And today’s field trip was…
Great Dixter. It’s a house.
A hundred years ago, a rich man bought a falling-down 15th Century house in Northiam. Then he bought a falling-down 16th Century house in nearby Kent, had it dismantled brick-by-beam and moved back to the first house. Then he got the great Victorian architect Edwin Lutyens to stitch the two together into a faux Tudor manor house, with big dollops of 1910 sauce.
If that sounds a bit snarky, it’s because I haven’t made up my mind about this sort of thing. Two decaying Tudor buildings were saved, so there’s that. And the resulting house really is lovely, so there’s that. The modern bits don’t stick out at all.
But there’s something a bit too Disney’s Magic Kingdom about the whole business. And something too much like vandalism.
Lutyens bought ancient carved blanket chests and had the backs and bottoms removed to put over the 20th Century radiators. Just, ew. There’s still no shortage of ancient chests in England, but…ew.
Years ago, we visited Hever Castle, which was Anne Boleyn’s childhood home. One of the Astors got hold of it in 1903, gutted it and rebuilt it to the 1903 notion of what Anne Boleyn’s childhood home should look like.
Ew.
I don’t know. I think these stately old homes cease to be homes and die. And then elderly people come and buy overpriced cups of tea and artisanal chutneys and tea towels with the birds of England in the gift shop.
Sometimes I feel like I’m something unpleasant swarming over the mummified corpse of something that was once great.
p.s. There was a garden.
August 2, 2011 — 9:44 pm
Comments: 13
Another neat thing money can do
I forgot to tell you. We read in the paper the Red Arrows were going to put on a display over Rye last Saturday. Which is weird, since Rye is a little medieval hill town kind of in the middle of nowhere, but it’s one of our favorite places in all the land. So, had to go.
The Red Arrows are the Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team and they are AWE. SOME. I saw them at an air show in Rhode Island a few years ago and came away sockless.
Nine jets. Impressive. And they do things like put on a show for you with six or seven jets and while you’re gaping at that, the rest sneak around behind you and come screaming in right over your head.
Yeah. The sheep loved that.
Funny thing, though. Much of the land around Rye was reclaimed from the sea in Tudor times. It’s flat as a table. Perfect for an air show. But they kept flying formations up and around this one hill near the town, where half the spectators at any one time couldn’t see.
Turns out, some rich bugger up on Point Hill bought and paid for the display as an anniversary gift. At the very end, two jets turned on the red smoke and traced a big heart in the sky over his house. Rumor has it he paid £35,000 for it. Rumor, sadly, didn’t tell us who he was. (Not that we’d know him, but we’d kind of like to, if you know what I mean).
Love and money. What a splendid combination.
Good weekend, all!
June 17, 2011 — 9:52 pm
Comments: 25
It’s a fête worse than…oh, whatever
Hooray — the fête season is upon us! Uncle B and I are utter fête hags; we scour the local paper for them all Summer long (though some of the most memorable are those we ran across by accident driving down country lanes).
You might think the appeal of drifting around dark churches drinking weak tea and eating digestive biscuits looking at bad oil paintings flogged by rich old ladies might wear off after a while. You’d be wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
It’s the churches. Beautiful, tiny jewels of ancient architecture, lovingly tended by generation after generation of old ladies flogging bad oil paintings and weak tea. Every little village has its church, and they present a real strain on their communities, keeping the buidings clean and tended, whole and sound, and open to passers-by.
The thing in the picture? Can you make it out? This was behind the church, and it gave me a chill.
It’s a yew tree (on the right) and an oak (on the left) so ancient their trunks are entertwined and the two have completely permeated each other, a confusing jumble of oak leaves and yew branches sticking out in all directions.
Both the yew and the oak were hallowed here long before the coming of Christianity. The early church embraced local beliefs, choosing to co-opt instead of conflict (with an occasionally strange result). Many old churches have an elderly yew growing in the grounds. All the sources I’ve read agree that the yew was there before the church, the church was deliberately built on sacred ground.
This church is almost a thousand years old.
May 16, 2011 — 11:24 pm
Comments: 27
As a matter of fact, we ARE spring chickens
SQUEEEEE! (Also in color).
We took a long drive through the South Downs today (gas: $8.66/gallon US, e-yow) to Middle Farm and bought these two lovely birds.
Pekin bantams again. The one on the left is Victoria, a partridge, and the one on the right is Violet, a lavender.
Victoria was the given the name of Vita Sackville-West (two posts down) and Violet was her lover of many years. Though Vita and her husband were genuinely and deeply in love with each other (and he was into boys or llamas or little white dogs or something). Whatever — CHICKENS!
Tomorrow they will see sunshine and walk on grass for the very first time, and we will begin the long, ticklish business of introducing them to the flock, AKA the other two.
And thus my poultry inventory is complete.
