Spalding III: Ayscoughfee Hall and gardens

     Adjacent to the parish church is Ayscoughee Hall, a late medieval house started in 1429 and added to and altered over the years.  It now belongs to South Holland District Council who run it as a museum, and is open to the public everyday except Tuesdays - Market Day in Spalding, along with Saturday.
     Built of dark red brick with stone dressings, and although a little municipal in feel, the Hall is a discreetly attractive, picturesque building - a mixture of 'genuine' Medieval Gothic, Georgian and Early Victorian Gothic and the classical; at times formal at others domestic. Sprawling.  For me the most interesting feature is the oddly detailed bay lighting the back of the hall. Almost as though it has arrived from the Late Medieval Holy Roman Empire. Interesting too that odd little door adjacent  very like the priest's door on one of the side chapels in St Mary's church. 

   The interior is fun but a little chill.  A sense that it was a bit of a challenge to fill the spaces.  As I have mentioned before one of the upstairs rooms was floor to ceiling with glass cases of stuffed birds.  All flown, alas. Period furniture and decor would certainly help warm the place up a bit.  The best spaces are the entrance hall, - a neo-classical refit of the original great hall - and the the warmly, Victorian, paneled library.  I could spend many happy hours there.  The great hall retains its original medieval roof, and and bay window.  

     In the early eighteenth century Ayscoughfee was the home to Maurice Johnson the founder of the Spalding Gentleman's Society, an example of thriving provincial cultural life.  Its members included Pope, Addison, Sir Hans Sloane, and the Lincolnshire antiquary William Stukeley.
     The hall stands in the remains of a formal, walled garden of c1730, which contains the the only building in Lincolnshire to be designed by the great Sir Edwin Lutyens - the town War Memorial of 1925.  In addition there are a number of sixties additions: a café and an aviary.  The 'Buildings of England' suggests that the designer of the gardens was the local architect William Sands.  The yew hedges have long since escaped their original bounds and now form huge billowing cloud-shapes.  It would be a shame to loose them in a full restoration of the garden, but certain features, like the enormous, and missing, gate pier at the back of the house could be put back to match the surviving pier and that would add hugely to the romance of the place.

Own work: Life drawing XXXXII

     From yesterday's class.....

Own work: The Rustiche of Sebastiano Serlio XVII

Yet another Rustiche drawing complete - there are, I think, twelve or so left to do.....

Croyland Abbey I

     On Saturday afternoon, after lunch and an amble around Spalding, in blazing heat we travelled south across the Great Postland to Crowland, a tiny remote market town at the very southern edge of Lincolnshire.  There rising, blunt and massive like some sort of butte carved by the wind, above the houses stands Crowland, or Croyland, Abbey.  Not however the work of nature and time but the work of the hand of man both creative and destructive; a great fragment of what once was a vast church and monastic complex and a place of pilgrimage, for it was here on St Bartholomew's Day in 699 that the former warrior Guthlac came to do spiritual battle. To make Catharsis on the path to Theosis.  Guthlac's reputation for holiness attracted others, and, according to the traditional narrative, after his death King Athelbald of Mercia founded an abbey see below.  It was destroyed during the Viking invasions and was refounded sometime before the Norman Conquest.  It was dissolved in 1539, and all is now Ichabod.

     What remains is now mainly from the time of Abbot Lytlington and is the work of Master William.  There is some surviving Norman work at the east end of the nave and at the west end too where it formed the east wall of a chapel built around what was thought of as the remains of Guthlac's cell.  The little metal plaque that marked the cell has gone.  The lower part of the west front dates from the middle of the 13th century.  I had hoped to bring you some pictures of the interior, but by the time we had walked around the inside the church had been locked.

10.06.2018.

   It turns out that the site has been holy for far longer than the arrival of Guthlac in 699.  Crowland does not, as is popularly thought, sit upon a fen 'island' but at the end of a peninsular of gravel stretching out from the fen edge at Peakirk north-east into the fen.  It is dotted with Bronze Age barrows.  Interesting too when you think about it that Peakirk with its ancient sanctity should stand almost on guard at the start of the peninsular.

14.07.2024

   Three small points. A) Although Crowland is now in Lincolnshire it may originally have been located 'in myddan Girwan Faennen' (in the middle of the fenland belonging to the Gyrwe).  B) Some historians now believe that no coenobitic monastery was founded at Crowland after Guthlac's death until 9th/10th century.  C) Recent and intriguing archaeology undertaken at Crowland  here

10/09/2024

     The foundation of the monastic settlement of Crowland, as well as that at Repton,  is credited to St David by the 11th century Welsh writer Rhygyfach in his biography of the saint.

Classic Car and Bike Show 2017

     Midsummer has come around again and with it the annual Vintage Car and Motorbike show in Bourne.  Here are a few snaps of the event, which I took this morning. Hopefully no repetitions of images from previous years. (Apologies if there are!)