For centuries, the river powered corn and fulling mills until, in the late 1600s, the arrival of Dutch experts in papermaking and water-management led to the creation of dozens of paper mills along a complex system of watercourses between the hamlet of Loudwater and the village of Wooburn.
One of the largest was Clapton Mill, whose Dutch owner, Groner Steyn, erected an imposing family home on high ground that overlooked the millpond and the river below. Built-in the classic Queen Anne style between 1700 and 1710, with later 18th-century alterations, Steyn christened it Clapton Revel, a name derived from the Dutch for ‘mansion house’, as befitted a house of status at the heart of a 25-acre mini-estate.
An article in COUNTRY LIFE (March 6, 1937) highlights the beauty of the setting: ‘Water in the garden is always delightful, and here especially so, since besides the main stretch—a backwater of the River Wye—there are several other diversions of the river, beside which one goes by winding paths and across little bridges, finding here a secluded water garden, there a swimming pool, plantations, waterfalls, and the mill stream itself which was no doubt the original purpose of such diversion.’
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der February 26, 2020-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der February 26, 2020-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
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A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
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Forever a chorister
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Best of British
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Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