April 20, 2011 — 9:38 pm
Comments: 22
My lawn, it is nothing like this
This Tudor gatehouse tower is almost all that’s left of a huge and ancient manor house named Sissinghurst, near Cranbrook in Kent. By the Twentieth Century, even this was a ruin. In 1930, Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson bought it and much of the land around.
They were rich, aristocratic and sexually odd. Which is neither here nor there, I just thought I’d mention it; liven things up a bit.
Together they turned the grounds into one of the most popular gardens in the country. It’s a long way for us to go, but it’s our favorite National Trust site. It was too nice to stay home, so we drove out to it today.
Yep. We have reached the “walking around gardens” stage of our lives.
The garden is laid out in “rooms” — square, walled plots with a theme. The most famous is the White Garden, which is exactly what it sounds like and touched off a bit of a craze.
My favorite is the herb garden, I think. Because — herbs! I like herbs. Even if I have to pronounce the “h” here or nobody knows what I’m talking about.
Uncle B is reading the guidebook and says Vita Sackville-West opened the gardens once a year and liked them to be popular, but I imagine she’d be well and truly cheesed off at the lot of us hoi polloi eating icecreams and trudging around her nice lawns.
Somewhat embittered at her misfortune, was Vita. See, she was born here, in what is reputed to be the largest house in England. And as the only child of Lionel Edward Sackville-West, 3rd Baron Sackville, she would have inherited the lot — had she been male.
Next time you board an airplane and struggle through First Class to reach your cramped seat at the back, look into the eyes the people up front in the comfy seats and be assured they’re thinking, “dammit — it’s not fair! Why don’t I have a private jet?”
April 18, 2011 — 9:45 pm
Comments: 11
Saw the chicken pusher today…
Awwwww…dang it to poop! I made you a movie of the Chicken Man’s chickens, but Pinnacle Studio is barfing it up when I go to render it (I love Pinnacle Studio, but it sure goes on the rag a lot). Now I’m late, late, late and no time to fix it.
Here’s a quick recap.
Went to see our chicken guy today. He had many fine birds, but no bantams. He’ll have some bantams in a couple of weeks, though they’ll be a bit older than I’d like. He doesn’t know what colors; his bantam guy gets ratty when he asks and never gives him the right answer anyway. Sounds like Bantam Guy has issues.
Chicken Man is a heckuva guy, though, and is really trying to make a go of it, so we bought lots of other stuff. Shavings. Corn. A run for the new girls to keep Mapp and Lucia from killing them when they’re small and tempting.
I’m casting around on the chicken forums and looking at local bulletin boards. Lots of people raise these things.
On the way home, we stopped in a little antique shop and got talking with the owners. Chicken people. Turns out Antiques Dude used to be a zookeeper and one of his jobs was killing chickens to feed to the animals. He demonstrated the pull-and-twist method, but really prefers putting an air gun pellet in their heads.
So I learned something!
The End.
March 31, 2011 — 11:05 pm
Comments: 13
Happy VD!
Valentine’s Day! Attentive readers — examples of whom, I feel sure, will exist some day — may remember this as our wedding anniversary. Our second.
Year Two is the Big Mac anniversary, yes? Because we went to the zoo, followed by Mickey D’s. Because basically, both of us, when we turned eight our brains stopped developing.
To be fair, we tried to think of something more grownup to do, but so many things aren’t open in February. And some that are, aren’t open Mondays.
In the spirit of grown-uppedness, we’ll share a bottle of decent champagne tonight. We got two as a consolation prize because the inn which served our wedding supper screwed up our nephew’s vegetarian dinner. We looked it up and it’s suitably expensive, so WHA-HEY!.
Anyhoo, this is a wildlife park I’ve written about before, specializes in British aminals. I didn’t know there was a European lynx. Lovely pussies, seen here being a bit frisky — he’s giving her a playful head-butt, which I managed not to catch, quite. (Wire mesh erased courtesy of Photoshop, a thing it does creepily well).
Also, there’s a European bison. Who knew?
The stoats and weasels were all asleep (I managed to spot a little patch of weasel fur poking out of the straw, expanding and contracting as it snored). Likewise, the minks and otters. All the reptiles were in hibernation, with some of the rodents.
The wolves wouldn’t howl for me, but then an ambulance went by and they all tuned up their pipes. WooooOOOOoooo! That must’ve been effing spooking around the campfire, back in the days when you had nothing but sticks and rocks to drive them off with.
They seem to have a new batch of badgers. Three younguns. The underground sett is inset in various places with glass windows, so we watched Badger A chase off Badger B and dig himself a nice bed in the straw, while Badger C took a dump in the community latrine. Yeah. I was going to say I paid money for that, but I didn’t — they let us in free because we turned up late.
Last up always, we pass the cage of the Scottish wildcat, ounce for ounce the meanest bastard in the park. Really. They look like adorable hearth-rug moggies, but nobody’s ever successfully tamed one.
