TOM and Rosamond Sweet-Escott liked Chettle so much they almost bought it twice. This beautifully eccentric early-18th-century house came up for sale in 2015, having been owned by the same family for the previous 400 years. The Sweet-Escotts put in an offer but were pipped to the post, only for the buyers to have second thoughts and sell it to them after all. The tale of its long and painstaking repair has been detailed by John Martin Robinson in COUNTRY LIFE (November 18, 2020), but the gardens of Thomas Archer’s Baroque edifice have proved to be as fascinating—and enigmatic—as the history of the house itself.
Chettle was built in about 1715 for George Chafin, shortly after his marriage to a local heiress and his election as an MP for Dorset a position he was to hold for the next 40 years. It stands on the edge of the pretty village that shares its name, on the glorious chalk uplands of Cranborne Chase, a vast medieval hunting ground that remains remarkably wild and woolly to this day, crisscrossed by Roman roads and peppered with prehistoric earthworks. The house was long a puzzle to architectural historians, with documentary evidence for Archer’s authorship only coming to light in recent years, but its mystery was as nothing compared with the grounds. Gardens there must surely have been to frame such an ambitious house, yet not a single sketch, plan, or early description has ever been found.
Denne historien er fra September 22, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra September 22, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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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.
