Holy Cross, Burley-on-the-hill

     One of the delights of the British Summer is visiting gardens, especially if it involves afternoon tea.  Last weekend A paid his monthly visit and we headed off into Rutland, to Burley-on-the-Hill and The Old Vicarage, open as part of the National Garden Scheme. The garden is most impressive - a series of garden rooms surround the house at all different levels.  The influence of Lutyens is evident in the formal structure of paths, walls, rills and hedges.  The use of colour was very interesting: blue and purple predominate, there is little white and next to nothing in the way of yellow and red. Interesting too the use of contrasting shapes and colour of foliage, eg very green lavender contrasting with silver blades of iris, and use of wisteria as standards as though they were roses. The cake was very good too.

     The Old Vicarage sits on the edge of the purlieus of Burley House built by 2nd earl of Nottingham in the late 1600s.  It is vast complex of buildings, now divided up into apartments; the cour d'honeur is 500 x 650 ft. and quite beyond my competence as a photographer using a smart phone.

     More within my technical capabilities was the small parish church of the Holy Cross, redundant now but under the care of the Churches Conservation Trust.  It stands sequestered in one corner of the complex of house and service buildings.  The churchyard is enclosed with a high wall, and is overlooked by the house giving it an oddly urban feel.  House and church are connected with a Gothic Revival corridor - not a cloister as there are far too few windows for that.  I think it must date from J L Pearson's restoration in the mid nineteenth century.(1869-70, almost twenty years after his restoration of neighbouring Exton church) A pretty thorough job he did of it too; apart from the lean west tower the exterior is completely his. Not that bad of itself but somehow not quite right either. Perhaps it is too polished, too sophisticated work for a country church even one in so grand a setting. I'm tempted to say that even after 150 years after completion it may too soon to make a judgment as to its merit and only after another 150 years of wind, rain and frost can such a judgement be made. 

     Inside however it is more atmospheric.  The arcades are Medieval. The furnishings are by Pearson and rather subdued, except for the High Altar reredos and accompanying east window by Clayton and Bell. Oddly for an estate church there are few monuments of any standing.  There is however Sir Francis Chantrey's superb monument to Lady Charlotte Finch of 1820.  A kneeling figure of chaste white marble of great pathos and sensitivity. Chantrey has breathed life and warmth into Neo-classical froideur.

    Beautiful panoramic views of the Vale Of Catmose on the way to the church.

Salon des Refuses

      I'm excited to announce that I will be exhibiting at the Traditional Architecture Group 'Salon Des Refuses' next month.  The exhibition which will run from 4th June until 14th is being held at the Art Workers Guild, Queen Square, Bloomsbury, London. It will be the first time I have exhibited in the capital.  'Tuscan Doorway' is based on a design by Wendel Dietterlin the Elder that appeared in 'Architecura: Von Austheilung, Symmetria und Proportion der Funff Seulen' published in 1598.  The painting is priced at £300.00

'This is Merlin's Town': Carmarthen and Pembroke

     Friday, the final full day of my holiday and we went into the west.  I exaggerate a little, as we only went as far as Pembroke, but there is something distinctive, almost other worldly, about west Wales.  Perhaps it is the quality of the light.
Our first point of call was Carmarthen, an ancient town, the oldest in Wales, high on a bluff above the river Towy at the point where it becomes tidal.  The Romans were there building a fortress and later a town - Moridunum, the civitas of the Demetae.  Remains of the amphitheatre are east of the town centre. 

