Snowshill, Gloucestershire

Wolf’s Cove

The other week the Resident Wise Woman and I revisited one of our local Cotswold country houses, Snowshill Manor, a place we had not been to for years. Snowshill, a 16th-century building much altered over the years, is now best known fior the collection it houses, which belonged to the architect-craftsman-artist-collector Charles Paget Wade, who bought the house in 1919. Wade’s collection is so large that it fills every room and spills over every surface. There is one room full of suits of samurai armour, another housing a large collection of musical instruments, one full of weaving equipment and domestic appliances, an attic room containing many bicycles, models of traditional British farm wagons, and perambulators. The theme that unites these apparently random and undoubtedly diverse objects is above all their owner’s passion for craftsmanship in all its forms. Wade would buy broken items and learn how to mend them himself, in the process giving himself a deeper understanding of how they were made. So Snowshill is a three-dimensional portrait of his interests and obsessions. Stepping inside the house, more than any place I know apart perhaps from Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, is like taking a trip inside its owner’s head.

After the frantic plenitude of the house, it’s a relief to step outside into the garden, arranged as a series of courtyards by Wade, taking advice from his friend the great Arts and Crafts architect M. H. Baillie Scott. In a corner of the garden is another Wadeish eccentricity, a model village that he called Wolf’s Cove. Before World War I, Wade lived in Hampstead (he had worked with the architects Parker and Unwin on the garden city at Letchworth and the planning of Hampstead Garden Suburb). While there he had created in his garden one of the earliest outdoor model villages, and when he moved he took its buildings to Snowshill and re-erected them, adding more buildings and turning it into a sea port. Houses cluster around the end of the harbour, straggle up the slope beyond, and there is also a railway and station (invisible in my photograph, it is to the left behind the wall).

J. B. Priestley is his book English Journey (1934) describes visiting the manor and seeing Wolf’s Cove. He calls the village ‘boy’s play on a smashing adult scale, defying all common sense but glorious in its absorption in the exquisitely useless’. Priestley also points out that all the buildings (with the exception of the walls and jetty of the port) are moveable, and are designed to be taken down and put into indoor storage in winter. At the time of Priestley’s visit, Wade was making drawings for a possible castle to overlook the village, but that’s a project that does not seem to have got off the drawing board.

Wade gave up his architectural practice to concentrate on running his house and its eccentric collection, funding his obsessions with a private income, I believe. Making the buildings for his model village must have been a sort of surrogate architecture for him. For modern visitors, leaving the eccentricity of house for the quiet beauty of the garden, it’s one reminder that we have not quite escaped the bizarre magpie world of Charles Paget Wade.

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*Wade’s village has a claim to be the first of all miniature villages. This label is usually given to Bekonscot, near Beaconsfield (begun in the 1920s), however, presumably on the grounds that it has always been in the same location and was always a permanent construction, not one designed to be taken indoors in winter. However, if primacy of the idea is important, Wade should be given credit too.

Moreton Corbet, Shropshire

 

Gorgeous and stately

Looking at this end-on view of the ruin of Moreton Corbet Castle’s south range, you’d not think it was a castle at all, in the strict medieval sense . The same would be true of a view across the fields taking in what is left of the long south front of which my photograph above shows one corner. What is here are clearly the remains of an Elizabethan country house, and one of some grandeur. It was built by Robert Corbet at the end of the 16th century, who was extending the work done by his father, Sir Andrew, who had begun to transform the structure of his family’s ancestral medieval castle.

Sir Andrew turned his castle into a more fashionable residence by building new rooms against the old curtain wall. Ruins of these are still seen on the other half of the site, to the left of the building in my photograph. Sir Andrew died in 1578, and Robert was more radical, adding this new south range to create what Camden called a ‘gorgeous and stately house’. Its curvy gables, classical pilasters and large, rectangular mullioned windows will be familiar to anyone who’s seen more famous houses of this period – Blickling in Norfolk, for example has similar gables and windows; so does Montacute in Somerset.

