Own work: Covehithe Church

     My latest collage; 'Covehithe Church' on the coast of Suffolk. A vast church that was partially demolished in the end of the 17th century as surplus to requirements, and a smaller, much smaller church erected within the ruins. A rather M R James sort of place. 22cms x 10.4 cms on watercolour paper.

St Peter, Elmsett

     Just returned from a short visit in London, which took in the Queen's funeral. More of that, though, in a subsequent post. On Wednesday we took the train into Suffolk to visit friends in their new house. It was a deeply welcome return to East Anglia; my first visit since moving to Wales. It felt very remote there among the great wide fields and vast skies. The silence was palpable.

     The nearest church to our friends' house was St Peter in Elmsett, almost alone in the fields at a distance from the actual village; a simple structure of flint rubble and stone dressings - a tower, nave and chancel. A hurried visit it was, and a few snatched photographs. And, oh, how melancholy those photographs appear today. The tower rather gaunt. External textures were fantastic, with an excellent e window. Victorian porch on s side sheltering scant remains of Medieval wooden predecessor.  Inside was the usual translucent E Anglian space with lots of clear glass, though the nave too crowded with stuff - that usual Anglican distraction from the divine. Interior thankfully not too heavily gone over by the Victorians. Plaster ceilings. Lovely pamment flooring and old ledgerstones. And a rarity - three sided communion rails. Damson jam for sale near the four-square Norman font and cooking apples in a cardboard box in the porch. What more could one ask for?

      Opposite, on the other side of the road the Tithe Memorial of 1935.

I thought I'd add, 14.10.22, that travelling by train we passed through Stratford. From the train, at least, the Olympic site look utterly dreadful; the ArcelorMittal Orbit, by Sir Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond worse than mediocre. The Infernal City is ubiquitous.

Ickworth II

   Ickworth is now in the hands of the National Trust, the old family wing a hotel.  The incomplete western wing, very sensibly, is now the reception and café.  The entrance lobby is spoilt by painted quotes, in the way that the National Trust seems to be fond of today.  Alas.  However the long thin orangery is just right.  The Lloyd Loom furniture hits just the right note of timelessness.  Perfect.  It could have be the Edwardian age or the 1920s, but I liked to think it was the early Seventies and that any moment Celia Birtwell and David Hockney were going to step in from the garden.  A few floor standing uplighters between the windows would add a little more glamour, but anything else would spoil it.
   To the south of the house there is a Victorian Italianate garden bounded with a great bastion of a wall complete with gravel walk.  It effectively separates the house from the landscape park beyond - which is the work of Capability Brown and one of his duller numbers.  Down in the valley is a lake and between it and the house is the old village church and a large walled garden which is in a sorry state at the moment but there are signs of restoration.  The summer house is a delight.  The church is small and neat.  The tower, I think, is late 18th/early 19th century, stuccoed, and the rest of the church looks entirely Victorian, but is I think, almost a replica of what was there before - note the squint into the chancel.  It is the traditional resting place of the Herveys, but, alas, on our visit the church was locked.

Ickworth I

    A spur of the moment thing our trip to Ickworth, and well worth it.  The house is a stunner, and also, almost unique.  Coincidental too, considering my current fascination with the cultural efflorescence of the Protestant Ascendancy that ruled Ireland for a hundred years or so following the Glorious Revolution. (Perhaps more of that in a further post.)  And perhaps it is with the Irish connection that I should begin.
   The builder of Ickworth was Frederick Hervey (1730-1802), 4th Earl of Bristol, Lord Bishop of Derry. (The estate at Ickworth had been the hands of the Hervey's since the 15th century.)  As was common for a younger son Hervey entered the church, though his faith seems to have been somewhat lukewarm.  He achieved preferment however and when his older brother became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland he was elected Bishop of Cloyne.  After a year he became Bishop of Derry, and as such he enjoyed a sizeable yearly income.  I have to confess that I don't warm to the Earl-Bishop - an apparently volcanic temper, most likely a Deist if not an agnostic but happy to have church preferment. A man of contradictions, perhaps, even hypocrisy. It's hard not to see him, at least, as cynical.  Worldly, certainly.  However, it's hard not to warm to him as artistic patron.

   In Ireland Harvey built, almost concurrently, two large houses: Downhill, built romantically upon a cliff top in County Londonderry, and Ballyscullion in County Antrim.  It's really the folly he had built at Downhill by Michael Shanahan of Cork - the Mussenden Temple - and Ballyscullion that are important here, for both, like Ickworth, are rotundas.  Alas, Ballysullion, like the house at Downhill, has perished, but from surviving drawings it is clear that it was very close to Ickworth in design - a central rotunda, with a pedimented temple front (think the Pantheon in Rome), linked to flanking wings by curving colonnades.  

