Detmar Blow

How to describe Hilles, home to the Blow family? First and foremost, it’s a stunning wedding venue, high on a hill outside Painswick; but it’s also the seat of drama, tragedy and redemption. Katie Jarvis pays a visit.

- Katie Jarvis

ON the road to Hilles, the mist swirls like smoke puffed from a briar pipe. It clouds my vision, making me unsure of what’s there (and what I’m just imagining) in the spectral shapes of this unfamiliar landscape. Strange. I’ve known this happen once or twice before: when you’re so close to home; yet the twist in perspective is so alien, you can’t quite process where you are.

I follow the tapering lane off the busily populated A46 into deeper, obscuring nothingness. Confabulating; discombobulating; bamboozling.

And then, as I push through the mist, I catch it. The secret little sign to Hilles. And I swing onto a track that takes its time in stretching to what one might call a house – though the term does it little justice. A vision. An Arts and Crafts vision of stone and wood; of gable and chimney-stack; of greatness and detail; of mill-like austerity and extravagant curls. A political vision too, where all who enter are as equal as the moment of creation: when unjudged soul animates untainted body.

For a second or two, I stand towards the far end of the terrace, peering out over parapet and into void. I know – or I believe I know – that in front of me lies a vista beyond compare: of plain and bridge; of tree and hill; of road and settlement that draw the eye for tens of miles, to a horizon that teases inviolable rules.

But now. Right now, all that is lost to the mist.

Detmar Blow is making a coffee. A coffee for one. A coffee for me, the guest. The spring water - that has fed the house since its inception a century ago – is on ration, clogged and sluggish. Leaves, probably. The cattle are fine; it flows to their

trough first, before it meanders wilfully on to the house.