So this is high-status building, and the amount of effort and expense involved in its construction is confirmed by the details, especially the pilasters and attached columns, together with the friezes they support (photograph below). These feature a variety of roundels, bits of strapwork, and carved animals of various kinds, some from the standard repertoire of the time (decorative flourishes influenced, like the house’s gables, by contemporary Flemish architecture), but also the heraldic beasts of the Corbet family.

Why is this marvel of late-Tudor architecture now a ruin? During the English Civcil Wars there was much fighting around the house (which was then occupied by Sir Vincent Corbet, who was on the royalist side). As a result, the house was badly damaged, and although the family continued to live in it, they abandoned it in the 18th century. There were plans to build a new house on the site but these came to nothing and the building was left to decay. It is a magnificent, if tantalising, ruin.

Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

No madding crowd

Yes, this is something you don’t often see on this blog: a really famous building. It’s Shakespeare’s birthplace, the house in Stratford that in normal times attracts crowds inside and out. But as we were emerging out of lockdown last month, Stratford was still quiet and I took the opportunity to take a photograph of the building without anyone standing in front of it. It’s not known for sure how long this house has stood here, but we do know that John Shakespeare, the poet’s father, was living here by 1552, when he was fined for leaving a midden heap (dumping trash, you might say) in the street outside. Not an auspicious entry into the historical record, but Shakespeare senior rose to prominence in Stratford-upon-Avon. A dealer in wool and hides and a maker of gloves, he was an alderman and spent a period as the town’s High Bailiff.

William Shakespeare inherited the house in 1601, by which time he was a successful playwright in London with his own house in his home town. So he leased the house to tenants. By the early-19th century, there were no surviving direct descendants of the dramatist, and the house fell into disrepair and was partly refaced in brick. When it came on the market in 1849, P. T. Barnum announced that he wanted to buy it, take it apart, and rebuild it in America. This was the spur that the British admirers of Shakespeare needed to buy the house themselves and preserve it. They raised the money, and repaired and refaced the building so that it looked much more like its 16th-century self.

At the same time, the second half of the 19th century saw a revaluation of Shakespeare as a writer. New editions of his works came out, a Shakespeare festival was started in Stratford, and a theatre was built to put on the plays. Shakespeare turned into a kind of national symbol (or at least into a symbol of England’s outstanding achievements in the arts), and Stratford attracted visitors from all over the world. Insofar as the street was quiet the other day, I welcomed the fact that the crowds of Shakespearian pilgrims were not visiting Stratford. But the bustle of the town in normal times, with its mixture of shoppers, theatre-goers, students, culture tourists, and even the odd literary scholar, cannot be too far from the diverse crowd that attended the plays in London’s Globe theatre in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Let’s hope they can return soon.

Great Brington, Northamptonshire

These premises are alarmed!

And so, having taken in the dovecote at Harlestone and its adjacent laundry, to nearby Great Brington, to look at the church and have lunch with a friend. In the church I was prepared to be amazed at the panoply of Spencer monuments, which famously fill a memorial chapel adjoining the chancel.* Sadly, the chapel is fenced off with locked railings. There were notices hanging on these railings, which I expected to contain helpful captions identifying the figures on the tombs, but they turned out to bear warnings that the chapel was alarmed and requests that visitors should not poke their hands or noses through the bars. So one had simply to peer.

What one can make out in the gloom is truly spectacular., A series of large monuments, several with life-size effigies, dating from the 16th to the 19th centuries and including works by Nicholas Stone, Nollekens, and Flaxman. The Elizabethan and Jacobean ones are painted in the dazzling array of colours and patterns that people then loved. They are set about with obelisks, columns, pediments, and an array of other architectural devices. The painting and carving was restored, beautifully, by the 7th Earl Spencer in 1946.

I offer a couple of pictures of this rich but inaccessible treasure. The first is a close-up of one of the heads that can be seen through the railings: that of Robert, 1st Baron Spencer, made in 1599 by Jasper Hollemans of Burton-upon-Trent.† The head of the deceased rests on his helm, which has a bird crest visible in the left foreground of my picture. The hair and ruff are cut with the crisp deep detail usual on the best monuments of the time; the face has a chiselled character that must be attributable to the subject as much as to the sculptor.

