Category Archives: Country Houses of Derbyshire

Elizabethan skyscraper: Barlborough Hall

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Barlborough Hall, Derbyshire

Barlborough Hall, Derbyshire

Barlborough Hall, on the borders of Derbyshire and South Yorkshire, is one of a number of country houses which Mark Girouard ascribes to the architect Robert Smythson.

It has all the Smythson trademarks of Wollaton Hall and Hardwick Hall – symmetry, height, lots of glass – and it was built (c1583-4) for Francis Rodes, an ambitious lawyer, staunch Protestant and associate of George, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, the fourth and last husband of Bess of Hardwick.

It’s ironic that Rodes’ house is now a Catholic prep-school, and Mass is celebrated in his drawing room.

I was very surprised to be told, on a recent guided tour of Barlborough, that there’s a priest’s hole in the building.

Why, I asked, in a Protestant house?

Because, the guide replied, Francis Rodes’ wife was a Catholic.

I’ve not checked this further, but if it’s so it must have been an odd marriage.

Barlborough Hall is a preparatory school and as such is not open to visitors:  http://www.barlboroughhallschool.co.uk/barlboroughhallschool.  However, the Barlborough Heritage Centre [http://www.barlboroughrc.btck.co.uk/BarlboroughHall] welcomes visitors.

 

Marvellous boy

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'The Death of Chatterton' statue, Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire

‘The Death of Chatterton’ statue, Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire

On the way from the house to the lavatories at Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire there is a disconcerting moment when one comes upon a recumbent marble figure at the base of the garden wall.  It appears that an eighteenth-century gent has fallen from the top of the wall and expired.

In fact, the statue is a reproduction of Henry Wallis’ painting ‘The Death of Chatterton’, which hangs in Tate Britain.

Thomas Chatterton (1752-70) was the sad, unregarded poet who passed off his work as “The Rowlie Poems”, the rediscovered work of a fifteenth-century monk.

He was found dead of arsenic poisoning in his London attic at the age of seventeen.

Horace Walpole took against what he saw as a literary fraud, but Keats dedicated his ‘Endymion’ to Chatterton’s memory, and Wordsworth thought well enough of his talent to describe him as “the marvellous boy”.

How his statue came to Kedleston – or who sculpted it – remains obscure.  Apparently Lady Ottilie Scarsdale, wife of the second viscount, found it in pieces in the yard of a monumental mason, and bought it.

I admire her wit in positioning it where it startles passers-by.  It’s something to chat about.

For visitor information about Kedleston Hall see http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/kedleston-hall.

Royal flush

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Royal bathroom, Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire

Royal bathroom, Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire

When my friend Jenny and I visited Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, I was disappointed not to be able to show her the royal bathroom.

The early twentieth-century owner of Kedleston, the Viceroy Lord Curzon was ambitious to entertain King George V and Queen Mary, and in anticipation had an en-suite bathroom discreetly added to the State Bedroom.

I had the opportunity to photograph this some years ago, but the room stewards assured us, with regret, that it’s not usually shown to the public.

Apparently there’s a second modern (that is, early twentieth-century) bathroom, which I haven’t seen, nearby.

As consolation, Jenny and I were allowed to see the po-cupboard next to the dining room.  This common, convenient feature of grand dining was for the use of gentlemen after the ladies had retired to the drawing room.

It saved a long trek in white tie and tails.

I duly photographed the po-cupboard, but the royal bathroom is far finer.

For visitor information about Kedleston Hall see http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/kedleston-hall.

 

Love match

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Tomb of George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquis and Earl Curzon, Viceroy of India (1859-1925) and his first wife, Mary Victoria, Baroness Curzon (1870-1906), All Saints' Church, Kedleston, Derbyshire

Tomb of George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquis and Earl Curzon, Viceroy of India (1859-1925) and his first wife, Mary Victoria, Baroness Curzon (1870-1906), All Saints’ Church, Kedleston, Derbyshire

Nestling against the cool classical pile of Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire is the far older medieval parish church of the long-vanished village of Kedleston.  The north aisle of the church is an early-twentieth century Gothic memorial to a great love match.