Solitary beasties, too, so we were shocked at how close this one was. Sitting on a high wooden platform, staring around with seething disgust. Didn’t even acknowledge us.
So, pretty much like Charlotte, then.
February 14, 2011 — 9:24 pm
Comments: 33
Nice puss
This handsome feller is from the inside of the church of St Peter and St Paul, the Norman church next to Peasmarsh Place.
The village of Peasmarsh is a mile from the church. Legend blames the Black Death. Originally, homes were built all around the church, as usual. But when the Plague came, they burned the houses to the ground and rebuilt a mile off. The rector had three symbols carved into the church to keep death away: a stag to ward off rats from the drains, a unicorn to keep plague from the door, and a bird to keep plague from coming in the roof.
Or so they say.
This guy, however, is a leopard — one of two on either side of the arch leading to the altar. It was his job to protect from leprosy. There was a lot of it about.
Charming place.
I love exploring village churches. They are traditionally kept unlocked, and they’re chock full of Norman bits and weird pagan-y iconography.
Christianity came to Britain bass-ackwards — the early evangelists were told not to disparage pagan tradition, but to quietly absorb it. By, for example, building churches near sacred trees and groves.
The result is kind of Jesus meets Harry Potter. I honestly don’t know how else to describe it.
We recently watched a very interesting BBC program called Churches: How To Read Them on the history of British church imagery. Presented by a man with a seriously annoying lisp.
BBC loves doing that.
October 28, 2010 — 11:11 pm
Comments: 8
Can Alice come out and play?
Peasmarsh Place is a dreary-looking old folks’ home in the village of Peasmarsh. Natch. At least, it looks dreary from the outside; it ain’t cheap, so it’s probably pretty nice inside. It does have ten acres of very impressive gardens — trees, mostly — that are open to the public two days a year, Spring and Fall.
We went yesterday. I’ve wanted to go since forever. Gardens, schmardens — the occupant in the 1860s was Charles Liddell, Alice‘s uncle. In these grounds, Alice was told some interesting stories by the Rev’d Dodgson.
At least, that’s what their marketing blah says.
Most of the trees were blown over in a hellacious storm that flattened Southern England in 1987, but there are plenty of gigantic specimens left. And interesting young trees. And spooky abandoned greenhouses with invasive whatnots pressing their leaves against dirty cracked glass. And a gorgeous Norman church next door.
And wild pigs. Apparently. After dark, they come out of the forest and roam the grounds and make themselves dangerous, so the signs said.
And, yes, I turned my ankle in a rabbit hole.
Amusing exercise: know who else lives in little Peasmarsh? Paul McCartney. Not sure where. All we know is, his house is up a drab lane of carefully deceptive boringness. Peasmarsh Place is here. Have a Google around, if you’ve a mind to.
One more thing: a link to Ace’s latest Be The Wave post. Expectations for this election have gotten so crazy out of hand, if the Republican wave isn’t HUGE a week from tomorrow, the Dems will call it a win for their side. And a mandate. With all that entails.
Please please pleeeeeeeeeease</whiny kid voice> do what you can to turn out your fambly, friends and cubiclemates on November 2.
October 25, 2010 — 9:54 pm
Comments: 34
Ye olde Franke and Beans
Uncle B has been working hard lately and I’ve been watching him do it, so today we took a break, broke out the Weaselmobile and drove to Bodiam Castle, which is this stunning 14th Century semi-ruin along the River Rother.
It’s got everything you want in a Medieval castle: a big square sandstone thing with round towers on the corners and square towers in the walls, with gatehouses, crenellations, portculliseses, murder holes, machicolations and a big giant moat full of carp and fornicating ducks (well, they were certainly fornicating today).
It had a cameo role in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (as the establishing shot of “Swamp Castle“) and I caught Uncle B humming “Brave Sir Robin” under his breath in tune with the crumhorn music once or twice.
The castle wasn’t lived in for long and was deliberately ruined (or “slighted“) after the Civil War (theirs, not ours, duh) to keep it from being used as a fort again. Then good old Mad Jack Fuller bought it in 1829 and started excavating and shoring it up. Which they’re still doing.
The lady in the long linen cape and jingle bells (god, I hope she works there) told us that workmen on the sewer lines found a complete medieval pot and a piece of wood with a nail in it, just this morning.
The whole thing is covered in incised graffiti — mostly from the 19th Century, when it was an early tourist attraction. But I’m guessing this handsome meat and two veg, carved on the wall outside the guardtower loo, is a bit older.
What? Yes, I went to a beautiful 13th Century castle on a lovely Fall day, and all’s I brought you was some crude penis graffiti. Geez, learn to use Google, why don’t you?
October 20, 2010 — 10:17 pm
Comments: 17