 As a contrast, here’s some of the decoration around the tomb of Sir John Spencer (died1586) by the same artist. Here we see the top of an obelisk covered with strap work and finished off with a golden ball finial. There are also architraves, mouldings, and friezes decorated with a range of pattern, stipple, and mottled paintwork, plus a modicum of gilding. At the top is another bird crest which is just one tiny heraldic detail (there are many coats of arms in the pediment, not visible in my image).

I can understand the family not wanting crowds getting too near all this precious statuary and paintwork, whatever other reasons there may be for fitting alarms in the Spencer Chapel. I remain grateful for the glimpses I could take, and also hopeful against hope that one day they’ll let the rest of us marvel at their artistic and funerary heritage. 

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*Spencer being the family of Diana, Princess of Wales, although the church is famous as the place in which Princess Diana is not buried. Her grave is on an island in the grounds of the nearby family house, Althorp.

†Hollemans was a Dutchman who came to England in the 1580s; Burton-upon-Trent was a centre of alabaster carving. The Hollemans family were Protestant refugees, as were some of the other craftsmen who worked at such major English houses as Burghley around this time. The refugees (Dutch, Flemish, French, and so on) joined other groups from Europe who had recently settled here and who might be called ‘economic migrants’ today: the French ironworkers who settled in the Weald, the German miners of Keswick, and the master glaziers who worked in places such as York. Britain’s commerce, art, and industry gained greatly from such arrivals from the mainland.

Canons Ashby, Northamptonshire

Backward glance (4): Finding Canons Ashby

This backward glance recalls another discovery of my teenage years. The big house seemed abandoned back then, but at least it had escaped the great cull of country houses that had taken place in the 1950s and 1960s. I'm glad the place was saved by the National Trust, although one of its literary connections still nags away at me – although I did read Pamela once, I've never made much headway with the novels of Samuel Richardson...

I remember when I first stumbled across this place. Passing a knot of stone outbuildings and rounding a sharp bend, there was a high brick wall pierced with mullioned windows. As we continued a little further and pulled up by the side of the lane, this beautiful front was revealed across a lawn. We had found Canons Ashby.

All those years ago, the house looked neglected and sad. Walls were bowing. I think I remember weeds sprouting from the fabric here and there. We poked around a bit and a local woman appeared from a nearby cottage. We learned that Canons Ashby was the ancestral home of the Drydens (the poet’s family), who had lived here since the 17th century, but who now lived in Africa. As the sun warmed the Northamptonshire stone and and brought out colours ranging from raspberry to apricot in the brickwork, the place looked magical. Inside, we were told, nothing much had changed for 250 years. And all this history looked as if it would soon turn into another ruin, another lost country house.

That it did not do so was mostly due to Gervase Jackson-Stops, architectural advisor to the National Trust and a great scholar of and friend of country houses. Jackson-Stops not only fought to save the place, but also pioneered an arrangement under which government money was used to endow a house given to the National Trust – the first time the Trust had accepted a building with this source of endowment.

The place has blossomed since it was taken under the National Trust’s wing in 1981. The dry rot is gone, the structure has been strengthened, and conservators working for the Trust discovered enchanting 16th-century murals under layers of paint, to add to delights ranging from elaborate plaster ceilings to the vast kitchen, which, until 1938 contained the only tap (cold, of course) in the house. The library even houses a signed copy of Sir Charles Grandison by Samuel Richardson, one of the fathers of the English novel. Apparently he wrote the book at Canons Ashby: another literary link. It’s heartening to know that the fragile beauty of this place has been saved.

