham (and elsewhere) following the death of his older brother. When he then came of age Coke unexpectedly refused to sign up to the conventional resettlement of the family estate (which would have given him life tenancy but not outright ownership), causing a lasting rift with his father.

In a further act of rebellion Coke, with Andrew Fountaine, now decided to quit the Inner Temple without passing the bar, the pair instead setting out for France and remaining abroad for almost three years. Fountaine would later maintain ‘that it was ‘at John Coke’s entreaty’ that he neglected his studies to travel but Coke family lawyers in the future had little doubt that self-interest came into play’. On their return in 1660 Coke opted to reside with the Fountaine family in Salle; his father died the following year. John Coke now became ‘the absolute owner of the Holkham estate and Andrew Fountaine the chief manager of his concerns’.⁴

Over the next few years ‘Coke entered into a series of transactions which substantially enriched Andrew Fountaine’ including the grant of several lucrative long-term leases at very favourable terms on various Coke estate properties. ‘The most plausible explanation is that Coke did in fact intend to make large money gifts, of £20,000 or thereabouts, to Fountaine [over time] out of income but gave them as legal interests intended as securities to protect Andrew Fountaine, after Coke’s death, from the claims of Coke’s heirs’.⁵

And, sure enough, a queue of eager litigants quickly formed after John Coke died unmarried in August, 1671, aged 35. Broadly, they would argue that Fountaine had exploited the loose rein afforded to him as steward to fill his own boots, conducting intended estate investments instead in a personal capacity, the most conspicuous example being Fountaine’s acquisition of the Brookmans estate in Hertfordshire in 1666. Both sides would be mired in Chancery for the next two decades.

In the meantime, Andrew Fountaine would lose his first wife in 1671 but gain another – Sarah, daughter of Sir Thomas Chicheley of Wimpole Hall – a year on.

see: North Mymms History

‘A Hertfordshire squire of unattractive habits and personality, addicted to drink and always in money difficulties, Fountaine led his wife a most wretched existence.’ Sarah nevertheless provided her husband with a son, Andrew, in 1676 and, via some serious family string-pulling, a very handy seat in parliament three years later. By 1680 the ship had seemingly steadied sufficiently to allow Fountaine to develop a new residence at Brookmans (r).

Final settlement with the Coke estate was reached in 1694, all leases and income to be surrendered by Andrew Fountaine in exchange for £10,000. ‘This sum must have helped his purchase, only a year later, of Narford, which is still the home of the Fountaines. Thus one family prospered as a result of the legal carelessness of another.’⁴ Brookmans was disposed of in the spring of 1702 to fund a new project:

“1702 Monday 29th June I laid the first stone of my new house at Narford.”²

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Though a star classical scholar at Christ Church, Oxford, under the influence of its polymath dean Henry Aldrich – ‘one of the forerunners of the Palladian movement’ – there is no evidence (as yet) that the young Andrew Fountaine (2) took a direct hand in the shaping of his father’s new house.⁶

Henry Bell of King’s Lynn has been suggested and Narford’s long since removed lantern as shown in Edmund Prideaux’s west front view c.1725 (left) echoes that of Bell’s Sessions House in Northampton (r).

In fact, in that summer of 1702 the recently knighted Fountaine, Jnr. was in Italy, a diplomatic mission to the elector of Hanover (later King George I) having turned into a three-year Grand Tour ‘of unusual intellectual intensity’.⁷

And while his precocious erudition impressed all, other qualities found favour with the fairer sex at court, reducing distinguished German mathematician/philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz to undisguised fan mail. “Your wit, your good looks, or rather your beauty, remains engraved in their imagination, and makes you as much noise at Court as your learning does.”⁸ Fountaine’s swoonsome aspect was captured in a drawing from life by Roman master Carlo Maratta preserved at Narford.

The declining health of his father obliged a domestic focus upon Sir Andrew’s return but in the next three decades he would largely favour the stimulating swirl of city life over Norfolk. Andrew Fountaine, Snr. died in 1706; four years later his 34-year-old heir would undergo a near-death experience at his London townhouse witnessed by good friend Jonathan Swift. Fountaine pulled through no thanks to his hovering relations according to the celebrated scribe:

“Sir Andrew’s mother and sister are come above a hundred miles to see him before he died. I knew the mother; she is the greatest Overdo upon earth; and the sister, they say, is worse; the poor man will relapse again among them. Here was the scoundrel brother always crying in the other room till Sir Andrew was in danger; and the dog was to have all his estate if he died.“

see: Art UK

Long since returned to rude health, by 1714 Fountaine was venturing out on Grand Tour II with his now regular companion, the obscure Wiliam Price, and friends. A portrait depicting the group (Sir AF left, leaning) at ease within the octagonal Tribuna gallery of the Ufizzi in Florence was among his many souvenirs. ‘Sir Andrew doesn’t seem to have made a record of his purchases abroad and his tours informed his later buying. An inventory of 1753 [by Price] lists a total of 3,327 prints in [just] one eleven-drawer cabinet in the Library Closet, one of the smallest rooms in Narford Hall.’⁸

see: Evelyn Simak @ geograph

Brimming with inspiration and acquisitions upon his return in 1717 Fountaine would soon embark on the first of two major phases of development at his Norfolk estate. A four-bay wing extending north housed a new Library, the room remaining ‘an outstanding example of an early-C18 interior, its appearance comparatively little changed’.²

This is not, however, the aforementioned ‘most beautiful room in England’, that epithet having been applied rather to Fountaine’s central Saloon (formerly the entrance hall). Still dominated by ten huge canvas panels by the Italian artist who was in pole position to decorate the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral until politics intervened, ‘the saloon at Narford is the sublime monument to the genius of Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini‘.⁹

see: Vitruvius britannicus

Sir Andrew surrounded the Hall with highly formal gardens of enclosed spaces and geometric avenues terminated by classical eye-catchers. ‘Fountaine was uniquely mingling the latest Palladian architectural styles from Hanover with the kind of structural atmospheric content gleaned from Dutch gardens. For an enthusiastic supporter of the Protestant succession, Narford was the ultimate politically correct garden.’⁷ A long canal extended north from the house, passing the church of St. Mary’s which still stands isolated NW of the Hall. Now redundant, ‘it is a woefully neglected place’…

see: John Salmon @ geograph

… one of the few remaining fixtures being Sir Andrew Fountaine’s memorial (left). “I am now building a Portico, and making a large plantation of oaks, as if I was to live 50 years longer,” he wrote in 1750, overestimating his longevity by some 47 years.⁸ The portico, a late indulgence, would not endure but much remains from a second significant phase of development at Narford after Fountaine’s retreat from the capital in 1733. New bays were introduced…

… north and west while, more significantly and seemingly also to his own design, a major new suite of rooms would now extend the house in the east.

see: Fairfax & Favor

see: Fairfax & Favor

‘The c.1735 work includes a four-bay block, now the Music Room, with a handsome Kentian fireplace [while] beyond, a typical singerie ceiling of exotic animals by Andien de Clermont crowns the Queen Anne Room.’²

Perhaps inspired by his time at the Ufizzi, Fountaine created an octagonal closet, top-lit and fronted by a glass door, specifically to display choice items from his then incomparable collection of maiolica and Limoges enamel ware. (Coins and medals were another enduring antiquarian obsession, numismatic expertise which doubtless contributed to his appointment as Warden of the Royal Mint in 1727. In contrast to his proactive predecessor in this role, Sir Isaac Newton, Fountaine evidently regarded the position as something of a sinecure, his years in office characterised by ‘indolence and inaccessibility’.¹⁰)

see: Arts Council

Despite his noted appeal to the opposite sex, Sir Andrew would never marry and following his death in 1753 Narford descended through his niece Elizabeth and her husband William Price to their son, Brigg Price Fountaine. Though he would be squire for over half-a-century Brigg’s tenure saw little significant alteration to the Hall and its contents. But one new adornment would be a family portrait of c.1776, a work which has recently been acquired for the nation via the Cultural Gifts Scheme (whereby art works are accepted in lieu of tax). The ‘English School’ painting had been sold at auction for £36,000 in 1987 by Narford’s then owner, Andrew Fountaine (5), to pay for dry rot treatment at the Hall. Reacting to the assertion by its new owner months later that the picture was in fact a work by the leading American artist of the C18th, John Singleton Copley, and actually worth £2 million, Fountaine was philosophical: “I am very sceptical [but] if it is, I wish the chap all the luck in the world.”¹¹

see: Fairfax & Favor

Brigg’s heir, Andrew (3), would enjoy Narford for just a decade, succeeded in 1835 by his son, Andrew (4), who soon initiated major changes, the estate coffers helpfully swollen by a four-day sale of surplus contents held in the Hall grounds in 1838. The rigid formality of the latter had long-since given way to open parkland. Surveying the scene in 1841 one visitor described ‘a place of great beauty though in miserable order at present’, a possible reference to the ongoing creation of the 60-acre lake behind the house.

see: Evelyn Simak

‘Before leaving this seat, it may be stated that we could discover no entrance to it at all worthy of the interior,’ the same author remarked, ‘the gateway [being] similar to that of a farmyard.’ Surprisingly, perhaps, the expansive plans of Andrew Fountaine (1801-74) would not remedy that situation as the house itself now underwent a programme of major aggrandisement.