George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquis and Earl Curzon, Viceroy of India (1859-1925), famously the “superior person” of an undergraduate ditty, like a number of his contemporaries married the daughter of an American millionaire.

Mary Victoria Leiter’s father was a co-founder of what became the Chicago-based Marshall Field department-store empire.  Her wit, charm and elegance was legendary.  The breaktaking peacock coronation gown, by Worth of Paris, which she wore as Vicereine at the Delhi Durbar in 1902 is on display within Kedleston Hall.

Perhaps the only sadness about their relationship was her inability to produce an heir, and the medical complications following a miscarriage destroyed her health.  She died in her husband’s arms on July 18th 1906.

Curzon commissioned the Gothic Revival architect George Frederick Bodley to design the memorial chapel at Kedleston, and employed the Australian sculptor Bertram Mackennal to carve her effigy in 1913.  Mackennal, by then Sir Bertram, ultimately provided an effigy of Lord Curzon which was installed in 1931.

Lord Curzon’s second wife, who has no obvious memorial at Kedleston, was Grace Elvina Duggan, a rich American widow aged 38 at the time of their marriage in 1917.  Though she had three children from her first marriage she did not provide a Curzon heir, and the marriage deteriorated into a separation.  She is buried in the churchyard of Kedleston Church.

The finest monument to Grace Curzon is not at Kedleston.  She was the subject of John Singer Sargent’s final portrait in oils, now in the Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Grace_Elvina,_Marchioness_Curzon_of_Kedleston.jpg.

 

Mary, Queen of Scots slept here

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Old Hall Hotel, Buxton, Derbyshire

Old Hall Hotel, Buxton, Derbyshire

When I lectured to the Cavendish Decorative & Fine Arts Society in Buxton [http://www.cavendishnadfas.org.uk/index.html], I was taken for an enjoyable lunch to the Old Hall Hotel [http://www.oldhallhotelbuxton.co.uk], where the food was as excellent as the service was leisurely.  I chose wild boar burger which, to be honest, tasted much like any other hand-made burger – very good indeed.

The Old Hall is at the heart of historic Buxton.  It stands on the site of the Roman bath and medieval holy well, and was constructed as a typical Midland four-storey high house [compare with North Lees Hall, Hathersage] by George, sixth Earl of Shrewsbury who recovered from an attack of gout after trying the “baynes of Buckstones” in 1569.  It had a battlemented roof and contained a great chamber and lodgings for up to thirty guests.

Here he entertained most of the greatest names in Elizabethan politics – Lord Burghley (1575), Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (five times between 1576 and 1584) and his older brother Ambrose, Earl of Warwick (1577).  Queen Elizabeth herself never travelled this far north, but did receive a delivery of Buxton water, which gave her no benefit:  it was said not to travel well.

Lord Shrewsbury was the fourth husband of the formidable Bess of Hardwick and the custodian of the captive Mary, Queen of Scots, who stayed here nine times between 1573 and 1584.  Caught between his domineering wife, the duplicitous Scottish queen and the volatile English one, he lived an unenviable life.

Buxton Old Hall was substantially rebuilt in 1670 and again in the late eighteenth century, but its core survives within the present-day hotel, as becomes obvious when you move from room to room through thick walls and odd doorways.

Celia Fiennes hated it when she visited in 1697:

Its the largest house in the place tho’ not very good… the beer they allow at the meales is so bad that very little can be dranke…if you have not Company enough of your own to fill a room they will be ready to put others into the same chamber, and sometymes they are so crowded that three must lye in a bed;  few people stay above two or three nights its so inconvenient:  we staid two nights by reason one of our Company was ill but it was sore against our wills, for there is no peace or quiet…

Needless to say, it’s much improved over the past three hundred-odd years.  They take their time over the boar burgers, and the result is worth waiting for.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2009 Derbyshire-based Taking the Waters:  the history of spas & hydros tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Chatterleys not at home

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Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire

Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire

Sutton Scarsdale Hall may have provided the nucleus of the idea for D H Lawrence’s characters Clifford and Constance in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, because the marriage of William Arkwright, the last owner, was blighted by the consequences of a hunting accident.

