Almost forgot

I’d forgotten that we actually fitted something else into today’s packed schedule. We did a short detour to a place called Lyveden New Bield. (Don’t ask.)
This is a National Trust place set in the middle of nowhere, and began life as a stately home for a Catholic family, the Treshams. It was begun between 1595 and 1605, but because Catholics were on the out at that time in English history, fines and penalties - and one of the sons being involved in the Gunpowder Plot - meant that the house and its architecturally planned garden was never finished.
Consequently what is left, still standing after 400 years, is the shell of what would have been a lovely home. Many things are in place: fireplaces, the decorations over doors, the decorations around the outside of the building, the underpinnings of a spiral staircase, the inner drainpipes. It’s like seeing a stately home stripped of its interiors, including floors, so that you can look straight up from basement to the top walls of the house. There’s no roof or ceiling either.
The gardens are lovely, although again because it was so hot we didn’t walk as far as we might have done. But we did go round the spiral Mount (a raised area a short distance away from the house which has a spiral path on it), and crossed over the man-made lakes on a short bridge. There are orchards as well, but we didn’t get that far.
An oddity, but worth visiting, especially on a day like today.

Felbrigg Hall

Today we went to Felbrigg Hall, and its walled garden. The latter is a delight, with pear and apricot trees and other such fixed to the inside walls, so that all the fruit hangs readily available. The herb garden runs almost the entire length of one side of the garden, and there is a dovecote at the very back. Flowers of every kind mingle together in an orderly fashion - flowers I’ve never come across in some cases. And the vegetable garden, which was large and varied, was so tidy that veges would have no choice but to grow well. In one of the glasshouses the smell of honeysuckle was overwhelming. Altogether a great find, and one of the many places we should try and get back to, since it’s only a couple of miles away from where we’re staying at present.

The house itself is rather undistinguished from the outside, in the sense that it’s very square at the front, and the older part doesn’t seem to quite meld with the newer section. Be that as it may, inside it’s well worth visiting, as all these places have been. Paintings galore - I mean paintings on almost every available surface. This is typical of all these houses: dozens of ancestors stare down at you, and in Felbrigg’s case they’re joined by a lot of landscapes, far more than I remember coming across elsewhere, and many naval battles. Then there are all the busts, and a marvellous collection of bronze statues of heroic gods and picaresque scenes, such as a stag being held by three or four people, or a thoroughly weary stag almost lying on top of his beaten rival.

I meant to mention that on the outside of Felbrigg’s entrance, high up on the third floor, are the words Gloria Deo in Excelsis (Glory to God in the highest) carved out in letters large enough to read easily from some distance.

The library is so full there’s a second room with books - perhaps a reading room - and then there’s a little alcove off that again, sunny and uncluttered, where someone could sit and read, or contemplate. There are a lot more modern books in this library than we’ve seen in other libraries too - modern in the sense that they may have actually been published in the 20th century. One of the Walpoles was obviously a favourite of some inhabitant of the house, as possibly all of his published works are there. (Having said that, I thought at first it was Hugh Walpole, who, incidentally, was born in NZ. However, it may have been Horace Walpole, who was an 18th century author.)

There’s also a headless lady from around 300 AD - she sits in a rather lonely fashion amongst all the stuffed birds in a kind of museum area. Not a very dignified place for such an elderly person, I would have thought.

One of the plastered ceilings consists of large ‘drops’ - I don’t know the technical name for them; they’re rather like huge upside-down chess pawns. Another one is ornate in an almost rococo style.

It’s very hard to convey any sense of these places. They’re so full of magnificent works and of wonderful design that you walk through them, mouth open, but not entirely taking it all in. A second and third visit might begin to help you become familiar with the place and its treasures. But there are so many houses around the country, and so much treasure in them, it’s unlikely we’ll get to see any of them more than once.