In the 1850s, overseen by Robert Ketton of Norwich, the south front gained a dominating domed entrance tower ‘in the angle between the main house and the library wing of c.1718’² while the single-storey range of 1735 was overwhelmed by ‘High Victorian grandeur’.¹² The east face of this burly new block featured a canted bay book-ended by stout pavilions. Unlike so many cumbrous country house appendages of the period, all of the C19 work at Narford remains.

see: Historic England

Andrew Fountaine may have been impelled to enlarge his house having also inherited his esteemed ancestor’s weakness for C16 Continental china. ‘A wealthy man who combined fastidious taste with great courage as a buyer, who never scrupled to give immense prices for exceptional items,’ Fountaine was the last of Narford’s great collectors. His immediate heirs, daughter Mary and her husband (and first cousin), Algernon Fountaine, ‘preferred their equivalent in money’¹³…

see: V&A

… kicking off a sequence of major dispersals with a ‘spectacle almost without rival’ in June 1884. Many of the 400+ pieces of “useless crockery” in the four-day Christie’s sale were acquired for the nation, displayed today at the British Museum and the V&A. A month later dozens of paintings and over 800 prints would be knocked down. One decade on, Rubens’ ‘Return of the Prodigal Son‘ was among more Old Masters sold, followed in 1902 by another four-day sale of almost one thousand folios and manuscripts from Narford’s library.

(Alas, a widowed Mary Fountaine would later be forced to sue the senior trustee of the Narford estate, Lord Amherst, when it was discovered that a large slice of the proceeds from these sales had been deposited with, and promptly embezzled by, his trusted solicitor.)

Mary Fountaine died two weeks before the 1918 wedding of her son, Charles, a career naval officer whose re-emergence from retirement to oversee North Atlantic convoys in WWII hastened his own demise in 1946. There followed an eccentric half-century at Narford dominated by the forceful but mutually antagonistic personalities of his widow and their son and heir.

“There is an iceberg between mother and me, there has always been a rift between us,” Andrew Fountaine (5) revealed to the Daily Mail in 1961. The newspaper had ventured to Narford to witness ‘the first international rally of the British National Party’, of which Fountaine was then president. The squire and his assembled acolytes were on manoeuvres in readiness to repel what they saw as the looming threat posed by non-white immigration into Britain. “Mother thinks it is outrageous. She owns the Hall but I own the grounds around it, so there is nothing she can do.”¹⁴

see: MACE

Exiled from the Conservative Party prior to the 1950 general election (the candidate for Chorley’s unapologetically racist views proving strong meat), Fountaine, as an independent, fell just 361 votes short of becoming the second of his line to be returned to Westminster. He would remain a prime mover in the BNP/National Front cause throughout the 1960s and ’70s – ‘the movement’s moneybags to a large degree’¹⁵ – losing more elections along the way. But in the 1980s ‘Fountaine largely abandoned his efforts to save the British race and concentrated on planting trees on his [5,000-acre] estate’.¹⁶

Meanwhile, his mother’s reign as the eccentric chatelaine of ‘the most inaccessible house in England’ having ended in 1968, more of Narford’s contents would gain new visibility via a steady trickle of further sales under Andrew Fountaine. Some key items have at least remained in the same county, Norwich Castle Museum acquiring Roubiliac’s ‘highly important’ terracotta bust of Sir Andrew (c.1747) in 1992, and the Grand Tour group portrait featured above.⁸

see: Fairfax & Favor

see: Art UK

Sartorial scrutiny of that painting (left) reveals Sir Andrew Fountaine’s apparent fondness for distinctive footwear, the detail of his shoes being notably superior to that of his associates. While he would find much that has changed here since his time the renowned C18th aesthete might perhaps approve of the coveted creations peddled today by the Fountaines’ 21st-century generation from the converted stable block on the Narford Hall estate…

*

1. Einberg, E. William Hogarth: A complete catalogue of the paintings, 2016.
2. Parissien,S., Harris, J., Colvin, H. Narford Hall, Norfolk, Georgian Group Journal, 1987.
3. Kenworthy-Browne, J. et al. Burke’s & Savills Guide to Country Houses: East Anglia, 1981.
4. Hiskey, C. Holkham: The social, architectural and landscape history of a great house, 2016.
5. Macnair, M. (Mitchell, C., Mitchell, P., Eds.) Landmark cases in equity, 2012.
6. Colvin, H. A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840, 3rd Edition, 1997.
7. Richardson, T. The Arcadian friends: Inventing the English landscape garden, 2007.
8. Moore, A. Norfolk and the grand tour, 1985.
9. Knox, G. Antonio Pellegrini, 1995.
10. Challis, C.E. (Ed.) A new history of the Royal Mint, 1992.
11. The Times 1 Sept 1987.
12. Pevsner, N., Wilson, B. Buildings of England: Norfolk 2: North West and South, 1999.
13. The Times 12 June 1884.
14. Daily Mail 22 May 1961.
15. The Times 22 Sept 1997.
16. Daily Telegraph 25 Sept 1997.

See also:
Harris, J. The Prideaux collection of topographical drawings, Architectural History, Vol.7, 1964.
Ford, B. Sir Andrew Fountaine: virtuoso, Apollo, pp.352-8, 1985.

 

Penny Bridge Hall, Cumbria

Oxford academic, clergyman and man of letters Henry Kett was clearly not one of life’s fence-sitters:

’This house is a disgrace to the noble scenery around it. Nature has done much for this charming place, but the builder caught no enthusiasm from the scene; for never was there an edifice reared in a more contemptible style.’¹

see: Conishead Priory

In August 1798 The Reverend Kett had undertaken ‘A tour of the Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland’, his observations and reflections being subsequently published ten years on. The residence which had so offended Kett’s sensibilities was Conishead Priory, ‘the seat of Mr. Bradyll, of white rough cast in front, with gothic battlements, and an arcade bordered with yellow stucco’.¹

Being at that time a rather muddled mid-C18 renovation, had the author lived to encounter the full-on gothick fantasy which Conishead Priory would become just three decades later he may quite possibly have expired from apoplexy on the spot.

see: bonjourbobs / Instagram

’There is no house in England like Conishead,’ suggested Simon Jenkins in his personal selection of England’s Thousand Best Houses and ‘the extravagant gothic mansion, now a Buddhist retreat,’ is duly a grade II* listed building in recognition of its unique character. Conishead stands just east of Ulverston on the Furness peninsula, at the head of the Morecambe Bay estuary. Travelling some four miles north to the foot of the tributary river Crake valley, Henry Kett found a vista altogether more to his liking.

’Near Penny Bridge stands the house of [Mr. Machell], plain, commodious, and elegant, built of white stone, and roofed with sea-green slate. This agrees with the character of the scenery, and is exactly what Mr. Bradyll’s ought to have been.’

see: Croquet in the North West

While the adjectives he deployed would still appear apposite, the face of Penny Bridge Hall today, just as at Conishead, is apparently not that which presented itself before Henry Kett. And he had at least noticed a house which has passed only by inheritance and marriage (never sold) but whose very plainness has rendered it largely inconspicuous in the architectural annals.

*

That Penny Bridge Hall should have been overlooked in Nikolaus Pevsner’s original Buildings of England series is not particularly unusual; omissions were inevitable given the logistics (and subjectivity) of his heroic shoestring odyssey completed over three decades from 1945. However, anyone searching the ‘comprehensive’ 800-page revised Cumbria edition of 2010 for any reference to this enduring family seat will also be disappointed.

The entry for buildings of note within the parish of Egton-cum-Newland does make brief mention of two houses, including Summer Hill (‘a minor Late Georgian villa’) and this ‘handsome residence’ was also amongst those charmingly illustrated in a two-volume survey (r) of ‘The History and Antiquities of Furness’, published in 1880. Wherein, once again, Penny Bridge Hall is nowhere to be found.²

Summer Hill is a grade II listed building, the national register of structures of architectural or historic interest having been established in the early post-war years just as Pevsner was likewise sallying forth notebook in hand. And, as with his Guides, the register would later be subject to wholesale revision: ‘The resurvey of the 1980s largely made good the defects of the original listing process in the 1950s which had been erratic and incomplete.’³ Throughout this whole process the Hall at Penny Bridge was once more deemed to be unworthy of remark…

c.1906 (see source)

… unlike the short late-C16 river crossing nearby, Grade II, widened two centuries later and from which both house and hamlet derive their name. ‘Some time after 1587, a bridge was built at the ford over the Crake by James Penny who had moved [with his father, Richard] to Crakeford in 1572. The bridge would be a very real help to travellers using the packhorse route between Ulverston and Kendal.’⁴

see: Google Maps

And, incongruous as it may seem today, the strategic significance of this structure – ‘the most southerly bridge over the Crake prior to 1820’⁵ – would play its part in turning this scenic spot at the foothills of the Lake District into a hive of heavy industry some 150 years later.

