Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Uffington, Lincolnshire


Tame and wild

I’d probably not normally have given the two lodges outside the village of Uffington, near Stamford, a very long glance. As we passed, we wondered what house might lay behind them and I thought they might be early-19th century. Then suddenly, simultaneously, two pairs of eyes met two pairs of eyes.’Look! Wild men!’ we cried, seeing the carvings on top of the rusticated gate piers. Wild men, men of the woods, wodewose – grisly of hair and beard, they have various names and many incarnations, but are unusual adornments for a pair of gates at the entrance to a country house.§ They seemed worth another look, so I began to search for somewhere to pull in.

The parking place turned out to be next to a pub, the Bertie Arms, and I realised the significance of the carvings on the gate piers. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Bertie wild men.’ The remark brought an interrogative stare from the Resident Wise Woman. ‘The Bertie family,’ I said. ‘They have a wild man on their coat of arms.’* I knew about Bertie wild men because there is one on one of their family tombs in the church in Spilsby, also in Lincolnshire, near where I was born – although what we were actually looking at were Saracens – see the note* below.
Looking the place up afterwards, I learned that Uffington House had been built for Charles Bertie, 2nd Earl of Lindsey in the 1680s and was destroyed in a fire in 1904. It was one of those late-17th century houses with rows of sash windows, a hipped roof, dormers and a central pediment.† Now this gateway and some other gate piers remind passers-by of the house’s presence and these very Classical, civilised-looking lodges make a memorable contrast with the splendid, vigorously carved heads atop the piers who, making a welcome change from the usual urns, stare wide-eyed across the fields towards Bourne, Spalding, and the endless fens.

- - - - -

§ Wild men are everywhere in myth, literature, and heraldry. Perhaps Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the most ancient of all surviving epics, is the first wild man; they are still around in the works of Tolkien and Ted Hughes. They occur on coats of arms from the low countries to Central Europe, and Antwerp has a wild man and a wild woman as supporters of their arms. The Danish royal arms has wild men supporters and when the Danes began to rule Greece, the wild men became figures representing their Classical cousin Herakles.

* There were no wild men on the pub sign, though, presumably because the wild man on the coat of arms is one of the supporters, and the pub sign did not show these. A reader has pointed out that a wild man does indeed appear as a supporter on the Bertie coat of arms; what is on the gate piers is actually their crest (the symbol on the top of the arms), which is a crowned saracen's head.

† Uffington was one of the hundreds of houses included in the famous 1974 V&A exhibition The Destruction of the Country House.
  

10 comments:

  1. I have often passed by a grand entrance or gateway that appears to have no building behind it and wondered what could have been there. An entrance can be very evocative. I would never have picked up on your Wildman reference!
    On a much less impressive scale, near here there are a pair of pillars which very few people even notice, at a local street junction. It turns out that they are all that remains of the gates to Wanstead House which stood half a mile away. You can see them here:

    https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5697659,0.0234028,3a,84.9y,106.31h,89.46t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sXnDmwX6v2rrCgAHeYtWQBA!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo1.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DXnDmwX6v2rrCgAHeYtWQBA%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D278.25885%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656

    CLICK HERE for Bazza’s egregious Blog ‘To Discover Ice’

    ReplyDelete
  2. I forgot to mention that you might be interested in my current post about Chartwell.
    CLICK HERE for Bazza’s unimaginable Blog ‘To Discover Ice’

    ReplyDelete
  3. "Brush up on your heraldry," might be the motto here. Lady Charlotte Bertie of course became Lady Charlotte Guest of Merthyr Tydfil, whose major contribution to Welsh culture was her brilliant translation of the Mabinogion. Was she connected with Uffington?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Bazza: Thank you for the link. Chastening that those piers are all that is left of the vast Wanstead House.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Joseph: Yes! Lady Charlotte was born at Uffington. I didn't know much about her, apart from the fact that she had translated the Mabinogion, but she seems to have been a remarkable woman.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Ooh lodges that have lost their house. Julia Smith was good on this in her entry for Blatherwyke in the Shell Guide to Northamptonshire.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Peter: Just looked it up: thank you. I see she says such places are fitting settings for an M R James ghost story. How true, and if such a story had a gateway with wild men popping up in the dead of night, it would be spooky indeed.

    ReplyDelete
  8. And just round the corner from the pub there are two pairs of hugely elegant gates, with their piers, leading from the [former] house to the village church. Hope you noticed them as I can't send you my picture....

    ReplyDelete
  9. The figures on the gates are the Bertie crest, a crowned saracen's head. The earl of Lindsey's right-hand supporter was a wild man but he is not what's on the gate. It hardly matters as in most representations they are indistinguishable. The house was destroyed in a fire but the orangery survived and was used to store the objects saved from the blaze. There they were left to rot by the 12th earl's daughter, a notoriously bad landlord. Her son, David Liddell-Grainger, finally sold off everything that was left at Uffington. He kept some of the Bertie artefacts at his home in Scotland, Ayton Castle. His widow has now sold even those and they have been popping up in salerooms for the last few years. David's son Ian is an MP.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Norreys: Thank you for this correction. I'll add an amendment to the post, so that readers aren't misled.

    ReplyDelete