October | 2014 | That Cluckin' Bustard

As far back as the 1740s, the gardens of Stourhead were described as ‘a living work of art.’ The National Trust is particularly proud of these words and understandably so, for they encapsulate the reason why so many visitors pour through these gates each year. It might seem a rather indulgent review, but while walking around the grounds it doesn’t require a huge leap of the imagination to envisage your surroundings brushed across canvas by one of the great landscape masters. Orange, gold and powerful red leap from the various shades of green, all reflected in the sparkling lake. Indeed, the garden was even designed through an artist’s eye, with everything laid out so dark and light colours would provide one another with contrast and relief.

‘Mid-October to mid-November is the time when Stourhead truly glows,’ the Garden Manager is quoted as saying, and advice from such authority should be well recieved. The weekend we had chosen was a particularly busy one, with the grounds in the middle of their autumn peak as well as being the last one before the house closes its doors for the winter, but all the same the crowds were not too ferocious.

We allowed ourselves to be guided by the map we’d been given on arrival and, before the gardens, we followed the main driveway up towards the house, its grand stone facade revealed step by step as the flanking trees peeled away. According to Wikipedia, a miniature replica of the mansion was used as Lady Penelope’s home during the original Thunderbirds TV series, a wonderful fact if true and one that maybe the Trust could play on to enthuse children. As it is, they have this year brought in another feature to give something extra to the house, ‘Harry’s Story’, the tale of Harry Hoare’s childhood at Stourhead and eventual death in Alexandria during the First World War. It adds a human element and alongside him, of course, is reflected the decline of the nobleman, from lord of all he surveys to a relic of past times, clinging on to a rapidly receding relevance in the twentieth century. The story of the fire which destroyed large parts of the building in 1902 is also striking.

Despite the charms of the house, I couldn’t help feeling that going round it didn’t add a huge amount to the day as whole. It is undoubtedly a beautiful building but it isn’t presented in a way that feels particularly engaging. Many of the rooms are cluttered, as though the curators felt that every single item available to them must be crammed in and put on display when actually it may be a case of less is more. Of course, this is nothing more than my own perception, and many of the other visitors looked pretty well engrossed in the various exhibits, but I would rather be made to feel like I’m being taken back in time to see the house as it was lived in and at no point did I really feel under any such illusion.

View from the portico of Stourhead House.

The sun spilling into the Painting Room.

That is but than a minor quibble though, for the simple reason that nobody really comes to Stourhead for the house.

On we went, then, to the gardens. Their development draws on the principles of ‘genius loci’, using each added feature not just to thrill in its own right but also to provide a frame and viewpoint to the rest of the garden. With every step you are immersed anew inside a masterpiece; from every angle the effect is beautifully picturesque. The words of Alexander Pope, used to popularise these ideas, are engraved on wooden plaques near to one of the three temples which surround the central lake.

“Consult the genius of the place in all;
That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;
Or helps th’ ambitious hill the heav’ns to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,
Now breaks, or now directs, th’ intending lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.”

It is possible to do guided tours of the garden but we just went at our own pace, as the overwhelming majority also did. After a path wound us downhill, we arrived at the Temple of Flora, a relatively plain offering compared to the other two but providing some of the finest views across the lake from its portico. Understandably, this was one of the Lady of the House’s favourite places to entertain guests, most notably the wounded soldiers who would visit here during the First World War. Just outside, a small piece of land juts out into the water and here, between a willow tree and the Palladian Bridge, we sat down for our picnic. The sky became blue and the sun shone; you couldn’t ask more for a more perfect autumn setting for samosas and cheese sandwiches.

Looking to the Pantheon from the Temple of Flora.

The Pantheon, seen from the Temple of Flora.

The Palladian Bridge

Moving around the lake, a fork in the path gives the option of taking the steep slope up towards the Temple of Apollo, sitting grandly on its perch overlooking the entire scene. Getting there involves walking through a remarkable tunnel made of sharp rocks which hang closely above your head through the darkness, almost spear-like in form. Even more spectacular, though, is the view from the top as the whole garden opens up beneath you and presents nature’s full range of colours. The temple itself is also impressive, boasting a golden relief in its dome which depicts Apollo’s face in the centre of a beaming sun, but as always it is the way in which the building presents the overall vista that is most powerful.

Apollo in the golden sun.

The Pantheon, further round the lake again, is the largest and most important of the three temples. Based on its Roman namesake and the subject of a million Stourhead photographs, it houses statues of various gods under its grandly domed roof. Like the other temples and indeed the house itself, this fascination with the classical is reflected not just in the contents but in the architecture too, and it makes grand statements about the context in which they were built. The great columns and imposing facades could be lifted straight from Athens or Rome and they boast of the British nobility’s power and position as masters of the eighteenth century world. Adorned with heroes and gods, these designs had no room for humility.

Temple of Flora and the Palladian Bridge.

The Pantheon

More modest, so much so that it almost feels out of place, is the Gothic Cottage. Built of beams and thatch and perched on the edge of the lake, this hut offers a large open fire and hot drinks to warm you as you make your way around the water in the colder months. The grotto is also well worth the minor detour, featuring yet more classical statues incorporated into water features in a stony cave that opens up onto the lake. The falling water and natural light reflect off the brightly alien alabaster, a combination which made this odd little cave my favourite part of the garden.

The ornate pebbled floor of the Grotto.

The upper part of the circuit offers little variation, but more of the same is a very fine thing in this instance. We eventually exited through the village of Stourton, a tiny hamlet of no more than a few buildings which feels almost as though it is tucked inside the grounds of the estate itself. There are a couple of holiday cottages as well as the Spread Eagle Inn, an 18th century pub serving the most up-market food on the site, generally in the £10- 20 range. The village adds life to the place, but is also where the crowds become most noticeable on a busy day.