‘When the Crown monopolies [in mineral rights] ceased in 1650, the people who lived by the estuaries of the rivers Crake and Leven were well placed to take advantage. They had a plentiful supply of water, wood (for charcoal) and iron ore for smelting. They had a packhorse route for all northbound traffic and facilities to load and unload ships in these tidal estuaries which gave ready access to markets beyond Furness.’⁴

Four generations on from his bridge-building ancestor, William Penny (1708-1788) sought to leverage his particular advantage. Hitherto principally a supplier of wood from his estate to the disparate local iron masters, in 1748, spurred by a belief that the latter had been actively conspiring to depress the price of charcoal, Penny led a consortium of timber suppliers who committed exclusively to supply a new blast furnace to be built on his land.

see: BBC/LDNPA

’The Penny Bridge furnace [and a shipbuilding quay just south of the bridge] only had a short life – it worked at some profit but came to a standstill in 1800’⁴ – yet the initiative would have a lasting effect upon the destiny of the Penny family estate. For over on the river Leven, four miles to the east, James Machell, by 1748 sole owner of the Backbarrow ironworks (right) established by his grandfather, saw the advantage of amalgamation with the Crake valley upstart, successfully negotiating a merger of the two enterprises.

In 1767 came another union, the marriage of James Machell’s eldest son, John, and Isabel, the youngest daughter of William Penny.

see: Visit Cumbria

Penny’s only son had died in infancy leaving Isabel and her two sisters. In time John Machell bought out the interest of his wife’s co-heirs and eventually succeeded his father-in-law as the squire of Penny Bridge Hall. Prior to their relocation the family had lived at Hollow Oak, the Machell residence at nearby Haverthwaite, on the river Leven, which had been enlarged to accommodate their six children (and today serves as a nursing home).

The family would all be interred at St. Mary’s, the church (↑) endowed by William Penny and completed by his son-in-law. But precisely who was responsible for the development of Penny Bridge Hall itself as it stands today remains unclear.

see: angler @ uglyhedgehog

‘A dignified early-C19 Classical house in a pretty park,’ notes one significant regional survey, ‘the main five-bay front has a Victorian iron and glass verandah along the ground floor.’⁶ John Machell died in 1820, his heir, James Penny Machell, in 1854.

see: Google Maps

see: Google Maps

Some indication of the character of the earlier stone house is evident at its western extremity (left), the opposite end merging into the first of two later ranges, which also features a full-height bay facing north (visible from across the river).

‘The grounds, dappled and shining with rhododendron blossom in early summer, give on to pleasant pasture fields, and look across to steeply sloping deciduous woodland beyond the Crake.’⁷

*

James Penny Machell’s son, John – who ‘lived a very retired life and beyond the immediate vicinity of his residence was personally little known’⁸ – passed the Penny Bridge/Hollow Oak estate to his only daughter in 1884. ‘An extensive and most considerate landowner,’⁹ Justina Madeline Machell died unmarried in 1900 aged 61 leaving all to kinsman Major Edward Machell of nearby Newby Bridge (descended from a younger son of her 3x great-grandfather). In memory of his benefactor, and his eldest son who had perished in the Boer War, Maj. Machell commissioned the carved oak reredos and altar in St. Mary’s Church (below).

see: Carlisle Diocese

His younger son, Ulf, not being of age at the time of Edward’s death in 1920, Penny Bridge Hall became available to let for a short time: ‘Furnished, charming old family residence standing in seven acres of fine timbered gardens, with about 2,500 acres of good, mixed shooting. Accommodation comprises entrance hall, three large reception rooms, ten principal bedrooms, six servant bedrooms. Vinery, conservatory, etc.’¹⁰

see: Airbnb

The latter details can be seen today associated with the promotion of a self-contained apartment at Penny Bridge Hall as an agreeable base for a break in the Lake District. “The flat is part of a rather grand old house set in large, well kept grounds,” says one of many satisfied customers of the present owners (to whom the estate was bequeathed by Lorna, widow of Penny Bridge’s most enduring squire Ulf Machell, in 1998).

see: Archie Workman

Adapting a property for such purposes will of course be potentially less involved where the ‘grand old house’ is not a listed building. National Parks designation brings with it an additional layer of planning bureaucracy but here too Penny Bridge Hall – standing sentinel-like above the Crake as it nears the end of its course from Coniston Water – is favoured.

For close scrutiny of the map reveals that the demarcation of the southern boundary of the Lake District National Park actually lies twenty paces away, on the opposite side of old Penny Bridge…

[Estate archives 1200-1905]

1. Mavor, W. The British tourist’s pocket companion, Vol.5, 1809.
2. Richardson, J. The history and antiquities of Furness, 1880.
3. Sayer, M. The disintegration of a heritage: Country houses and their collections 1979-1992, 1993.
4. Rigg, AN. The industrial heritage of the parish of Egton-with-Newland, 1966.
5. Holme, B. The ramblings of a longshore loafer, 2012.
6. Robinson, JM. A guide to the country houses of the North-West, 1991.
7. Dawson, J. Valley of prospects, Country Life, 20 Nov 1980.
8. West Cumberland Times, 25 Oct 1884.
9. Preston Herald, 22 May 1886.
10. Country Life, 18 Mar 1922.

See also:
:: Bowden, M., Ed., Furness iron, English Heritage, 2000.
:: “Din’d with Mr. Penny and eat six eggs” – The Diary of Edward Jackson, Vicar of Colton, for the year 1775.

 

Freeford Manor, Staffordshire

Given its once-vaunted reputation as the newspaper of record, it’s surprising to consider just how many landmark moments in history never in fact appeared on the front page of The Times. Stunning victories at Trafalgar and Waterloo, the sinking of the Titantic, the outbreak of World War One, all relegated to the inside pages alongside the Court Circular and the racing results as, for a century and a half until the summer of 1966, page one of the august organ was given over to content created by its readers in the form of classified notices. For a relatively modest outlay the column inches beneath that famous masthead were yours.

‘In commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the 1st April, 1549, when John Dyott of Stychbroke, 1519-1580, Thrice Bailiff of Lichfield, made the manor of Freeford his dwelling.’

A discreet gesture quietly satisfying the pride of Richard Dyott (d.1965), squire of Freeford for over sixty years and the ninth of that name to preside over this place with its never sold, never opened house just to the south of Lichfield. And just as The Times gave over it primary space to parochial concerns, similarly idiosyncratic editorial judgments are evident in the prodigious journal of Dyott’s forebear, Gen. William Dyott (d.1847), which, despite his decades of military service, neglected reference to such events as Nelson’s ultimate victory, and the charge of the Light Brigade. One episode the General could not overlook, however, was the dramatic demise of his marriage – and neither, alas, would the newspaper of record.

see: Clive Reeves @ YouTube

When he died aged 86 in 1847, William Dyott’s coffin was processed from Freeford at night time through the thronged streets of Lichfield to the Dyott crypt at St. Mary’s Church. This family tradition of nocturnal burials has since ceased but a local cavalcade in the opposite direction continues to this day. The Sheriff’s Ride, which includes a pit stop on the Freeford estate (right), originated with Queen Mary’s Lichfield City Charter four-and-a-half centuries ago and has been held without interruption ever since. Much like Freeford Manor itself.

* 

‘Henry Ludlow made no recorded contribution to the work of the 1st Parliament of King James I other than to interrupt a messenger from the Lords by breaking wind loudly in 1607.’ This flatulent interjection into the affairs of state would be quickly celebrated in ‘one of the most popular comic political poems of the early Stuart era’, a work in which fellow MP Anthony Dyott, son of the aforementioned John of Stychbroke, had the dubious honour of inclusion. The first of four Dyotts who would represent Lichfield at Westminster, by 1616 Anthony had consolidated his family’s ownership of the manor of Freeford and also overseen significant expansion east into neighbouring Whittington [map].