Sutton Scarsdale is not, however, Lawrence’s “Wragby Hall” – “a long, low old house in brown stone, begun about the middle of the eighteenth century, and added on to, till it was a warren of a place without much distinction”.  It’s generally agreed that Lawrence was visualising Renishaw Hall, in the north-east corner of Derbyshire, though the actual house is anything but lacking in distinction.

The late eighteenth-century owner, Sitwell Sitwell (his name is another story) built the elegant apsed dining room in 1794, and the grand east wing, with plasterwork by the local sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey, in 1803-8.  When it was finished the Prince Regent visited, and made Sitwell Sitwell a baronet.

Lawrence and his wife Frieda met Sir Osbert Sitwell, who invited them to call at Renishaw on one of their rare visits to Derbyshire in the 1920s.

When they eventually visited there was no-one at home but the butler, who took against the odd-looking couple:  it’s likely that their accents wouldn’t quite fit the bill, he the son of a Derbyshire miner, she the daughter of a German baron.

Consequently, all they saw of the house was the front hall.  They were shown in the front door and straight out the back into the garden – with the result that Wragby Hall is based on, but is only a shadow of, the actual Renishaw Hall.

The gamekeeper called Mellors, by the way, worked at Welbeck.

UPDATE:  The Observer of November 13th 2011 contained an edited reprint of Dame Edith Sitwell’s account of the Lawrences’ visit.  Evidently they met only once.

“He talked to us a great deal about our parents, explaining their characters to us.  Mrs Lawrence…explained the natives of Bloomsbury to me…”

Afterwards, in a lecture she gave in Liverpool, Dame Edith described Lawrence as the head of the Jaeger school of poetry – hot, soft and woolly.  The Jaeger company took exception, saying that their clothes were indeed soft and woolly, but not hot.  Dame Edith was contrite, and told Messrs Jaeger that “their works were unshrinkable by time, whereas the works of Lawrence, in my opinion, are not”.

Renishaw Gardens, Museum and Galleries are open regularly through the summer.  The Hall can be visited only on pre-booked tours.  Details are at http://www.sitwell.co.uk.

The survival of Sutton Scarsdale

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Sutton Scarsdale Hall, Derbyshire

Sutton Scarsdale Hall, Derbyshire

Southbound travellers on the M1 in Derbyshire are sometimes intrigued by a splendid ruin on the offside which is virtually invisible travelling north.  This is Sutton Scarsdale Hall, second only in scale to Chatsworth among the surviving classical country houses of Derbyshire.  It has survived, but only just.

It was built in 1724-9 for Nicholas Leake, 4th Earl of Scarsdale by the major provincial architect Francis Smith of Warwick.  Smith’s grand façades are oddly oriented because he built around a much older core which stands alongside the medieval parish church, so the main entrance is on the north front.  When the house was intact its chief glory was the plasterwork by the Italian stuccadores Giovanni Battista Arturi and Francesco Vasalli.

Lord Scarsdale died without heirs and deeply in debt, and Sutton Scarsdale passed through a succession of owners until it was bought by Richard Arkwright of Willersley, the financier son of the cotton inventor, for his younger son, Robert Arkwright, who married the “single-minded, simple-hearted” actress Fanny Kemble.

Their descendant William Arkwright is thought to be the model for D H Lawrence’s Clifford Chatterley, though the novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover is not set at Sutton Scarsdale.

After the First World War, the Arkwrights sold up the Sutton estate, but couldn’t get rid of the house, which was first vandalised and then stripped by a speculator for the value of its materials.