Eyton on Severn, Shropshire

Rooms with a view

Rounding a bend in a lane in Shropshire, I caught a sudden glance of a small pointed roof and stopped to find this little tower, apparently stranded on its own next to a tall garden wall. It is stranded because it is the last remaining fragment of Eyton Hall, the home of Shropshire grandee Sir Francis Newport, who rebuilt his house in the 1590s and early 1600s. The tower was one of a pair, standing at either end of a bowling green, and its artful plan (based on two conjoined octagons), diaper-patterned masonry, and ogee-capped roof are typical of the more ornate style of English architecture at the end of the Elizabethan period.

The building was what was known as a banqueting house. The tradition was for those enjoying a grand meal to take the last course – fruit, comfits, dessert wine – in a garden pavilion or tower, where they could enjoy a view across the garden. It was perhaps the closest they got to al fresco eating, an architectural concession to the English climate akin to Elizabethan long galleries, which enabled Tudor and Jacobean ladies to enjoy a walk without going outside to face the elements. Some of the grandest of country houses, such as Longleat, had banqueting houses in the form of towers on the roof, but  pavilions like this one at Eyton did the job just as well, while also maintaining a closer connection with the garden.

It's possible to enjoy this little tower not merely as I did, as a passer-by, but more intimately. It is in the care of the Vivat Trust, who let it out as a holiday home. The details, together with more historical information about the building and its history, are here.

Wendover, Buckinghamshire

Bucks bricks

Walking around Wendover looking at house fronts and brickwork, I was soon struck by Vine Tree House, with its front of about 1700. In a mottled wall of varicoloured brickwork – predominantly diverse shades of red but with darker bricks dotted around in it – are sash windows and a simple door case with bracketed canopy above. The cut outline of the brackets give the door case just a hint of swagger, no more. Very English. Looking at the house at first from the front, it didn't take me long spot that all was not as it seemed. The off-centre door and the uneven spaces between some of the windows didn't seem quite right for a building of 1700 or soon after – and what was that roof poking out above the parapet?

When I got to the corner of the building, all was clear, as you can see. This is actually a much older timber-framed building, which has been refronted – something that quite often happened when timber framing went out of fashion, as I've noticed in this blog before. The end of the building comes from another world – all irregular, with a half hip to the roof and a variety of beams that are probably Elizabethan or maybe early-17th century. But the spaces between the timbers are filled with brick hogging, so thanks to these red bricks, the structure has some visual unity after all. Very English indeed.

Don't mock Tudor

Christmas books: 4

The fourth of my Christmas handful of books actually came out last year, but it struck me as so relevant to the concerns of the English Buildings blog that it easily earned its place here. It is about what for many is the quintessential English building style: Tudoresque...

Andrew Ballantyne and Andrew Law, Tudoresque: In Pursuit of the Ideal Home
Published by Reaktion

Tudoresque – shorthand for the architectural style typified by black and white walls and prominent gables – is something of a national obsession in Britain, and a symbol of our culture. But its modern incarnation, mock Tudor, is decried for the fakery of stuck-on beams and imitation leaded lights. So why are we so preoccupied by it – whether we're in love with it or, like many design professionals and architects, scornful of its suburban manifestations? This is among the questions that Andrew Balantyne and Andrew Law (professors respectively of architecture and town planning) seek to answer in this lively book. They trace the style's 16th-century roots, its various reincarnations – during the vague for the "Picturesque" in around 1800, as a revivalist style (influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement) in the late-19th century, and as mock-Tudor suburban architecture in the 1920s and later.

Fascinatingly, Ballantyne and Law also trace the style's meanings for its revivers – those values that it has seemed to embody and that have been attractive to lovers of Tudoresque down the ages. It turns out that these meanings are far from simple. On the one hand, there is the Tudor style as a symbol of paternalistic old values: of manor houses, aristocrats who look after their patch and their servants, benevolent industrialists housing their workers. This is one-nation Tudorism, if you like, with a lavish portion of the roast beef of old England. From another point of view, it's the style of self-reliance,  of the lower middle class making ends meet, of squatters putting up a timber-framed house on common ground overnight and claiming the right to live there, of the Elizabethan ideal of a cottage with four acres of land, of suburban owner-occupiers.