British Museum

Despite being combatants on the losing side it could be argued that the Dyotts had a good Civil War. Anthony’s deaf mute grandson, John ‘Dumb’ Dyott, is believed to have taken out ‘fanatical’ Cromwellian general Lord Brooke with a legendary sniper shot from the tower of Lichfield Cathedral. Yet the heir to Freeford, John’s elder brother, Richard (the first, right), would ultimately prove able to salvage his birthright…

… which would pass in 1719 to his great-grandson Richard (4) who, in the first decade of his half-century tenure, began building the core of the present house. ‘Although the structure has gone through seven stages of building, Freeford still retains its essentially Georgian character.’¹

see: Victoria & Albert Museum

The varying correctness of the west front’s tripartite roofline gives an indication of the evolution of Freeford Manor (long-known as Freeford Hall). The three-bay centre section (pre-porch), accented by its tentative pediment and lunette window, represents the Dyotts’ original modestly-proportioned new house.

see: BSL Zone

see: BSL Zone

‘A drawing room (later the library) was added on the south in the mid-C18, and by the late-C18 another large room had been added on the east’ while a two-storey service wing now extended north. ‘The house was approached on the north through a courtyard, whose entrance was flanked by a pair of square buildings.’ (↓)²

see: Britain From Above

Richard Dyott’s daughter would marry into the neighbouring Astley family of Whittington Old Hall, a tie which would be later reinforced by the marriage of his grandson, Richard (6), to the latter’s first cousin, heiress Mary Astley, in 1783. This union had proved childless at the time of Richard’s sudden death at 58 in 1813, a year which would turn out to be something of an annus horribilis for his brother and heir, William (at this point resident at Whittington).

“I met with difficulty in settling with Mrs. Dyott,” William recorded in the diary he would maintain for almost the entirety of his long adult life. “I felt a little hurt that the family house [as pictured, 1797] was left to her for life. I should have been happy to have passed the remainder of my life at Freeford.”³

William would have to wait another thirteen years to get his wish. Somewhat more pressingly he was now also meeting with difficulty in respect of another Mrs. Dyott – his own wife, Eleanor.

*

“Having been at home leading an idle life for the space of three years,” in early 1781 William, the 19-year-old younger son of Richard Dyott (5), would set out for London seeking an army commission. So began a peripatetic military career which was to span almost half a century, the first years of which were mostly taken up with extended tours of duty in Ireland…and getting very, very drunk. ‘There are frequent references to parties, dances, dinners and shooting expeditions, his duties nothing more than attending reviews or the flogging of deserters.’³

There would also be diversions aplenty during a six-year posting to North America, notably a roisterous month in Halifax, Nova Scotia when young Lt. Dyott became the boon companion of fellow officer-about-town, Prince William (later King William IV). “The Prince would go into any house where he saw a pretty girl, and was perfectly acquainted with every house of a certain description.” This royal bond resulted in Dyott being appointed a personal aide-de-camp to the monarch in 1801, the year in which a posting to Egypt stymied William’s romantic interest in Maria Gresley of Drakelow Hall, fifteen miles north-east of Freeford.

It was during another tour of duty in Ireland in 1805 that Dyott’s domestic destiny took a fateful turn. “I had frequent opportunities of seeing the Thompsons, and felt a very considerable increase of inclination for Miss Eleanor,” confessed William to himself in December 1805. A whirlwind romance quickly culminated in marriage the following month. “No person was present just her own family,” they being the Thompsons of Greenmount, overlooking Lough Neagh, and sizeable estates in Co. Antrim (significant interest in which would descend to the Dyotts some eighty years later).

After a quarter of a century of overseas service Lt.-Gen. Dyott was now back home in Staffordshire, busy quelling Midlands Luddites and producing a daughter and two sons in short order. In 1813 incipient health concerns took Eleanor to London and the novel therapy of Turkish vapour baths located in Downing Street (which was then “a nest of filth and thieves” in the eyes of her husband). Further deterioration in Eleanor’s condition led the family to take a house near the hot springs of Clifton in Bristol, William visiting as and when.

Relations became strained and in March 1814 Dyott received a bombshell letter from his wife “expressive of her wish to separate from me. I was amazed and hurt in the extreme”. Matters had not been helped by the close attendance of Eleanor’s favoured physician, one Charles Dunne, whose manner, William suspected, had encroached beyond the bedside and against whom he successfully prosecuted a civil action for ‘criminal conversation’ with his wife the following year.

Eleanor counter-claimed adultery and cruelty ahead of her husband’s divorce petition in Parliament “to secure my poor children’s interest in their unfortunate mother’s property”. (The latter was not inconsiderable and included a quarter share in over 1,200 acres of plantations and several hundred slaves on St. Croix in the Virgin Islands which would provide a significant source of income, not to mention pineapple trees for friends, until it was sold in 1905.)

The sordid details of Dyott vs. Dyott as revealed over several days of proceedings in the House of Lords filled column inches in The Times (r) in the summer of 1816.

Despite an admission to his brother-in-law that he himself had taken ‘improper liberties’ with a young maid-servant, William got his divorce, and he and their children were never to see Eleanor again. She did not disappear entirely, however. In 1821 the former Mrs. Dyott had printed at her own expense a brief ‘memoir‘ claiming to expose the ‘odious attempts to ruin her character’, and to deprive her of her property. ‘I prefer freedom in an humble cottage,’ she insisted, ‘rather than be the victim of tyranny under the appearance of splendid magnificence.’

see: Historic England

Grade II* Hanch Hall, three miles NW of Lichfield, to where newly-divorced tenant William and his children relocated in 1817, initially belied the appearance of splendid magnificence, requiring “much exertion to make [it] comfortable, a dirty farmer having occupied it for the last two years”. But with the death of his sister-in-law in 1826 the family seat at Freeford Hall was at last his, and local architect Joseph Potter was soon engaged to make alterations.

source: The Field¹

‘The old diehard put on a couple of bedrooms above the drawing room in 1828 and his son, Lt-Col. ‘Dick’ Dyott MP, added the dining room and service wing in 1849.’¹ The latter would also introduce the two-storey, part-rusticated porch before he died childless in 1891, at which point Freeford passed in the female line to his first cousin Richard Burnaby on condition he adopted the family name. The subsequent tenure of this Richard Dyott’s grandson, Richard (9), was the longest of any at Freeford and included a major upgrade of the domestic offices, which ‘were hopelessly out-of-date from every point of view’ (work which still preserved Freeford’s distinctive rectangular courtyard plan).⁴

*

see: Britain From Above

The process of modernisation was not something which had ever sat easily with Freeford’s diarist Gen. William Dyott. A Tory squire of the old school, Dyott had been trenchantly opposed to most of the progressive reform initiatives of his day, including slave emancipation, workers’ rights and the ‘education of the lower classes [which] I am satisfied has in no wise tended to benefit society’. And these reactionary instincts engendered an initially hostile view of the advent of the railway, which Dyott feared would have negative implications for landowners and “render highways, horses and canals useless”. But he gradually became a convert and regular passenger, having conceded that “if it proved to be of general utility to the country, individual interest must, as it ever has, succumb to the welfare of the state”.

see: BSL Zone

This is a perspective the Dyotts of Freeford, along with a great many others, have found some difficulty reconciling in recent times as they grapple with the reality of finding themselves on the preferred route for High Speed 2. This highly controverial billion-pound project for a faster cross-country rail service is set to slice through the 750-acre Freeford estate in the south and east, with ‘significant loss of land and/or severance’. Preparatory excavations got under way in Whittington this April ahead of the scheduled start of construction next year.

see: Parliament TV

Two hundred years ago William Dyott would have cause to lament “many wretched journeys to town” in the course of pursuing his divorce bill through Parliament. Perhaps empathising, in this respect at least, with their Regency ancestor as they now beat a similar path, January 2016 saw representations apropos HS2 made at Westminster by Freeford’s present generation as they looked to safeguard the inheritance of the next…

[Freeford Manor listing][Archives]

see: Britain From Above

1. Montgomery-Massingberd, H. The Dyotts of proud tradition, The Field 20 Sept 1986.
2. A History of the County of Stafford: Volume 14, Lichfield, Victoria County History, 1990.
3. Dyott’s Diary, 1781-1845: A selection from the journal of William Dyott Vol.1 | Vol.2, 1907.
4. Lichfield Mercury, 2 July 1914.

Drummond Castle, Perthshire

It was always going to be something of a gamble: crossing the Mediterranean from Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera to the island of Corsica, a trip of some 115 miles, in an open 25-foot motorboat with no radio or compass. But to those who knew him back in the summer of 1963 such an impulsive, risky undertaking was entirely in keeping with the character of Lord Timothy Willoughby de Eresby, the 27-year-old heir to the earldom of Ancaster and its princely domains.

see: TorremolinosChic

Five years earlier Willoughby had been among a bevy of society figures arraigned in the dock at Marylebone Magistrates Court, a then illegal high stakes gaming session organised by would-be casino owner John Aspinall and his mother Lady Osborne at her Hyde Park home having been rumbled by police. ‘Show-stoppingly good-looking, totally unprincipled,’¹ the debonair, complex Willoughby was part of a fast-living London scene whose cast ranged from aristocrats and beacons of bohemia (including ‘lunatic punters’ Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud²) to the criminal underworld of the Kray twins.