Fifty tons of lead were removed from the roof, and a collection of interiors including the drawing room, the main staircase and some fireplaces were shipped to the United States.

Three rooms, their proportions altered and their provenance irreparably confused, can now be seen at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a fourth, purchased by William Randolph Hearst for San Simeon, remained in a New York warehouse in packing cases until it was bought by Paramount Studios and used as a set for the film Kitty (1945).

This was donated in 1954 to the Huntingdon Library, Pasadena, but remains, apart from two doorcases, in storage.

Chairs made for the 1724 house are now at Temple Newsam House, Leeds and in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum and the Frick Collection.

The shell of the house stood abandoned, until it was rescued by Sir Osbert Sitwell in 1945, just before bulldozers were about to clear the site.

By the time his nephew, until then Mr Reresby Sitwell, inherited it in 1969 the ruins were unstable.  Sir Reresby found himself caught in a bureaucratic maze:  the then Ministry of Public Buildings & Works wouldn’t help because Sutton Scarsdale was built after 1700, while the Historic Buildings Council, as part of the Ministry of Housing, couldn’t support a building which, being roofless, was no longer a house.

Eventually, after a change of legislation, it was taken over by what is now English Heritage, and travellers who can find their way through the by-roads from the M1 junction 29 at Heath may wander the ruins that were very nearly flattened in 1945.

Opening arrangements for Sutton Scarsdale Hall can be found at http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/sutton-scarsdale-hall.

Des res

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Wingfield Manor, Derbyshire (1976)

Wingfield Manor, Derbyshire (1976)

Ralph, Lord Cromwell, was a big hitter in the politics of the reign of King Henry VI.  He made a great deal of money and owned five major houses, two of which still survive – Tattershall Castle in Lincolnshire and Wingfield Manor in Derbyshire.  (The other three were Collyweston Manor House, Northamptonshire, Lambley Manor House, Nottinghamshire, and Ampthill Castle, Bedfordshire.)

Its position at the top of a steep hill, its dry moat and its robust High Tower indicate that it was seriously defensible, yet Wingfield has a much more domestic atmosphere than Tattershall.  Nevertheless, it was – and is – a magnificent complex of palatial dimensions.  John Leland, the Tudor antiquary, commented, “Winfield, or Wenfield, in Derbyshire, is but a maner place, but yt far passith Sheffeld Castel”.

Significantly, when it passed on Cromwell’s death in 1455 to the 2nd Earl of Shrewsbury, it needed no major extension for the grander nobleman.  Only when the 6th Earl, long-suffering husband of Bess of Hardwick, used it to accommodate the captive Mary, Queen of Scots were extensions made.

Mary took against it, saying the air made her ill, and Shrewsbury retorted that “the very unpleasant and fulsome savour in the next chamber” came from “the continual festering and uncleanly order of her own folk”.

It was slighted – rendered indefensible – after the Civil War, and the Great Hall was adapted as a two-storey residence by the astronomer Immanuel Halton (1628-1699), whose connection with the first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, is explained in http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1996JBAA..106…22B.

His successor, Immanuel Halton III, took stone from the ruins to build his Georgian house in the valley below.

Wingfield Manor has been for generations the site of a working farm, so that although it is conserved by English Heritage, public access is extremely limited.  Arrangements are set out at http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/wingfield-manor/visitor-information.

Otherwise, public access to the site is strictly prohibited.

Palimpsest of the Peak 1

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Chatsworth House, Derbyshire

Chatsworth House, Derbyshire

About fifteen years ago Andrew, 11th Duke of Devonshire, commissioned an extensive archaeological survey of the Chatsworth estate, a summary of which was published as John Barnatt & Tom Williamson, Chatsworth:  a landscape history (Windgather 2005).

It’s a revelation.

