WHAT on earth do you do with a ruined, but historically significant country house?
This is a question that plagues the average workaday heritage chairman (Fig 1), causing headaches, insomnia and occasional bouts of teeth-grinding. Here, I will use four examples from the English Heritage portfolio to illustrate the challenges we face. COUNTRY LIFE readers may have their own views about how we should deal with them; if so, I anticipate a flood of letters offering advice. Each site is different and no one solution fits all.
Kirby Hall in Northamptonshire was built in the 1570s by Sir Humphrey Stafford and, after his death, by Sir Christopher Hatton, Lord Chancellor. This magnificent house shows all the creative energy and architectural innovation of the first Elizabethan age. In the 17th century, it hosted five royal visits and boasted one of the finest gardens in England. After four generations of Hattons (all called Christopher in that charming, if rather confusing, English way) it passed to the Winchilsea family, who lived there until the 1770s. Abandoned in the 1830s, it is now roofless, but retains enough of its form forus to imagine how astonishing it would have looked when first built (Fig 2). John Summerson wrote: ‘The beauty of Kirby’s decline is that it was private and without violence. The house was never burnt, ravaged, used as a quarry or assaulted by mobs.’ English Heritage looks after buildings that suffered exactly those fates, but because Kirby was spared all of them, one can still appreciate there the romance of a lost grandeur (Fig 3).
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Denne historien er fra July 29, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
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
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
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.