‘An incredibly rich wastrel who loved a bit of slumming,’² the compelling character of pioneering parliamentarian Nancy Astor’s young grandson had already inspired ‘a landmark of art history’ and was now looking to make his own distinctive mark on London’s clubland. With its fur-lined walls and prominently positioned tank of piranhas, ‘Wips was a private members bar off Leicester Square [whose] opening night was a great success’, the architect engaged for the project by co-owner Tim Willoughby de Eresby recalled recently. ‘The following week I sent Timothy the bill for my design work, but he had already left for the south of France.’³

see: Getty Images

Whence he would set out, Corsica-bound, with an associate on that day in August 1963 – and was never to be seen again. Caught out by sudden violent stormy conditions, no body would ever be found despite the officially abandoned search being continued in a plane privately chartered by his elder sister, Jane. A decade earlier Lady Jane Willoughby had been one of six maids-of-honour at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (far left). And just as the relatively carefree family life of the royal princess had been foreshortened by the death of her father in 1952, so the world of Lady Jane Willoughby was now abruptly upended: ‘Suddenly she was the heir, and from that moment her life was defined by her family’s possessions.’⁴

And such possessions!

see: gailht / Instagram

In Scotland, the 60,000-acre Drummond Castle Estate 15 miles west of Perth, its elevated principal structures taking a back seat to what is indubitably ‘one of the major garden spectacles of Britain’ (r).⁵ And 340 miles south the small matter of Grimsthorpe Castle, ‘a stunning treasure house with beautiful contents, surrounded by 3,000 acres of ‘Capability’ Brown parkland’ representing roughly a quarter of the Lincolnshire estate.

Upon the death of her father the 3rd Earl of Ancaster in 1983 the family’s more ancient title now also passed to Lady Jane Heathcote-Drummond-Willoughby, the Willoughby de Eresby barony being unusually available to female heirs in their own right. As the compound full surname of the 28th baroness indicates, this was far from being the first such occurrence (having happened five times previously since 1313). It was, however, a concept wholly alien to the Drummonds, earls of Perth, synonymous with Drummond Castle from the C15 until Jacobitical rupture in 1745. The passing of ‘their’ estate to a distant female cousin (later wife of the 22nd Lord Willoughby de Eresby) in 1800 would occasion ‘much bitterness on the part of other members of the House of Drummond’.

*

It was observed at the time of Tim Willoughby’s disappearance that the family’s vast estate would be financially unscathed as the earl of Ancaster had not yet handed everything over to his son (common practice to minimise death duties). Centuries earlier, James Drummond, the 5th Earl of Perth’s seemingly premature decision so to do (his son being but months old) would prove equally fortuitous, thereby thwarting its confiscation for his subsequent role in the 1715 Jacobite rebellion.

see: si_arm77 / Instagram

1715 was also the year in which Robert Bertie, 16th Baron Willoughby de Eresby became 1st Duke of Ancaster, marking his elevation with a Baroque remodelling of the north front of Grimsthorpe Castle (r) which had been this family’s seat for two centuries. In so doing Ancaster would procure ‘the last great masterpiece’ to be built by Sir John Vanburgh and which these days can be publicly enjoyed for six months of the year.⁶

see: JThomas

Conversely the mansion at Drummond has remained a private estate residence, primed at one point to be ‘the first major country house transformation in the career of Sir Charles Barry’.⁷ But Barry’s scheme of 1828, ‘which would have turned Drummond Castle into a Scottish Penrhyn‘, would never be executed by him.⁸ Instead, the house which took shape on the rocky plateau through the second half of the C19th has always had a tendency to underwhelm.

see: RIBApix

‘A plain structure, hardly the mansion one should expect such a family to have even for a brief autumnal residence’ – a verdict⁹ on Drummond just prior to its final subdued Baronial makeover, whose off-centre crow-stepped gable only just staves off ‘boredom’ in the view of one present-day authority.¹⁰ ‘Small but nice’ was Queen Victoria’s diary note of the bedroom provided by her hosts during a three-day visit with Prince Albert in 1842, an elaborate temporary banqueting tent being commissioned to compensate for the dining amenities in the house (r).

see source

see: Canmore

But, for four hours each year, the remains of the original Drummond Castle, the late-C15 tower house next door, are opened to visitors. This bastion would supersede Stobhall (25 miles NW) as the principal Drummond residence, later enhanced c.1630 with the addition of a gatehouse (left) by John Mylne, master-mason to Charles I. Mylne would also be responsible for the complex 12-ft obelisk sundial which, with its 76 faces, remains pivotal to the spectacular 12-acre terrace garden. ‘Old Drummond Castle was well battered by Cromwell’ after the Civil War but the good times gradually returned for the Drummonds following the Restoration, reaching a zenith during the ill-fated reign of James II (1685-8).¹¹

see: Countrysportscotland

Made Chancellor and Secretary of State respectively, James Drummond, 4th earl of Perth, and his brother John (created Earl of Melfort) were ‘soon effectively in charge of governance within Scotland’. Perth and his son would develop a new residence on the plateau, ‘the nucleus of the present house’, including a Catholic chapel room ‘of the highest quality of design’ by James Smith. Alas, this feature would be lost along with the cultured Perth’s sizeable art collection when Parliamentary forces of the anti-Catholic interim government occupied the Castle in the wake of King James’ flight into French exile.¹²

After several years under arrest (during which he would be created ‘Duke of Perth’ by the emasculated monarch), Drummond was released on condition he too left for France, where he died. His son meanwhile had been able to return to salvage the family estate which he presciently consigned to his infant son two years before active involvement in the 1715 Jacobite rebellion. But this James, titular 3rd duke, would be unable to pull off the same trick as his father before taking up cudgels in the uprising of ’45, dying unmarried aboard a frigate bound for France following the rout at Culloden. After a century of living dangerously the Drummonds’ property was now finally attainted, their titles in abeyance.

*

see: Savills

Several weeks ago the sale was completed of a 17-acre Perthshire plot, formerly the site of the mansion and “lost garden” of Dunira House (r). Lying some nine miles north-west of Drummond Castle. Dunira was among the possessions of the earls of Perth and its amenities would subsequently be enjoyed by Henry Dundas (1742-1811) on lease from the Commissioners of Forfeited Estates.

By 1784 Dundas was a considerable power in the land, number two to Prime Minister William Pitt and ‘virtually minister for Scotland’. Curiously, that year would see both the passing of the Disannexing Act and Dundas obtaining Dunira: ‘[His] acquisition of this delightful place seems to have been bound up with the Drummond family’s indebtedness to him, and with the restoration of forfeited estates which he was instrumental in effecting.’¹³

In determining the destiny of the Drummond estate the Court of Session upheld the claim of one Capt. James Drummond (formerly Lundin), a great-grandson of the 1st Earl of Melfort via his first marriage. The swiftness of this arbitration had rather blindsided Melfort’s descendants exiled in France. Through their ‘seclusion and utter ignorance .. a person representing himself to be the Honourable James Drummond, supported by a very powerful patron, had no person capable to rebut his pretensions’, they were to argue, in vain. (Other claims persist to this day.)

see source

Almost immediately, this James Drummond ’employed John Steven to remodel the L-shaped mansion house’, the double-pile main range receiving a bow extension overlooking the gardens.¹⁰ Three years before his death in 1800 Drummond was ennobled as the first Baron Perth – the first and the last since he left only a daughter, Clementina, to whom all now passed and who, seven years on, would marry the 22nd Baron Willoughby de Eresby.

This last development reinvigorated the French exiles who now argued that historically the Drummond inheritance was restricted to heirs male. ‘In 1807 the Duc de Melfort was forced out of Scotland, put on board a packet sailing for Lisbon by police, very powerful interest having been employed to get him out of the way,’ stated his nephew George Drummond (who would finally be granted the abeyant earldom of Perth in 1853 but fail in his own claim on the Drummond estates fifteen years later).

see: Canmore

Lord and Lady Willoughby reinstated the Drummond Castle garden in the famous form seen today, landscape architect and long-time estate factor Lewis Kennedy taking forward designs (incorporating the Scottish saltire and the family colours) developed in conjunction with architect Charles Barry.

see: Cubo et excubo

Their son Alberic died unmarried in 1870 being succeeded by his sister, Lady Clementina Heathcote (later Heathcote-Drummond-Willoughby by Royal Licence 1872) as 24th baroness in her own right. Ten years before her death in 1888 G T Ewing was enlisted ‘to remodel the mansion to something of the appearance of a C17 laird’s house’.¹⁰ Gilbert, her son and heir, was created 1st Earl of Ancaster, a title which would effectively disappear along with his great-grandson Timothy in 1963.

*

Since her succession to the ancient barony of Willoughby de Eresby in 1983 Lady Jane Willoughby has featured regularly in the Sunday Times Rich List as among the wealthiest women in the land. Technically, however, since 1978 the entire estate has been in the ownership of a charitable trust established by the 3rd Earl of Ancaster and his daughter for ‘the preseveration and enhancement, for the public benefit, of Grimsthorpe Castle and Drummond Castle’. The baroness is one of eight present trustees.