The Stourhead gardens are one of Wiltshire’s great gems. The house is perhaps less so but that doesn’t mean it should be avoided as it forms an integral part of the overall package which is so impressive. Each season brings its own charms and pleasures with the rhododendrons of spring being particularly popular. Whenever you visit though, be assured Stourhead will envelope you in a three-dimensional canvas, one which is worthy of even the greatest masterpiece.

Prices: £14.80 per person plus £3 parking. All free to National Trust members.

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Perhaps it was the whirling, twirling and blaring of the Marlborough Mop in the High Street outside that put such ideas into my head, but the wonky staircase felt almost like it belonged to a ‘Haunted House’ fairground attraction. The oak creaked loudly underfoot, the walls bent inwards under their own weight, the floors were uneven and wavy. All in all it almost presented a caricature of a seventeenth century house, the sort of place a 10 year old might conjure up if tasked with finding a home for an Elizabethan ghost.

But the Merchant House is far from a circus ride; rather, it is a remarkable piece of history, a living museum filled with fascinating pieces but where the main attraction is the building itself. To understand the House properly we should begin, as the tour does, with a brief overview of its past. In what seems something of a recurring theme of the era, a ‘Great Fire’ swept through Marlborough in 1653, decimating the High Street and much of the surrounding area. Oliver Cromwell, in an act of sympathy for a town that had loyally supported him during the Civil War, ordered a national collection in all parishes to remunerate its people. The second largest individual settlement from this generous pot was granted to Thomas Bayly, a silk merchant, who used it to build himself and his family this particularly fine home.

While the grand estates of the aristocracy and the wattle and daub huts of the poor have all been relatively well represented in TV and film, the homes and lifestyles of the nascent middle classes are lost to us in comparison. It is this rarity which makes the Merchant House and its ongoing restoration such a worthwhile endeavour, particularly as so many of its original features remain in tact.

Entrance is only allowed as part of a guided tour, days and times for which are available on their website, which is taken under the steering hand of one of their experienced and knowledgeable volunteers. Ours was the late Saturday afternoon shift and we were joined only by one other couple, a well-meaning but fairly dour pair upon whom almost all of our guide’s enthusiasm seemed to break imperviously like waves on a beach, but the interest never dimmed as a result.

We began in the first floor chamber at the front of the building. Entirely panelled in original oak, this remarkable room has the feel, and indeed the smell, of an old ship. To suddenly find yourself here you could be forgiven for assuming you were aboard the Victory rather than inside a Marlborough townhouse. The room has fallen victim to the settling of the building over the centuries, giving rise to a large ‘wave’ across the floor where the oak boards have draped themselves over a wall on the floor below, while the original stone fireplace has also cracked in a few places. If anything, though, this only serves to add to its authenticity and charm.

Inside the chamber, as with all the rooms, are a number of artifacts from around the time it was built, although of all these only a solitary earthenware wine jug in the kitchen actually belonged to the house. In one corner sits a chest into which somebody has rather charmingly etched the abridged version of their life story, complete with a spelling mistake that has seen them carve a line through the errant letter and write the correct one above. In the window sits an original stained glass panel of a sundial with the Latin quip, ‘Dum spectas fugio’- ‘While you look, I fly’; a rather poignant comment about fleetingness of time- painted onto it. The addition of a painted housefly rounds off this seventeenth century japery.

‘While you look, I fly’

The tour continued upstairs to a small room which the curators suspect to have been a study. Beyond the very faint remains of what seems to have been a crest painted above the fireplace, the room itself is fairly unremarkable. On a desk inside it, though, lay what I found to be the most exciting exhibit of the entire tour: an original copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, loaned to the House on the condition that it remain open to be read and touched rather than stuffed behind glass. I could picture the joy my A-Level history teacher would have taken in seeing this, one of the great early masterpieces of propaganda detailing the suffering of Protestant heroes at the hands of wicked Catholics. Even ignoring the content, the physical book itself was incredible: the invention of the printing press stands chronologically between the development of written language and the advent of the internet as one of humanity’s great leaps forward in information sharing, and here was something that rolled off one of those first primitive presses, laid out for visitors to touch and turn its pages.

Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, an original edition, sits on a desk in the study.

Further into the house, we were taken through a couple of bedrooms and the newly-restored kitchen before finishing in the dining room. Far be it from me to explain every single detail and every story the house has to tell, for that you should take a tour yourself, but there are further causes for fascination. The master bedroom and the dining room are decorated in exactly the way Bayly himself had them, restored after analysing the surviving sections of authentic paintwork. Interestingly, someone recently noticed a painting in the Netherlands which clearly depicts the room Bayly must have visited to receive his inspiration for the dining room decor. At the end we were shown to the small garden and left to wander around it at our own discretion, the different sections providing something for the horticulturalists but not really having the same impact as the house itself.

It goes without saying that those with no interest in history whatsoever will gain little from a trip to the Merchant House. For everyone else, though, there is certainly something to enjoy and you don’t need to be an aficionado in order to do so. Whether you are struck by one of the exhibits or simply enjoy the building itself, the modest entrance fee is well worth paying, especially considering you will receive the wisdom of a guide throughout. Speaking of which, I can only admire and applaud the incredible amount of time and work that everybody involved in the project volunteers in order to restore the house and share its story with the wider public. It might be hidden away, relatively unnoticed on the busy modern High Street, but the fruit of their dedication gives the Merchant House a sparkle, and Marlborough is all the richer for it.

Cost: £6 per person

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That Cluckin' Bustard

A travel blog about the wonders of Wiltshire

Month: October 2014

Art in Motion

The Merchant of Kennet