Ballantyne and Law tease out these meanings carefully, showing that if such subtexts are no longer directly relevant (few people build and squat nowadays) they are still there somewhere in our unconscious, and they contribute the way in which we see things. If Tudoresque cottages appealed to the creators of the Picturesque landscapes of the 18th and 19th centuries, symbolizing patriotism, they also embody values of tradition and Britishness to many dwellers in modern half-timbered homes.  The authors also look at the vogue for Tudoresque in other countries, where it is seen in part as a symbol of Britishness and British values, whether in the swanky abodes of early-20th century US industrialists or in smaller Manhattan apartment blocks, which occasionally resemble Tudor skyscrapers.

Tudoresque pulls all these threads together well. It encompasses real timber-framed buildings and faux-Tudor houses with boards nailed on to brick walls, and shows that what they have in common is more than skin-deep. It made me think more deeply about why people built these houses the way they did, about the gulf that sometimes opens up between architects and home-owners, and about what makes Britain British.

Broughton, Oxfordshire

Across the fields and through the trees

To walk across green fields up to the beautiful Elizabethan front of Broughton Castle on a sunny morning is a real pleasure. Even if the sun is lighting up the other side of the house, the building still looks well, ringed by its moat and surrounded beyond by pastures full of baaing sheep and lambs. The place seems the essence of continuity of landscape, settlement, and building. And so it proves. The core of the house dates from the 14th century, but there was a major remodelling in the 16th century, since when not a great deal has changed – even the ownership: Broughton came into the Fiennes family in 1451, and it remains with them today.

The north front, shown in the picture above, is from the 16th-century, and it’s typically Elizabethan. The large mullioned windows, tall ornate chimney stacks, prominent gables, big bays, and central oriel are all typical of Elizabethan architecture, as is the general overall near-symmetry of the layout. If this had been a completely new build, there would most likely have been perfect symmetry and a central door. But because the original medieval room layout was preserved, with a great hall with an entrance passage at one end, things don’t match up perfectly, and the door is set to one side, cunningly concealed in the side of one of the window bays.

At the left-hand end, a battlemented wing protrudes. This is part of the earlier fabric, as the Gothic window suggests. There are more Gothic details on the east front, visible through trees from the main road and seen in my second photograph. In spite of the battlements, though, this was never a true castle. It was a fortified manor house protected by a gatehouse, moat, and minimal military features, and a very fine one too.

Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire

Architecturally incorrect

It’s a happy coincidence that I visited Sunningwell, in the previous post, within a few days of going to Chipping Campden, where in the large 15th-century parish church I found this memorable monument in the chancel. Although quite large, it’s easy to overlook in a church that contains still bigger, more eye-catching tombs not far away. What links the monument to Sunningwell is that it’s from the Tudor period and is another example of the arrival of a particularly eccentric architectural classicism in England.

It’s the monument of Sir Thomas Smyth, who died in 1593, and what concerns me here is not his effigy, recumbent on its tomb chest, the head resting on the knight’s metal helmet, nor the figures of his two wives and 13 children arranged around the base, charming as they are. What I’m interested in is the canopy.


You can tell straight away that this is a classical structure – there are Corinthian columns with their capitals of curly acanthus leaves, holding up a canopy topped with a triangular pediment. But look a bit more closely and the design breaks all the rules. The pediment does not run the whole width of the frontage and is far too high – and there’s half of another pediment on the short side. The carving in the triangle depicts not classical scenes but a coat of arms. Around the frieze beneath run designs that are neither Greek nor Roman but Elizabethan patterns including, near the corners, motifs that look a bit like interlaced strips of leather and are known as strapwork – there are also large versions of these on the underside of the canopy. And another thing – at the front there are three columns, one at each corner and one in the centre. True classical design does not use odd numbers of columns – an even number is used, so that there’s a gap, not a column in the middle.

All of which is enough to tell you that this monument has not been built according to the rules laid down by the architects of ancient Greece or Rome, or of their Italian Renaissance imitators. And this is not surprising, because English builders of this period got their knowledge of classical architecture not from Greece or Rome, where virtually none of them had been, but from France and the Netherlands, where the classical style had already been adopted and developed with the addition of different kinds of ornament. When the English took it over, they put their special spin on it too. The result: architectural hybrids like this tomb canopy.