‘In general, one of two preconditions needs to exist for a family to set up a substantial charitable fund to maintain and open a house. One is that the family’s assets are large enough to endow the house adequately without significantly reducing the family’s economic position.’¹⁴

see source

The Rich List of 2007 attributed a figure of £49m to Baroness Willoughby de Eresby. In that same year a single painting by British artist Francis Bacon came onto the market for the first time, realising $52.6m at Sotheby’s, New York. Study from Innocent X had been created in 1962, the year in which another work, Two Figures, 1953 – ‘one of Bacon’s most remarked upon, seldom seen paintings’¹⁵ – was shown at the Tate, its only public display in Britain to date. Also known as ‘The Buggers’, this picture (r) hung for many years in the home of Bacon’s great friend and rival, the late Lucian Freud, but has since returned to hang in the bedroom of its actual owner, Lady Jane Willoughby.

A Design: The Garden at Drummond from Higher Ground  © June Andrews

‘For more than half a century Jane had been Freud’s most loyal patron, supporter, friend, lover, muse and soulmate. Lucian used to stay with her at her baronial home in Perthshire and supported her plans to build up an astonishing collection of works by modern British artists: Bacon, Auerbach, Michael Andrews (left), and the greatest collection of Freud’s own work [in private hands]. There are plans to use part of her house as an extraordinary museum for the works of Freud and his circle.’⁴

‘The alternative precondition for a family to set up a charitable fund to maintain a house is the impending extinction of the family, or its direct line.’¹⁴

see: Hannah Rothschild

Baroness Willoughby de Eresby, now 82, has never married or had children. (While Lucian Freud would father fourteen acknowledged children by six different women, Lady Jane (r) remained unwavering in her support.) Among the current board members of the Grimsthorpe and Drummond Castle Trust is the baroness’s first cousin once removed, one of several co-heirs. And, of course, who ultimately succeeds to the 700-year-old barony is of more than purely parochial interest.

For Lady Jane represents one of three families who share the oldest hereditary office in England, that of Lord Great Chamberlain. Whilst responsible for certain ceremonial duties at coronations the office holder is most commonly to be seen at the annual State Opening of Parliament, being the monarch’s representative in the Palace of Westminster. By virtue of an agreed rotation the Marquesses of Cholmondeley have served in this capacity throughout the time of Queen Elizabeth II. Taking over every fourth reign, all things being equal, the Lords Willoughby de Eresby will next be called upon at the coronation of King George VII…

[Drummond Castle Gardens][Listing][Full genealogy]

1. Luard, E. My life as a wife: life, liquor and what to do about other women, 2013.
2. Scala, M. Diary of a teddy boy, 2000.
3. Rykwert, J. Nightclubbing, AA files 74, 2017.
4. Grieg, G. Breakfast with Lucian: a portrait of the artist, 2013.
5. Hellyer, AGL. A great Scottish formal garden, Country Life, 10 Aug 1972.
6. Musson, J. Grimsthorpe Castle, Country Life, 17 Apr 2008.
7. Blissett, D. Sir Charles Barry: A reassessment of his travels & early career [thesis], 1983.
8. Lindsay, M. Castles of Scotland, 1986.
9. Dundee Courier, 12 July 1878.
10. Gifford, J. Buildings of Scotland: Perth and Kinross, 2007.
11. Country Life, 26 July 1902.
12. MacKechnie, D. The Earl of Perth’s chapel of 1688 at Drummond Castle, 2014.
13. McNaughton, D. Upper Strathearn: From earliest times to today, 1991.
14. Sayer, M. The disinitegration of a heritage, 1993.
15. Harrison, M. Francis Bacon: catalogue raisonné, 2016.

 

Hoveton House, Norfolk

In February this year, one week ahead of a scheduled meeting of the planning committee of Cheshire West & Chester Council, David Cholmondeley, seventh Marquess of that ilk, wrote a letter to the council’s chief executive. It was to be the final push behind a project which he believes “will mark an important step for the future of the Cholmondeley Estate”.

see: Peter Craine

Extending across more than seven thousand acres in the soft underbelly of north-west England, ‘the seat of the Cholmondeleys has passed down in the direct male line since the 12th century’.¹ While the C19th Gothick castle (right) remains a private residence the renowned gardens nurtured by the marquess’s late mother are opened seasonally and the grounds host regular events including the popular ‘Cholmondeley Power and Speed’.

“The long-term vision of the Estate aims to deliver a thriving environment of which we can all be proud,” wrote the marquess in the course of explaining that what this environment really needs now is .. Twiggles. Twiggles and, indeed, Boggles. The planning committee of Cheshire West Council having since been duly persuaded, the transformation of some unremarkable outlying acres of the Cholmondeley Castle estate into ‘the captivating and enchanting world’ of BeWILDerwood is seemingly imminent.

‘Swampy shuffled out of his house and made his way to the main platform in the Boggle village. This was the place where the Boggles had most of their feasts and Swampy could almost smell the aroma of sweetsludge pie and mudwort jelly..’

Now Boggles, nor indeed Twiggles, are not native to the north-west of England. They are set to be introduced from their only existing habitat, being several acres of marshy woodland in Norfolk, a county wherein also lies the other seat of the Marquess of Cholmondeley, palatial Houghton Hall, begun in 1721 for Sir Robert Walpole. Some forty years earlier and forty miles east an altogether more modest but today similarly Grade I listed Classical creation, Hoveton House, had been completed for one Thomas Blofeld (d.1708):

‘For many years justice of the peace and deputy lieutenant, once mayor and six times a representative in Parliament for the city of Norwich, in all which stations he signalized himself for his eminent zeal and unwearied diligence in promoting the interest, trade and welfare of his country, his knowledge in which was equalled by few, his integrity exceeded by none.’

Passed only by inheritance – mostly to people named Thomas – since its construction c.1680, Hoveton is today the private home of one Thomas Blofeld:

‘Tom was born at a very early age and mostly grew upwards after that. When he left school he embarked on a full-time career as a sausage thief. Unfortunately he was easily distracted and got caught quite often. He says he has stolen his last sausage now and is quite reformed, but all sausage thieves say that.’

see: Bewilderwood

Hoveton House has been described as ‘a naive, but a most lovable design’², adjectives which might equally characterise the estate-saving wheeze developed by Tom Blofeld having been handed the reins at Hoveton a dozen years ago. With a somewhat incoherent ‘career’ hitherto (which included more than a little ‘swanning around doing nothing’³), Blofeld (right) hit on the notion of creating a fantasy woodland kingdom populated by an imaginary community elaborated in several self-published children’s books. A kind of anti-amusement park was born, powered not by electricity and adrenalin but rather by the energy and imagination of its 2-12 year old target audience.

Eco-friendly and unashamedly old-fashioned in its appeal, BeWILDerwood was soon attracting more than 150,000 visitors annually and Blofeld and his small team had Mark II in the pipeline for National Trust/Cheshire Council-run Tatton Park until negotiations eventually hit the buffers. Enter fellow Old Etonian the Marquess of Cholmondeley as the ideal partner, being ‘a willing landowner who possesses the freehold of the whole site’.

*

This enterprising streak would doubtless be recognised by Thomas Blofeld, the builder of Hoveton House, whose fortune derived from the successful manufacture and marketing of woollen garments in partnership with his brother-in-law, Henry Negus. A Norfolk family for generations, the Blofelds had gradually inched south from coastal Cromer, steadily improving their yeoman status (via some opportune alliances) before Thomas’s acquisition of the manor of Hoveton St John in 1667.⁴

see: mikes_urban_garden

‘One of the most charming of Norfolk houses, in a beautiful and secluded setting,’⁵ Hoveton stands amidst the watery low-lying landscape of the Norfolk Broads, formed from the flooded peat pits of the early Middle Ages. The Blofeld property is naturally bounded on three sides by the looping river Bure which feeds Hoveton Great Broad and Hoveton Little Broad, private waters constituting a sizeable chunk of the estate’s 1,500-acre extent. In 1882 it was observed that the ‘Dutch-ness’ of the Broads was nowhere more so than at Hoveton Great Broad: ‘Homely, fat arable land right and left, and windmills all around the horizon.’⁶

see: Sam Klebanov

And this influence remains evident at Hoveton House itself, the north (present-day entrance) front featuring the Dutch gables of the smaller original house and contrasting markedly with the Classical symmetry which would envelope it. No architect has been ascribed for the late-C17 expansion of Hoveton which was rendered in tiny, one-inch orange-red local bricks, its principal south front articulated by stone pilasters and crowned with a steep pediment.

Above the original doorway (see below) ‘a fancy pediment with a lot of not very disciplined vegetable carving’² also displays the arms of the Blofeld and Negus families both of which, despite Thomas and Elizabeth remaining childless, would continue to be represented in the next generation at Hoveton. For the estate was settled upon Thomas’s great-nephew, Thomas (2), who in time would marry Elizabeth’s great-niece, Sarah Negus.

