Going back in time

Well, we’ve hardly been living on the edge of late, but we did have lunch in a house built in 1570 today. As the host said, it’s amazing to think that Shakespeare was writing his plays around the time the house was built. Actually Shakespeare was only born in 1564, so he probably wasn’t writing much at that point, but you get the idea.

The people who own the house, which is situated near Bury St Edmunds, are both into the conservation of old buildings, and this place is a prime example of a house built (and restored) in the wattle and daub process. It has a thatched roof (I’m told thatched roofs are great, except that they need more frequent repair than more solid materials such as the tile roofs that are common everywhere in Norfolk) and that timber and ‘plaster’ look that’s typical of Elizabethan houses. (You can see some photos of the process of building one these houses here.)

It’s a bit weird going into a house this old (400 plus years), and sitting down at a table amongst furniture that’s also old (not as old as the house, but still old). On the walls are photographs of various ancestors in the typical serious poses of the early 20^th century and before, and the floors in the kitchen are made of bricks on sand. Apparently that stays very dry. The rooms have an uneven look about them, and even though I’m only 5’6” tall, I hit my head on one of the door frames, and would have hit it on more if I hadn’t watched out. Even the ceiling beams are within inches of my head.

The house has mod cons, of course, because these are 21^st century people, but it retains the atmosphere of a home built centuries ago – plenty of creaking floors, for example. (There were plenty of those upstairs at Blickling Hall as well – no doubt there for the benefit of Anne Boleyn’s ghost!).

We’re going back to this house mid-July, to stay there for a week, so you’ll no doubt hear more about it.

Blickling Hall

Today we finally did a bit of real sightseeing stuff and went to Blickling Hall. No, not Blinking, but Blickling, which is a marvellous old house/mansion/stately home near Aylsham (pronounced Aylsham!).

It’s a Jacobean house, which means it’s nearly four hundred years old – it was built between 1616 and 1627 – but it’s in great condition, and much of the original interior is as it was when it was built. There have been numerous alterations as well – like my wife, the owners of this house have never been content to keep it as it was – and the main staircase in the front hall is different to the way it began, and now goes in a different direction; various bathrooms have been substantially altered and rooms that were something before are now something else. Sounds so much like our place!

The house is full of paintings – most of them portraits, including one of Henry VIII by Holbein. There are a couple of Van Dyks, and no doubt there are other famous ones that I missed noting because I was overawed by the place.

The library is a massive long room with a plaster ceiling, which has a basic pattern to it, but between the pattern are a considerable number of separate sculptured sections of people and insignias and so forth. Below this is a painted frieze that goes all the way round the hall; it must be very early as the colours have faded a good deal and the detail isn’t as clear as it would have been. Below this again are some 12,000 books, scholarly works that a cousin of the then owner collected.

The plaster ceilings throughout the house are extraordinary, filled with detail, as are the fireplaces, some of which stretch from floor to ceiling. They’re enormous works of art, two or three metres wide, and three or four metres high.

The house we saw today is the second to built on the site: the original house was substantially pulled down and rebuilt for the Hobarts in the early 1600s. It had a proper moat – there’s no water in the current ‘moat’ – and it was also famous as being the family home of the Boleyns. Anne Boleyn, as you might recall, became the second wife of Henry VIII (who can’t keep out of the picture, apparently). Her ghost is still supposed to haunt the place, as is that of her father. He runs about the place once a year, and Anne appears on the anniversary of her execution. Which apparently wasn’t today.

I said to Celia on the way into the building: this is like the setting for some film, and it turns out the The Wicked Lady, with Margaret Lockwood and James Mason, was filmed there in 1945.

Blickling Hall – and 4,500 acres of estate - was left to the National Trust in 1940. It was used as an Officers’ Mess during the War, and finally opened to the public in 1962.

For more detail on its history, click here.

Photo by Nick Meers, copyright National Trust