But what a glorious hybrid! The monument is carved with vigour. It makes you look, but it doesn't dominate the entire church. The blend of Roman details and English ornament is happy. The whole thing has a liveliness that later English Classicism sometimes lacks. It reminds me a little of Shakespeare, its contemporary, who had ‘small Latin and less Greek’, but who put what he had to good use, in order to make something out of it that was special and rich and, occasionally, strange.

Sunningwell, Berkshire*

Classicism, Tudor-style

St Leonard’s church, Sunningwell, is a small parish church mostly built in the medieval period and restored by the Victorians. It has one extraordinary feature: this seven-sided porch at the west end, added to the church just after 1550. I’ve no idea why the porch should have seven sides, although the number seven is a widespread one in Christian symbolism, from the seven days of the rcreation to the seven last words of Jesus on the cross. The porch is interesting not only because of its seven-sided form, but also because of its mixture of architectural styles – it’s half-Gothic and half-Classical.

This strange stylistic mix is very much of its time, the second half of the 16th century. In this period, rural buildings were still using the Gothic style of the previous century, with its pointed arches and cusped window openings, though the pointed arches had got flatter (as in the doorway here) and the windows were sometimes rectangular rather than pointed. More adventurous builders, though, were learning about the Classical style of ancient Greece and Rome – but their Tudor Classicism is often an insular affair, in which the standard designs of columns and capitals aren’t in quite the right proportions (there is often the addition of decidedly unclassical ornament, too).

At Sunningwell, the columns are of the Ionic order, the one with the spiral volute decoration, but the spirals here are much smaller than on Greek or Roman buildings. And whereas Ionic columns are usually fluted, these are plain. So these details represent a rustic form of Classicism, but they’re still remarkable – Sunningwell may be the first English parish church to have Classical columns supporting part of its fabric.

The reason for this unusual stylistic adventure in a rural church is that the porch was paid for by a man of great learning and international connections. John Jewel, scholar of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, theologian, apologist of the Anglican church, and eventually Bishop of Salisbury, began his church career as rector of Sunningwell in the 1550s. His learning no doubt influenced the design of the porch, setting a trend in architecture in the unlikely setting of a quiet English village.

*I'm using the traditional county divisions here, as does Pevsner's Buildings of England series. Postally, the village is in Oxfordshire.

Ledbury, Herefordshire

Colours of history

Long ago in another life I was an editor of illustrated books and many was the discussion I had with my colleagues about the merits and otherwise of the various artists who worked as illustrators. I remember one occasion when we were discussing illustrators of historical subjects and the work of a particular artist came up in the conversation, someone who was known for artwork that was both historically accurate and highly atmospheric – but in which the atmosphere was often pervaded with clouds or stormy weather. ‘Ah,’ said a colleague. ‘It was always raining in the ancient world.’

Even in these days of colour reproduction and the electric glow of the internet, it’s all too easy to think of history before the Renaissance as taking place in a palette of greys under a cloudy sky. Most medieval churches no longer have their wall paintings and stained glass; castles have lost their banners and heraldry; we talk about black-and-white houses and silvery stone; we imagine peasants grubbing around in dingy hovels. This view of the Middle Ages is way off target, of course, as I've noticed before.

We know more about the colour and comfort of the Tudor period, from the surviving great houses. The grandest Elizabethan rooms were heated with big fireplaces and walls hung with thick tapestries. But how were smaller buildings decorated? What options were open to you if you couldn’t afford rich tapestries? A look inside most small Elizabethan houses today and the chances are you’ll find a very simple colour scheme – pale plasterwork and perhaps, if the building is timber-framed, the same ‘black and white’ effect as on the exterior.