‘Both externally and internally Hoveton House has been remarkably little altered through the ages.’⁵

see: Leslie Felperin

see: Ramon Wardale

But Thomas and Sarah would be responsible for moving the main door one bay along and enhancing the interiors with some ‘attractive mid-C18’ decorative mantels in the drawing room and dining room (r).⁷

The dining room perhaps still also contains portraits of this couple which hung there along with those of earlier generations in the time of the present owner’s grandparents (who would themselves expand Hoveton’s collection with canny purchases at country house sales): ‘We try to fit the ancestors in wherever we can as they did so much for Hoveton; not great works of art but amusing portraits of real people.’⁸

see: Bing Maps

Shortly before his death in 1766 Thomas enjoyed the “wonderful divine providence” of an unexpected inheritance from a distant cousin including, in addition to a sum of money, a goodly collection of decorative items many of which still remain, and which complimented Hoveton House’s early-C18 furnishings. (To his irritation, however, Thomas would subsequently have to contend with “Phillistines who come to spy out my good fortune”.)⁸

While his good fortune would not extend to having a son Hoveton remained squarely in the family, only daughter Sarah having married her first cousin, John Blofeld. Their own son and heir, Thomas (3), contemplated potentially radical upheaval soon after inheriting himself in 1805, calling upon Humphrey Repton to reimagine the lie of the land. ‘Repton visited three times in 1807.’⁹ To this point Hoveton House had fronted directly onto a highway running east-to-west. A realignment order would see the road promptly moved north while a ha-ha now transected pastures rolling away to the south.

source: The Field⁴

‘Dotted mainly with mature oaks, this diminutive landscape survives in good condition,’⁹ as indeed does Repton’s Italianate vision for Hoveton House itself which for one reason or another was never executed. ‘Repton was not put out and wrote an agreeable letter suggesting that Mrs. Blofeld should make little fans of [his] ‘before and after’ drawings,’ another suggestion mercifully rejected.⁸

Thomas Blofeld died ten years later, his tenure as brief yet as impactful as any Hoveton squire. It was also, thanks to the couple’s spending habits (Thomas being an ‘enthusiastic collector of Old Master and English drawings’) financially draining, however. It was an indebtedness his son and grandson (Thomases 4 & 5) could in turn do little to ameliorate, both being ‘impecunious’ vicars.⁸ The second Reverend Blofeld’s son, Thomas (6), having followed the well-trodden family path from Eton to Cambridge, went on to combine a lengthy legal career (including 29 years as Recorder of Ipswich) with a consuming drive to balance the books at Hoveton after inheriting in 1875.

But this effort would certainly not involve exploiting the waterways on the estate to cash in on the Victorian boom in recreational use of the Norfolk Broads. ‘I wish to bear testimony to the great and growing evil caused by [passenger] steamers,’ boomed Thomas Calthorpe Blofeld in a letter to the local press,¹⁰ noting the harm which he, as the owner of several miles of river bank, had plenty of opportunity to judge. It was around this time that navigable access to Hoveton’s Broads would be fenced off, a situation which obtains to this day much to the displeasure of some.

see: anouska_x

‘Hoveton Great Broad (r) is one of the largest yet most secret lakes in The Broads,’ states the website of the multi-agency project to restore this water (which has been leased to Natural England for 25 years) back to health. The awarding of several millions to this end by the National Heritage Lottery Fund and the European Union has proved controversial: ‘To use public money to repair years of neglect and still exclude boaters is a total disgrace.’ The Broads Authority admits that ‘there is no public access to the water or surrounding land [and that] this project does not provide any hope that this might improve in the future. The overriding driver is that of conservation benefit’.

see: British Museum

As, in its way, was the disperal of a significant portion of the art collection of Thomas (3) by John (2) soon after he inherited Hoveton in 1908 (one of two Canalettos, left, ending up in the British Museum). Also responsible for ‘turning’ the house round by developing the north courtyard entrance, John Blofeld would be fatally stricken…

… by anthrax in his mid-40s obliging his 17-year-old son Thomas (7) to abandon thoughts of a medical career and embark on a remarkable six-decade stint as the squire of Hoveton. Though financially deleterious inertia would set in latterly, this longevity at the helm would allow eldest son John to rise through the legal ranks, becoming a High Court judge.¹¹ Meanwhile…

see/hear: BBC

… just last month a round of applause broke out around Lord’s Cricket Ground during England’s Third Test match against the West Indies as younger son Henry Blofeld finally drew stumps as the doyen of cricket commentary after 47 years. ‘There is no doubt that the family estate at Hoveton was an enchanting place in which to have been brought up .. heaven for a small boy,’ recalled ‘Blowers’ in a memoir.¹²

His nephew Thomas (8) having rather successfully tapped into and monetised this nostalgic childhood enchantment through the expanding world of BeWILDerwood, the outlook for heavenly Hoveton would seem to be set fair…

see: Cambridge FilmWorks

[Grade I listing][BeWILDerwood]

1. Robinson, JM. A guide to the country houses of the North-West, 1991.
2. Pevsner, N., Wilson, B. The buildings of England: Norfolk: Norwich and North East, 1997.
3. Delingpole, J. Variations on a theme park, Financial Times, 5 May 2008.
4. Montgomery-Massingberd, H. Hoveton’s ten times Thomas Blofeld, The Field, 20 Jul 1985.
5. Winkley, G. The country houses of Norfolk, 1986.
6. Bell’s Life, 2 Dec 1882.
7. Kenworthy-Browne, J. et al. Burke’s & Savills guide to country houses: East Anglia, 1981.
8. Blofeld, Grizel. An account of the Blofeld family of Hoveton House, 1978.
9. Dallas, P., et al. Norfolk gardens and designed landscapes, 2013.
10. Norfolk News, 12 May 1894.
11. Blofeld, Henry. A thirst for life, 2000.
12. Blofeld, Henry. Squeezing the orange, 2013.

 

Castletown House, Cumbria

Emerald turf beneath my tread,
Soft gray mist around my head;
Salt the breeze, the air how sweet,
Where the Esk and Eden meet!

– Millicent von Boeselager, Songs of Solway¹

At the confluence of those two grand rivers lies the Solway Firth, a wild, dynamic expanse of estuary, mudflats and marsh, its detail restlessly redrawn by the tidal ebb and flow. Entering from the north, the Esk carries cartographic significance, its meandering channel emphasised by the dashes and crosses symbolizing the border between England and Scotland.

see: James Smith/Vimeo

The historic territorial skirmishes between these two nations is recalled on southerly Burgh Marsh where stands an isolated monument (r) to the Hammer of the Scots, King Edward I, marking the place of his expiry en route to another run-in with Robert the Bruce. ‘Burgh is only one of the great salt marshes of the Cumbrian Solway; the biggest and most important for wildlife is Rockcliffe Marsh’…

… a verdant swathe topped and tailed by the Esk and Eden. With vast transient populations of waders and over-wintering geese this marsh is a sanctuary of international import, its status derived in no small part from the fact Rockcliffe, ‘unlike Burgh, has always been kept a strictly private place by its owners, the Mounsey-Heyshams of Castletown House’.²

see: Castletown Estate

“Our USP is the inland saline lagoon. We have just had two pairs of avocet adults producing five chicks, which is a first for Cumbria,” revealed present owner Giles Mounsey-Heysham just last month…

see: Yorkshire Post

… in the course of accepting the Yorkshire Agricultural Society’s Tye Trophy for 2017, an award commending conservation measures in farming across the north of England. This is but the latest recognition for Rockcliffe Marsh, ‘the single largest expanse of saltmarsh in the Solway Coast AONB‘ and land which constitutes a significant proportion of the 4,000-acre Castletown Estate.

see: Ann Lingard

The marsh has been formally ‘stinted’ – grazed by arrangement – since divisive Articles of Agreement signed in 1769 which excluded those living in the eastern half of Rockcliffe parish. Before neutral arbitration prevailed this perceived injustice looked set to be compounded by the enclosure process of 1805, the prime mover of which was Rockcliffe’s newest and biggest landowner, Robert Mounsey, of Mounsey & co., solicitors, of nearby Carlisle.

Now the saltmarshes of Solway are a by-product of evolving river flow – but what Mother Nature giveth she also taketh away. And no-one would be more sensitive to this locally than William Lowther, 2nd Earl of Lonsdale (d.1872), the owner of Burgh Marsh on the opposite bank of the Eden. In 1864, citing erosion protection, his Lordship began the construction of a brick jetty 100 yards in length. He swiftly faced court action by the Mounseys who claimed the jetty ‘would force the current to the other side of the river and wash away the plaintiff’s land’.³

see: Bing Maps

Years of legal proceedings ensued, Castletown’s case aided by the family firm and the Earl losing expensively at every turn. As the saga played out one irony was doubtless not lost on either party: For the rise of Mounseys from humble origins a century before to county prominence as lawyers and landowners had its roots in the benevolence of the Lowther estate.

