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.

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