But it wasn’t always like this. In Ledbury is the rare survival of a 16th-century colour painted interior. Here the walls were decorated in a pattern that imitates the designs of contemporary tapestries – stylized flowers and fruit within intricate borders resembling the formal hedges of an Elizabethan knot garden. Their splashes of red, blue and gold must have glowed 500 years ago.


In addition there are panels bearing inscriptions, quotations from the Books of Psalms and Proverbs, instructing us how to live our lives. ‘Better is a dinner with greene hearbes where love is, then a fat oxe and hatred therewith.'* According to some sources, the presence of these sententious moral comments may relate to the fact that this building might once have been used as a local court – probably a court of ‘pie-powder’, dealing with the running of the town’s market and related matters. I'm not so sure: the sentiments seem more domestic to me.

Whatever their origins, these rare painted walls give us a precious insight into the way provincial buildings could be decorated in the 16th century. At least some people aspired to the kind of colour more readily accessible to the upper classes. And the setting of history was not always black, white, or grey.

*Proverbs 15.17, Geneva Bible. Thanks to the readers who identified the translation.

Horningsham, Wiltshire

Discreet meeting place

Strung out along a valley in Wiltshire, Horningsham is a straggling village belonging to the estate of Longleat, the 16th-century prodigy house belonging to the Marquis of Bath. Scattered thatched cottages, a pub (the Bath Arms, naturally), and a church sit behind hedges, down slopes, and across greens. There is a backdrop of woods and parkland and a pervasive feeling that the great house cannot be far away. And down one lane is this building, which may be England’s oldest nonconformist chapel.

The traditional story is that the Congregational Chapel or meeting house at Horningsham was built in 1566 for Scottish workers who were building the great house. Its sweeping thatched roof and unassuming design certainly look as if they belong to a building from the earliest era of religious dissent, when places of worship had a domestic appearance, because dissenting groups spurned the decoration and imagery of Catholic churches, were persecuted and so had to be discreet about their religious observance – and anyway mostly lacked the money for an elaborate church.

There seems to be no documentary evidence that the chapel actually dates back to 1566 and the story of its origins has been questioned. But there are plenty of references to people worshipping here by the end of the 17th century, by which time the chapel was clearly well established. Some of the worshippers were coming from neighbouring towns and villages. And still they come. Whatever the building’s exact age, it is certainly one of the oldest nonconformist chapels still in use and, in both its setting and simple construction, one of the most attractive too.

Canons Ashby, Northamptonshire

I remember when I first stumbled across this place. Passing a knot of stone outbuildings and rounding a sharp bend, there was a high brick wall pierced with mullioned windows. As we continued a little further and pulled up by the side of the lane, this beautiful front was revealed across a lawn. We had found Canons Ashby.

All those years ago, the house looked neglected and sad. Walls were bowing. I think I remember weeds sprouting from the fabric here and there. We poked around a bit and a local woman appeared from a nearby cottage. We learned that Canons Ashby was the ancestral home of the Drydens (the poet’s family), who had lived here since the 17th century, but who now lived in Africa. As the sun warmed the Northamptonshire stone and and brought out colours ranging from raspberry to apricot in the brickwork, the place looked magical. Inside, we were told, nothing much had changed for 250 years. And all this history looked as if it would soon turn into another ruin, another lost country house.

That it did not do so was mostly due to Gervase Jackson-Stops, architectural advisor to the National Trust and a great scholar of and friend of country houses. Jackson-Stops not only fought to save the place, but also pioneered an arrangement under which government money was used to endow a house given to the National Trust – the first time the Trust had accepted a building with this source of endowment.

The place has blossomed since it was taken under the National Trust’s wing in 1981. The dry rot is gone, the structure has been strengthened, and conservators working for the Trust discovered enchanting 16th-century murals under layers of paint, to add to delights ranging from elaborate plaster ceilings to the vast kitchen, which, until 1938 contained the only tap (cold, of course) in the house. The library even houses a signed copy of Sir Charles Grandison by Samuel Richardson, one of the fathers of the English novel. Apparently he wrote the book at Canons Ashby: another literary link. It’s heartening to know that the fragile beauty of this place has been saved.