Chatsworth has, of course, been repeatedly written up, ever since the Bachelor 6th Duke produced his privately printed Handbook of Chatsworth and Hardwick in 1845.  The recent survey pulls together a full review of the archaeology and the estate’s enormous archive, backed by the evidence of maps, illustrations and modern photography.

This reveals a layered chronology of a significant area of the upland Derbyshire Peak back to prehistoric times.  In particular, since the mid-eighteenth century much of the landscape has been undisturbed, leaving evidence of prehistoric, medieval and early modern agriculture and industry that has been obliterated elsewhere in the county.

The shadowy presence of the great landscape designer, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, who is mentioned only once in the entire Chatsworth archive, is made clearer because almost all payments in the estate accounts were addressed to his “foreman” or contractor, Michael Millican.  Their work in creating the naturalistic landscape that stretches from Chatsworth House to the horizon began in 1759, financed to a great extent by the 4th Duke’s lucrative copper mine at Ecton in Staffordshire.

Another recent discovery is the complexity of the patterns of drives and roads around the estate.  It seems that the eighteenth-century landscape was primarily designed to be seen from and near the house, and largely enjoyed on foot, rather like the characters’ explorations of Mr Rushworth’s Sotherton property in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814).

During the early Victorian period, the time of the Bachelor Duke, the park was crisscrossed with wide drives, carefully contrived to give advantageous views.  Many of these have since been grassed over and largely forgotten.  It seems that in the Bachelor’s time visitors were encouraged to enjoy the mature landscape in the comfort of a carriage.

When I take groups to Chatsworth, particularly visitors from outside the UK, I make a point as the coach climbs the steep road (realigned in the early nineteenth century) from Beeley Bridge (1759) of explaining that everything within sight – buildings, grass, trees, water – is in fact contrived by man.  And you wouldn’t get planning permission for it now.  Especially as it lies in a National Park.

The portal for information about visiting Chatsworth is http://www.chatsworth.org.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

No sign of Mrs Rochester

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North Lees Hall, Derbyshire

North Lees Hall, Derbyshire

North Lees Hall, near Hathersage in Derbyshire, is a highly significant building, built for the Jessop family of Broom Hall who belonged to the sphere of influence of George, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, custodian of the captive Mary, Queen of Scots and long-suffering husband of Bess of Hardwick.

Many of the Earl’s associates built “high houses”, with tall turrets, gridiron mullioned windows and skied chambers and galleries.  The plasterwork at North Lees Hall includes the arms of the Rodes family of Barlborough Hall;  other families with Shrewsbury links and comparable houses included the Sandfords of Thorpe Salvin Hall and the Hewitts of Shireoaks Hall.

Because North Lees Hall was more or less continuously let from the mid-seventeenth century until after the Second World War it was hardly altered, but at times unoccupied.  Sometime before 1792 the tenancy came to one Thomas Eyre, whose descendants stayed here until 1882. Their occupation had an interesting effect:  a whole procession of scholarly visitors assumed a quite spurious connection with the ancient and prolific Catholic family of Eyre.  The resulting legends are extremely attractive.

A more famous connection came from the 1845 visit of Charlotte Brontë, who is often assumed to have based Thornfield Hall at least partly on North Lees in writing the novel she entitled Jane Eyre – “…three stories high, of proportions not vast, though considerable…battlements round the top gave it a picturesque look. Its grey front stood out well from the background of a rookery.”  She may have taken her heroine’s family name from the occupants, and named the nearby fictional village Morton after the actual landlord of the George Inn, Hathersage.

After the Second World War the house was neglected, and at one stage was used for storing grain.  It was converted it into holiday accommodation by Lt-Col Hugh Beach.  It was purchased by the Peak Park Planning Board in 1971, and in 1987 it was leased to the Vivat Trust, who restored and reopened it as self-catering holiday apartments in 1989.  A further restoration took place in 2002, and it is now let as a residence.

Other sites associated with Jane Eyre are described and illustrated at http://walk2read.com/books/jane_eyre.html.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.