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.

Small doors

I don’t like 16th century houses with short doors. I raced up the stairs this evening to answer the phone in one of the upstairs rooms, lowered my head to get through the doorway and still managed to nearly knock myself out on the lintel. Forgot about the phone and struggled to retain my wits as I lay on the floor gasping with the pain. I can’t believe that people in the 16th century were ever this small. To get through two of the doors upstairs you have to perform the kind of manoeuvre you’d use in one of those dances where people form an arch and you go under it. Most people look as though they’re never going to make it through one of those, so imagine how they’d get on here.

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.

Sheringham...at last!

We made it to Sheringham today, the place my wife has most wanted to come back to. It’s where she grew up, and she has a great fondness for it. Consequently I got a running commentary on everything we passed, things that were still there and things that weren’t (such as one of the hotels near the beach), things that had changed (like houses on Beeston Bump) and things that had improved (the way the lifeboats go in and out), people who’d lived in certain spots (like the boy who wet his bed – hopefully he doesn’t still after forty something years), and who’d married who.
She met up with at least five women who knew her or other members of the family, from the two elderly ladies who lived in the same ‘Close’ as her family, to a woman selling crab meat from a stall, to the librarian who at first claimed vehemently that there had never been a Methodist church on the corner near the library and then had to admit defeat when Celia found it in one of the library books, to a woman in a pet shop who had worked under Celia’s big sister.
The houses in Sheringham have been greatly improved over the last few decades: everywhere you find solid plastic window frames (instead of aluminium ones), and plastic decoration around the doors and so on. The picturesque feature of these houses (it’s common throughout the coastal area of Norfolk, I think) is that the houses have brick corners but the central area of the outside walls are made of beach stones set in concrete. Nearly all the houses are two storeys, and many of them are attached to other houses. Brick is everywhere. Those houses that aren’t built with the stones, are all brick. Brick, with tile roofs, so there’s an overwhelming red brick feel to all the housing. (The beach stones make a nice contrast).
I must say I liked the place – and didn’t remember anything about it at all, even though I have been there once before with Celia, thirty-odd years ago. The beach isn’t my style of beach, with it’s heavy pebbles and stones before you reach the sand – and the sand is more orange than white, and more gritty underfoot. But the buildings around the beach area are delightful, all squashed together, with little yards and alleys running between them. It’s all very clean, and it looks as though the place is prospering. Certainly it was busy, even though it’s not the ‘season’ yet.
Just while I remember: a curious piece of Norfolk speech is that they say things like, ‘Come round to ours,’ or, ‘we’re going round to his,’ the ours and the his referring to the person’s house in each case. We’d say, ‘come round to our place,’ but the place gets lost in Norfolk.

Bearly Coping

The half a dozen teddy bears that we've got in the house (there are two more upstairs) have been ganging up on us. They want to go to England, and definitely don't want to be stuck in a room with all the bits and pieces that we're storing, for six months. They sit together with one of the large rugs wrapped around them, either watching telly, or muttering amongst themselves, and the other day, we came into the small lounge to find they'd written a note on an envelope: We're going to England, and we don't have to pack! I've tried to convince them that bears hibernate in the winter, so they won't even notice that we're gone, but they're not persuaded.

I'm not sure where all these bears have suddenly come from: there's Teddy, of course, who've been round almost as long as I have and has come back into view again after having been in hiding for years; there's Bill, with his little hooded jacket, his fluffy hair that gets in his eyes, and his please-love-me-because-I'm-a-pathetic-little-bear look – I suspect he's the ringleader because he thinks he's the most favoured. Balthazar, of course, just sits there being good and never saying a word out of place. He came to NZ from England with P G Tips, the scrawny and rather ugly little white bear who unaccountably went missing when the kids were quite young. He and Balthazar were in a trunk that got delayed on the way back from England, and I think we were more upset about not seeing them again than we were about the rest of the stuff that was in the trunk. And then there are a couple of other smaller bears who have come from nowhere: we think bears are breeding in the house.