     Carmarthen is at the southern end of the longest branch of the 'Sarn Helen', the network of Roman roads in Wales, the construction of which is traditionally credited to 'Elen Luyddog' - 'Helen of the Hosts', daughter of Eudaf Hen and wife of  Macsen Wledig, the late Western Roman Emperor Magnus Maximus. That ancient legend, the 'Breuddwyd Macsen Wledig' or 'Dream of Macsen Wledig', forms part of the Mabinogion and appears too in different form in Geoffrey of Monomouth's 'Historia Regnum Britanniae'. But I digress. Carmarthen is however associated with another mythic cycle that of Arthur, for Carmarthen, Caerfyrddin, is Merlin's town.  (There is some scholarly discussion as to whether Caerfyrddin actually refers to Merlin or not; either way there are number of local monuments that are connected to him.)  Be that as it may Carmarthen was an important centre in the Kingdoms of Dyfed and Deheubarth - the location of a 'bishop house', three monasteries within the walls, that sort of thing. The centre of the town now presents a mainly Georgian and Victorian face, the public spaces intimate, streets narrow, something that all old Welsh towns have in common I wonder? Coloured plaster predominates. The view from the south is dominated by the muscular County Hall building designed by Sir Percy Thomas architect of the Guildhall in Swansea.  It is, like the Guildhall, a building of impressive heft, with a nod in the direction of Richard Norman Shaw with its great chimneys and impressive graded slate roof. There is however, like the Guildhall, some of that twentieth century froideur about it.  It is an austere, somewhat aloof, building that sits squarely within the remains of the castle on the site of the gaol that John Nash built during his Welsh sojourn.  Its not helped by the fact it is now encircled by a puddle of parked cars.  I left wondering what the wonderful Josef Plechnik would have made of the commission like that.  

     We had time also to pop into St Peter's church.  Full of civic pomp, and a dash over restored, but worth a visit.  It contains the lavish tomb of Sir Rhys ap Thomas supporter of Henry Tudor in his rebellion against Richard III and reputed slayer of the king at Bosworth Field.

     Then on into Pembrokeshire and the mighty castle at Pembroke - no time really to look at the town.  This incredibly powerful Norman fortress, which stands at the point of a great tine of land, between two branches  (south one silted up) of the Milford Haven ria.  While doing a research for this post I've been struck by the shear political and cultural dynamism of the Normans; R H C Davies in 'The Normans and their Myth' (London 1974) talks about the Dukes of Normandy forging 'a new aristocracy, a new church, a new monasticism and a new culture'. At the same time as the Normans were first conquering England, and then conquering and settling south Wales, Norman knights were conquering first the southern Italian peninsular, defeating the Lombards and the Eastern Roman Empire in the process, and then island of Sicily, before eventually launching the invasion and attempted conquest of North Africa. In the following century they would nearly conquer all of Ireland and settle peacefully, at the behest of the monarch, in Scotland, and wherever they went they brought that new culture with them - there are Norman churches, for instance, all over the British Isles (including areas such as the Shetlands (Kingdom of Norway) and Pre-Conquest Ireland, that politically were beyond  the Norman world). Castles too such as Pembroke.
     Pembroke fell to the Normans in 1093, to put it in context that is twenty-nine years after the Norman Conquest of England and just two years after the Norman conquest of Sicily.  As at Abergavenny, Kidwelly and Brecon in addition to building a castle a monastery was founded. A pattern also followed here in south Lincolnshire at South Kyme, Castle Bytham/Grimsthorpe and more importantly for this post at Bourne under the aegis of Baldwin Fitzgilbert. In 1138, the same year that Baldwin was founding Bourne Abbey, his brother Gilbert was raised to the Earldom of Pembroke with Palatine powers. It was his son Richard de Clare, 'Strongbow', who began the Norman invasion of Ireland.  In 1170 Henry II embarked for Ireland from Pembroke in an attempt to control that invasion, but being virtually impregnable Pembroke castle played little part in British history again until, that is, the Wars of the Roses. By then Pembroke was in the hands of the Lancastrian Tudors, and it became a stage, as it were, for several key events in the rise to power of Henry VII - his birth in 1457, his dramatic escape from a Yorkist siege and flight to France and his return to claim the throne. For this blog the resonate event is his birth, for Henry's mother was the remarkable Lady Margaret Beaufort, (this is her fourth appearance on this blog) wife of Edmund Tudor, descendant of Baldwin FitzGilbert, Lady of the Manor of Bourne, patron of the abbey.
     Back to the architecture.  It is, it has to be said, not only very grand and imposing, but also rather workman-like, utilitarian.  Which is probably what you'd expect with a castle, but it is almost all lacking in detail and being constructed almost wholly of rubble masonry the castle has a very homogenous look making it hard to differentiate sometimes the work of different periods.  Thinking back it seems to be that though there are Early English details and some Geometric detailing in the residential block north of the keep there was nothing later in style.  No Curvilinear Decorated or Perp.  Nothing either of a Great Hall.  All that is left, and there is a lot of it, is the defensive. The most distinctive is the great circular keep - a massive cylinder of stone, 53 feet in diameter at the base and 80 feet high. It is thought to date from the time of William Marshall, 1st Earl of Pembroke of the second creation, who was the husband of Isabel de Clare, daughter of 'Strongbow' and Aiofe McMurrough, daughter of the King of Leinster. The view from the top is exhilarating.