Ickworth House

We found our way to Ickworth House today. Turns out to be only about ten minutes from where we’re staying. It’s not as old as the other two National Trust homes we’ve been to, and it’s larger and more imposing than either of them. An enormous rotunda (see picture) is the centrepiece of the building, with east and west wings extending from it. The interior of the rotunda is about all that’s available to view; the west wing contains a large restaurant, foyer and the obligatory shop while the east wing has been formed into a hotel.
Ickworth must be one of the NT’s showpieces. Certainly a large amount of money has gone into keeping it up to scratch, aided by the fact that the family who owned it put plenty of solid money into it over various generations.
The house and gardens (some 1800 acres of them!) have been in the Hervey family since the mid-fifteenth century, but Ickworth House was only begun in 1795. It was the creation of a rather eccentric member of the Hervey family: Frederick, the 4th Earl of Bristol and also the Bishop of Derry, neither places being remotely near Ickworth, as far as I know. Frederick can’t have had a lot of time to be a Bishop, as he spent much of his life collecting things for his house – mostly abroad in Europe. Consequently, the house has a host of marvellous silverware, gold plate, various statues and busts, an intriguing collection of metal fish thingees - I can’t remember their purpose – around thirty miniatures, stuff from the Orient, and umpteen paintings, mostly portraits. Included amongst these are works by Gainsborough, Hogarth, Reynolds, Poussin, Velasquez and Titian. (I think there are actually only one each of the latter two artists, but the Titian is a superb portrait, the head shining out of a dark background.)
Besides all this, the design of the house is breathtaking. You walk into the Rotunda and there’s a large foyer, with a ceiling reaching up some thirty feet. When I say ceiling, I actually mean a glass roof, a curved glass roof. (One person there today was observantly asking: were the panes of glass actually curved, or just the shape of the roof as a whole?). Beyond this glass ceiling the building goes up further, and by stretching your neck you can see a metal spiral staircase clinging to the side of the upper storeys, and more storeys above that again. As Celia said, you wouldn’t want to drop anything while you were up there.
Everything in every room smacks of wealth, and beauty, and good taste. The walls are covered in portraits, many of them nearly life size. I think there are over 200 portraits around the place. But the furniture and fittings and adornments are all top of their class. (Only one pair of ornaments, candleholders in the form of a couple of very pink cherubs, seemed kitsch rather than classy.)
There are around 7,000 books in the various shelves and the library. Many of them were rebound at the beginning of the 19th century to make sure they stayed whole. Apparently most have been read at some point, as there are pencil notes scattered throughout. (Those people who will insist on annotating their own books!)
The house and gardens were given to the National in 1956 in lieu of death duties. The east wing was supposed to stay in the hands of the family, but the rather notorious 7th Marquess of Bristol sold it to the NT in 1998. He had managed to blow a £30 million pound fortune away in his short life – he died at 44, possibly from AIDs and definitely after having been involved in the drug scene. The next Marquess in line tried to buy the east wing back, but the NT refused. However, they did complete the unfinished west wing, in partnership with Sodexho Prestige.

And gardens, and volunteers, and a bookshop

I barely mentioned the Gardens in my last post. Blickling Hall has enormous cultured gardens, with trees shaped in certain ways, thousands of plants of every kind, long walks both amongst trees and out in the open, a 'temple', various gazebos and so forth, and a lake. It's possible the lake is man-made, as was often the case with these stately homes. But I don't have anything to back that up, except that the other night I was watching a television program which talked about the way at a certain period in English history, the owners of such homes tended to reproduce the art of other countries, and to make their own lakes. These lakes were supposed to add to the beauty of the already beautiful surroundings, and often had little classical temples dotted around the banks.
It would take a month of Sundays to explore the gardens in their entirety, and it must take a large number of staff to keep them as beautiful as they are. I saw at least five workers while I was there, but I'd suspect there are a great many more.
There's also a secondhand bookshop within the grounds. Now you'd expect the restaurant, and even the area where they sell plants, but a secondhand bookshop? It's not just you're 'fit-in-the-corner' type bookshop either. It's very extensive, and has a great collection of books. It must do well - certainly there are plenty of visitors to Blickling, I'd imagine. It does have a name, but I can't remember it.
And one other point: the volunteers. In each room we went to there was at least one volunteer person directing traffic, or answering questions (with considerable knowledge about the place), or greeting people, or helping disabled people in and out of the lift, and so on. Most of them were well past retirement, and I don't think I'd envy the job of standing in a room for several hours at a time. But they all seemed to be taking it in their stride.