   The architect of Ballyscullion is not known for certain, but the design has been linked to Francis Sandys who was in m'Lord Bishop's household - his brother was the Earl-Bishop's chaplain. (Any number of architects are connected to Downhill - the Sardinian Davis Ducart, Soane, Wyatt and Charles Cameron - but the executant architect is most likely to have been Shanahan.)  A similar confusion hangs over the design of Ickworth; but it is however believed that the design originates with the 'Italian' Mario Asprucci the Younger, the executant architect being Francis Sandys. However, as I have said, the house is so similar to that at Ballyscullion that it's hard not to think that Sandys had more a hand in the design than he is usually credited with. Perhaps both Asprucci and Sandys were only actualising Frederick Hervey's ideas and that the design is essentially his.

   The house was begun in 1795, by which time the Earl-Bishop, with entourage, had left Ireland for good and was on another Grand Tour.  By then he had inherited Ickworth and the Hervey titles, so he had two income 'streams' and was very rich indeed.  Alas, m'Lord Bishop of Derry died with the house incomplete, and having never seen it.  It had been destined to hold his vast art collection but that had already been confiscated by Napoleon.  The shell of the house wasn't completed until 1830, by John Field, and the western wing was never fitted out as intended, but then without the art it was rather purposeless, and the east wing which, I think, was destined to be the library, became the family wing.
   What was realised, however, is very impressive.  The central rotunda is vast - 100 feet to the top of the dome, each order is 30 feet high - and very satisfying.  It has great heft and presence that is sometimes lacking in contemporary English architecture (compare it to Heveningham by Taylor, also in Suffolk).  Like the rotunda at Bullyscullion it is decorated with half-orders - two orders here though, Ionic below, Corinthian above, executed in stone.  The walls, of brick, are coated in stucco.  The two friezes, of terracotta and Coade stone, are the work of Casimiro and Donato Carabelli of Milan.

   The wings are huge in themselves.  I detect in them a touch of the Baroque, just as there is in the curve and countercurve of rotunda and colonnade.  That shouldn't surprise.  Italy went straight from Baroque to Neoclassical and the Irish Neo-Palladianism was always rather baroque inclined.  It begs the question though: just how Irish is Ickworth?  A question I can't answer.
   The interior is very monumental, the principal rooms are very high and there great columns of scagliola in the Saloon and entrance hall.  But it is all a little plain. The principal stair threads its way up through the architecture as though it was designed by Vanbrugh or Hawksmoor.  Its current form however is Edwardian and is the work of  Arthur Blomfield, viz Oundle.  My favourite parts were the corridors leading to the wings, which seem to be fully commensurate with the exterior.  The east corridor is particularly fine.  Alas the Pompeiian room (very late, by J G Grace, viz Algarkirk) was closed for restoration.  I was looking forward to that.

Burwell

   The week before last and our annual trip to Suffolk and lunch at 'The Great House' in Lavenham.  It seems an age ago now. Lunch, by the way, was delicious: Ox cheek and Lentils, Skate, Chocolate Marquise. And that evening our host prepared a scrumptious dinner of fried chicken and a sort of stir fried rice. We were truly spoilt, with a day of good food, good wine and good company.

   On our return journey we stopped off briefly in Lavenham - (apologies for posting, again, images of the Little Hall Museum. I couldn't resist it) - before braving the busy A14.  We had two ports-of-call in east Cambridgeshire before getting home:  Anglesey Abbey and Burwell church. The former was heaving with visitors as it was snowdrop time and also half-term.  It was rather like being in the middle of Cambridge on a Saturday.

   Burwell church was an altogether quieter affair.  A large church, St Mary was rebuilt in the 15th century in a very sophisticated Perpendicular Gothic. There are earlier bits at the west end. The mason is thought to have been Reginald of Ely - some of the motifs in the window tracery match those dating from the first construction period at King's College down the road in Cambridge where Reginald is known to have worked.  The outside is built of flint, although there are a number of flint built churches in east Cambridgeshire very few display flushwork.  I wonder why that is? Anyway inside it's a rather grand affair, perhaps the grandest parochial nave in Cambridgeshire, rather than homely; the nave soaring overhead supported on slim piers of dressed clunch, and light pouring in from every direction through the vast windows.  No expense was spared by the look of it; the walls above the arcades are fully panelled (no inert wall surface at all), and the walls between the immense chancel windows are decorated with oversized image niches. There is a sort of reasonableness to it all, but not much mystery. A delicacy too, an almost brittle quality to the architecture; and the architecture is all, for there are few if any fittings of worth.  A contrast one suspects to the Middle Ages, when colour and fittings would have added, I would hope, that missing sense of mystery.  The church was restored thrice in the 19th century by John Edlin and Blomfield (x2).  I think it must be to Blomfield that the dubious credit goes for the slightly weird green light in the chancel.