Thirty miles south of Rockcliffe, on the bounds of vast Lowther Castle park, lies the village of Askham where Robert Mounsey’s grandfather (also Robert) was born in 1696. The following year Viscount Lonsdale endowed a grammar school on his estate where young Robert would later thrive, subsequently entering the church and serving as vicar of Ravenstonedale for several decades.

Rising from a junior position in the office of the Registrar of the Diocese of Carlisle, law proved to be the metier of Robert’s son, George, who would later establish Mounsey & co., subsequent generations developing the firm and its stranglehold on diocesan legal affairs. With his wife, Margaret, George Mounsey produced fourteen children several of whom would be placed in the care of wet nurses outside of town, third son Robert being sent a few miles north to the village of Rockcliffe.

The Mounsey family’s proliferation mirrored that of Carlisle itself at this time, the town experiencing a cotton-printing boom. By the turn of the 19th century Carlisle’s cadre of middle-class movers and shakers were ready to upgrade to the league of country gentlemen, the aspriation of Messrs Mounsey (law), Ferguson (mills) and Hodgson (banking) seemingly spurred on by the timely arrival in town of the new county surveyor for Cumberland.

see: Google Maps

On the recommendation of renowned engineer/architect Thomas Telford, Peter Nicholson arrived in 1808 from Glasgow where he had recently completed Carlton Place (r), ‘the most chaste and elegant of the buildings which grace the Clyde’. An accomplished craftsman and draftsman, Nicholson’s main driver was education, his peripatetic career being something of a one-man mission to instill…

see source

see: NPG

… ‘with as much perspicuity as possible’, the discipline of mathematics into the art and craft of architecture. Already the author of several manuals of innovative instruction, Nicholson would leave Carlisle for London after just two years in post to continue publishing and teaching, but not before he had essayed a clutch of Classical villas to the north of the town for his aspirant clientele.

All three houses – within three or four miles of one another, their construction overseen by Nicholson’s partner, architect William Reid – were variations on a theme: two-storey, five-bay principal blocks flanked by subordinate pedimented wings. Houghton House for William Hodgson (below, left) features a ‘delightful cast-iron veranda and a beautiful little octagonal library’⁴…

see: Historic England

see: Historic England

… while at the Fergusons’ Harker Lodge nearby a broad fan-light crowns a recessed entrance, the pavilions here being explicitly remote.

But the largest and perhaps most successful composition of this trinity was achieved at Rockcliffe for Robert Mounsey on the land which he had acquired in 1802.

see: tauck.com

That Castletown House could be described back in 1989 as ‘a remarkable early-C19th survivor .. still lived in by its original family’ is surely testament to the toll of ancestral seats over the past one hundred years.⁵ For, by the standard of most of the houses hitherto considered here, Grade II* listed Castletown is positively a young ‘un, but it’s an original house built on a virgin site and mercifully little-altered.

see: PhotoCumbria/Instagram

Completed in 1811, ‘Castletown sits in a spectacular location’ overlooking the Eden (the attraction of which may have palled somewhat just the following year when the Mounseys’ second son, ten-year-old Robert, drowned whilst bathing in the river).

see: JFitzpatrick Travel

As at Houghton and Harker Lodge, the central section of the original entrance front of Castletown House stands proud of its (here two-storeyed and, in the west, bow-ended) wings. ‘The short links are canted back, which jars a little but allows the apsidal ends of the main rooms to be lit.’⁴

Country Life⁵

Two-column screens emphasise these apses in the dining room (below) and drawing room, the intervening hallway (featuring a decorative plasterwork ceiling) being similarly defined. An elegantly trim cantilevered staircase rises beyond.

Hugh Palmer/The Field (detail)¹⁰

‘Much of the furniture is of the same date as the house.’⁵ Externally, the portico comprises square pillars featuring locally novel incised decoration ‘characteristic of John Soane’s work at the Bank of England’ in the last years of the eighteenth century when Peter Nicholson was first in London.⁶

see: Historic England

Either side (with flanking louvred shutters) are elongated ground floor windows, all the better to maximise the carefully selected southerly vista. However, while they might afford fine views out they do, of course, allow others to readily see in.

‘In a Grecian or Italian edifice, it may be essential that the entrance occupy the centre of one of the fronts; in which case, I think it equally essential that the living rooms should not be on the same front. On the contrary, we frequently see the entrance on the south front, and the drawing room or library exposed to the gaze of the servants from the carriage, whilst the windows, which should have opened upon the embellishments of a terrace or pleasure ground, look upon a sweep of glaring gravel.’

see: Historic England

The opinions of painter William Sawrey Gilpin who in later years would apply his aesthetic sensibilities in the role of landscape consultant. He averred that two-thirds of the houses he had seen were ‘spoiled’ by such inattention and urged reorientation wherever practicable.

see: Britain From the Air

Though he died the year after Robert Mounsey, Gilpin is known to have worked at Castletown⁷ – the terrace above a dwarf wall is a typical motif – and may have sown the seed for the house being ‘turned round’ by Mounsey’s son 1851-2. Castletown was deepened to incorporate the inset Doric portico of the new north entrance (above).

see: Google Maps

The project was overseen by architect James Stewart whom George Gill Mounsey (d.1874) also employed in the building of new churches at Rockcliffe and on family land at Gilsland Spa (r) 22 miles east on the Cumbria / Northumberland border…

… where a large hotel enterprise would also be redeveloped. This burst of building activity followed the death of three-time Carlisle mayor Mounsey’s wife, Isabella Heysham, the daughter of the town’s leading medic, Dr. John Heysham, a pioneer in the treatment of the disease-ridden local poor.

The Mounseys’ second son, George, became Mounsey-Heysham upon inheriting the estate of his uncle, James Heysham, in 1871. By the time he also came into Castletown House ten years later (his elder brother Robert dying unmarried at 52) George was well-established practicing law in London and raising a family in Kensington. His only son, also George, a soldier and solicitor in the family firm, would also be unmarried at the time of his death in 1928. Castletown now passed to Richard, the son of his eldest sister (Agnes, wife of Capt. Richard Gubbins), who had been orphaned a decade earlier and until attaining his majority enjoyed the singular guardianship of his aunt, Sybil Mounsey-Heysham.

‘A unique and vivid character of whom people would say quite matter-of-factly that she ought to have been a man,’ Sybil already had experience in teenage mentoring having previously taken a young Olave Soames – later wife of Boy Scouts founder Robert Baden-Powell, and the driving spirit of Girlguiding – under her wing. Olave ‘stayed at Castletown as often as she could’, coming to regard unconventional Sybil – ‘reputedly one of the three best duck shots in the country’ and an enthusiastic violinist – as ‘an example and an inspiration’.⁸

see: StatelyHomeNews

Richard Gubbins-Mounsey-Heysham left three children by his second wife, Margaret Barne, at his death in 1960. The eldest daughter would marry into the Howard/Lawson family of Corby Castle (r), another Peter Nicholson house on the banks of the river Eden, some 15 miles upstream of Castletown on the other side of Carlisle. Regarded as ‘his masterpiece’, Grade I Corby has had an ill-starred recent past.⁹ Its sale out of the family after 400 years in 1994 led to an acrimonious courtroom saga driven by Sir John Howard-Lawson’s son and ‘heir’; the multi-millionaire industrialist purchaser would perish in a helicopter crash ten years later.

In marked contrast to such drama, for most of the past half-century Castletown has known the constant stewardship of its seventh (and longest-serving) squire, a man of many hats, and long-married to Penelope Twiston-Davies, sister of leading National Hunt racehorse trainer, Nigel. And the suggestion of continuity would be there from the outset of Giles Mounsey-Heysham’s ownership: ‘On his twenty-first birthday, in the best feudal tradition, the tenants on the estate presented him with the lodge gates to Castletown House.’¹⁰

see: Google Maps

[Castletown Estate][Rockcliffe Marsh Nature Reserve]

1. nee Mounsey-Heysham, Millicent. A book of verses, 1914.
2. Ratcliffe, D. Lakeland, 2002.
3. Carlisle Journal 25 Oct 1864.
4. Hyde, M., Pevsner, N. The buildings of England: Cumbria, 2010.
5. Worsley, G. Castletown House, Cumberland, Country Life 7 Sept 1989.
6. Taylor, A. The dukeries of Carlisle, Country Life 21 Aug 1989.
7. Piebenga, S. William Sawrey Gilpin: Picturesque improver, Garden History, Vol.22, No.2, 1994.
8. Jeal, T. Baden-Powell, 1989.
9. Robinson, JM. A guide to the country houses of the North-West, 1991.
10. Montgomery-Massingberd, H. Surveying the future at Castletown, The Field 12 Jan 1985.