Summer Holidays 2010 8: An Englishman's Home is his Castle

Longleat Safari Park

…….. and sometimes an Englishman can make a real castle his home. However, when death duties in the UK became so much of a burden that selling the ancestral home seemed the only option, there were a few owners who thought up some novel idea to keep their places in the family.

One of them was the 6th Marquess of Bath who opened his home Longleat in Wiltshire to the public and converted part of the grounds into a safari park. And it worked. Nowadays Longleat is a thriving business and people come from all over the world to visit the house and grounds (and maybe catch a glimpse of the colourful 7th Marquess, who plays a very active role in the business). When his father was alive and he was still the Lord Weymouth and an art student, he started decorating his then private apartments, which can also be visited at certain times. Nowadays there is a special tour for children, but to see it all, you must be over 18, as a great number of murals and other artworks are inspired by the Kama Sutra.

The one time I felt compelled to visit, our small group of nosy tourists was shown around the place by a very prim looking English lady in a pink cardigan and a soft blue perm, who blushed every time she had to explain everything about yet another naughty wall. I don’t remember much of it, apart from it all being very colourful and my friends and I were constantly stifling bouts of the giggles because everyone was so very uptight about it all, in particular the pink guide who was clearly terribly embarrassed all the time. It would probably have been much more interesting if the then Lord Weymouth had done the guiding himself.

However, one thing (literally) still stands out in my mind and that was the bedroom with a gigantic four-poster bed with embedded in the headboard an enormous wooden penis. It was about the size of my arm. The poor guide didn’t know where to look and I vaguely remember her telling us that the Lord Weymouth was inspired to it all after his trip to India. I could only think that the thing was in a terribly awkward place and the only use for it I could think of was that it would make a nice stand for a reading lamp.

Every time I see a picture of the 7th Marquess (the former Lord Weymouth), who now looks like a big jolly leprechaun, or when I’m watching an episode of the BBC series about Longleat, that enormous bed and its attachment still springs to mind. It’s like one of those irritating little pieces of music you just can’t get out of your head.

Highclere Castle

The owners of Highclere Castle in Berkshire were a bit different. They managed to keep going partly because of the fact that their famous ancestor, Lord Carnarvon, discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamun in Egypt and in the cellars there is now a small museum with Egyptian artefacts, a real mummy and some items Carnarvon himself took to Egypt. When you look at what there was in his medicine chest you can finally understand why it’s no wonder he contracted blood poisoning after having been stung on the cheek by a mosquito. The story goes that his dog died at Highclere at the exact same moment Carnarvon died in Cairo. It does make you wonder about the curse of the pharaohs somehow.

Thousands of tourists find their way to the castle every year and if you have enough money you can hire the place for weddings and other festive occasions. If you are a lover of television you will probably have see it plenty of times, because the house and grounds are frequently used in films and series when a stately home us needed. Actually, it’s not a bad way to make a living and to help keep the ancestral home in the family.

One of the places that grows on you is Bowood House in the middle of the Wiltshire countryside. Once you get past the children’s playground, where screaming primary schoolers sound like they are all individually slaughtered in the most horrible ways imaginable, you find the house at the end of a narrow footpath. Just at the moment when you start thinking there is no house there at all, the path makes a turn and the ground drops steeply and there it is, much lower than you would expect a house like this to be, the formal gardens giving way to grassy slopes leading down to one of the lakes. The grounds were designed by that greatest of all landscape gardeners, Capability Brown.

The house is full of surprises. A small ante-room to the library used to be the laboratory where Dr Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen gas. The library behind it was designed by Robert Adam in neo-classical style. It looks so comfortable that you could easily spend a fortnight here without ever feeling the need to go out at all. On the second floor you can find a collection of late nineteenth-century treasures brought back from India and Burma by the 5th Marquess, who was Viceroy from 1888 to 1894. On the Top Exhibition Room there is a collection of Napoleonic treasures, including one of Napoleon’s death masks, that came into the family through Emily de Flahault, the wife of the 4th Marquess. Her father, Charles, Comte de Flahault, was Napoleon’s aide-de-camp, who accompanied the Emperor on his later European campaigns.

In my time I visited quite a few stately homes, castles and country seats. They hardly ever disappoint, especially not when you like to take a step back into history. There is nothing that manages to convey the sense of Englishness like a stately home. There it’s very easy to imagine yourself back in the days of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, or in the middle of an Agatha Christie murder mystery, although I myself have never come across a dead body yet.

The Library at Bowood House

If you'd like to learn more about the stately homes mentioned above, go to:
 
http://www.longleat.co.uk/
http://www.highclerecastle.co.uk/
http://www.bowood-house.co.uk/