Own work: The Baptist Chapel, Bourne

     Here is something I prepared earlier when I was in a very John Piper mood.  It's of the Baptist Chapel in west St Bourne, Lincolnshire. It is a rather powerful piece of architecture and I've always been inclined to credit Bryan Browning, beloved of this parish, with the design. I have no documentary evidence for this, unhappily. I've asked at the chapel a couple of times but nobody had a clue. I did the painting Wednesday and it probably took about three hours - perhaps less.  Thankfully less than half that time was actually spend siting in the cold drawing. Mixed media - pen and ink, watercolour, gouache oil pastel over pencil underdrawing on Acid free, Archival, 300gsm watercolour paper.  The most Piperesque thing I've done to date.

Two Abbeys II

     A quick trundle down the motorway took us on to Margam Abbey (Cistercian, founded 1147 by Richard, Earl of Gloucester) and a happier scene.  There the abbey's position above the coastal strip helped ensure its survival.  At the Dissolution the conventual buildings were, again, turned into a country house, while the nave passed in parochial use.  And it was to the church we first went. It sits in a small, bosky village above the motorway.  The churchyard is big with plenty of 19th memorials in the Welsh tradition. The exterior of the church dates from the early 19th century, though I suspect some of the features such as the west door are pretty faithful to the original.  The odd pinnacles are evidently not.

     Inside it is big boned; there is a satisfying solidity and strength to the austere Norman architecture. It is very Cistercian in that respect. Atmospheric too with the nave dark and mysterious, the aisles bright with spring sunshine. If there is one, only one, criticism it is the low, heavy ceiling. But that is a minor quibble for the church is filled with good things - in particular the the remarkable collections of funerary monuments in both aisles; Talbots to the North and Mansells to the south with a proper nestling of Jacobean alabaster tombs commemorating four generations of the family.  For me perhaps the most interesting monument is that to Theodore Talbot, based on the tomb of Archbishop Grey in York Minster. It is rather large, possibly over-scaled, but it adds a welcome element of spatial complexity to the Talbot chapel.

     Through the small door in the south aisle and into another world: Margam Park. (I don't think we should really have done that but got back into the car and driven round to the official carpark.) Perhaps an unexpected one at that, for who nowadays associates industrial south Wales with landscaped country parks.  However Margam is not alone, just outside Neath, only a few miles up the M4 from Margam, stands the Gnoll estate.  And like Margam, Gnoll is owned by the local council. Anyway the door opens to where once were the cloisters stood and is now a woodland garden with beautiful specimen trees.  To the left the remains of the east range of the cloisters - a kind of gothic skeleton, all the walls having been removed just leaving the piers and the vaults, and looking like an illustration in an 18th century Gothic novel.  Also surviving is the polygonal chapter house, alas without its vault.  Polygonal chapter houses are a bit of a British speciality; Margam is the only one in Wales, but there are three in Scotland and seventeen in England not counting the Norman circular one at Worcester, where the idea probably originated.  Ahead is the site of the great house built by the Mansells and incorporating parts of the abbatial buildings. 

     However in 1782 the house was demolished and a spectacular orangery constructed (1787) in its place.  It is the longest in Britain, and is the work of Anthony Keck (1726-1797). One part of the original Elizabethan/Jacobean house however was reused as a garden feature.  Oddly it wasn't until the 1830s that a new house, 'Margam Castle', was erected to the designs of Edward Hopper (1776-1856) further up the hill and linked to the church and orangery by a majestic staircase, a thoroughly Baroque concept that wouldn't be out of place in Sixtine Rome.  A nineteenth century equivalent, if you will, to the great cascade at Chatsworth.  The house has the most wilful detailing and is a sort of compendium of early Tudor houses such as Hengrave Hall in Suffolk and Melbury in Dorset.  Eccentric, ostentatious and oddly endearing. The family lived there until 1942.