A-Z Challenge 2017 - Houses, some real, some not - 'J'

J - Jamaica Inn

Jamaica Inn

Jamaica Inn, in the middle of Bodmin Moor was built as a staging post for changing horses for stagecoaches crossing the moor.

It was made famous by Daphne du Maurier in the fourth of her novels. Jamaica Inn told the story of Cornish wreckers led by a parson.

On a winters night in 1930 stayed at the Inn with her friend Foy, the daughter of Sir Arthur Quiller Couch.

While they were  there they went riding on Bodmin Moor. Finding themselves lost in bad weather they apparently sheltered for some time in a derelict cottage on the moor being eventually led back to Jamaica Inn by their horses. 

During that stay at Jamaica Inn Daphne also met and talked to the parson from the nearby church at Altarnun. 

Her story tells the tale of Mary, an orphan who goes to live with her Aunt Patience and Uncle Joss Merlyn, the terrifying landlord of Jamaica Inn and the mystery surrounding her uncle’s business - smuggling along the Cornish coast.

Today Jamaica Inn is both a pub and a museum, alongside the A30

Hitchcock's 1939 film of Jamaica Inn had its ending altered due to restrictions of the American Hays Production Code - the leader of the wreckers could not be seen as a man of the cloth and was changed to the local squire.

Daphne did not appreciate the changes.

Recently Jamaica Inn was made into a BBC TV series, ruined for me and hundreds of viewers by mumbling, inaudible  dialogue.

A-Z Challenge 2017 - Houses, some real, some not - 'I'

I - Ickworth House

For a while I thought that I would have to resort to an igloo to cool down after the usual hectic start to the Challenge.

Then I discovered:

Ickworth House, near Bury St Edmonds, Suffolk
(16 June 2004; ex geograph.org.uk - by Chris Downer - CC BY-SA 2.0)

Round the building, modelled on the Pantheon in Rome, below its 100 ft high dome is a finely carved frieze of scenes from Homer.

The rotunda and its pavilions for his art treasures was designed by Frederick Hervey, the 4th Earl of Bristol in the late 18th century. Unfortunately for him, while he was in Rome, Napoleon occupied the city and seized his art collection. Frederick died in 1803 before the house was finished.

The layout of the house may be seen in this plan:

Ickworth House - ground floor plan
(Plan drawn by user Giano - in Public Domain)

1 Library 2 Drawing Room 3 Dining Room 4 Entrance & inner Staircase Hall 5 Smoking Room 6 Pompeian Room 7 Orangery & West Wing 8 East Family Wing 9 Portico 10 Topiary Garden

The West wing remained unfinished until early in the 21st century - it is now an hotel and conference centre. The house is owned by the National Trust and  open to the public.

A-Z Challenge 2017 - Houses, some real, some not - 'H'

H - Castle Howard

An ITV television production of Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited was filmed at Yorkshire's Castle Howard between 1979 and 1981. Castle Howard was used again for the later film released in 2008.

Castle Howard
(21 March 2008 - by Pwojdacz -uploaded at en.wikepedia - Public Domain)

The Hon. Simon Howard, who owns Castle Howard, has said:

“It is easy to see why Castle Howard was chosen as Brideshead when we hear the description Charles Ryder gives when seeing Brideshead for the first time: 

'Below us, half a mile distant, grey and gold amid a screen of boskage, shone the dome and columns of an old house.' ”

Evelyn Waugh's novel which opens during the Second World War, charts the life and loves of Army officer Charles Ryder. Arriving at Brideshead Castle for the first time in more than 20 years, he recalls his years at Oxford University, his relationship with Sebastian Flyte and his - ultimately - doomed relationship with Julia, Sebastian’s sister.

However Waugh’s Brideshead Castle was not a castle at all, but a house built of stones from a pulled-down castle a mile away. It was not in Yorkshire either, but was situated in Wiltshire. So you may gain the wrong impression if you have not read the book.

{Note: Chatsworth House (Pemberley), Green Gables and Castle Howard (Brideshead) all featured in my article in The Lady magazine in 2007, entitled 'Houses in Fiction'}.

Green - Sunday Stamps II

I could not resist posting the green trees that appeared on the postcard Maria sent to me.

Singapore - 26 May 2010

Adenanthera pavonia ( Red-bead tree) on the left;  Pterocarpus indicus, the national tree of the Philippines, (also known as Amboyna Wood, Burmese Rosewood and Red Sandal Wood) on the right,

For other green stamps check out the links at Sunday-Stamps-II 121

A- Z Challenge 2017 - Houses, some real, some not - G

G - Green Gables

Would you recognise this house in the town of Cavendish, Prince Edward Island?

Green Gables
(30 September 1982 - By Peter Broste - CC BY-SA 2.0)

In Anne of Green Gables Lucy Montgomery described it as follows:

“It was a rambling, orchard-embowered house on the furthest edge of cleared land, barely visible from the main road. It had a neat back yard with great patriarchal willows on one side and prim lombardies on the other. The kitchen windows faced east to cherry trees and west into the back yard. Nodding slender birches grew in the hollow by the brook covered with a tangle of green vine.

“The huge cherry tree outside Anne’s window was so close that its boughs tapped against the house. On both sides of the house was an orchard – one of apple and one of cherry trees. The garden contained purple lilac trees and beyond the garden a green clover field ran down to the brook where scores of white birches grew in the undergrowth of ferns and mosses.”

The novel Anne of Green Gables by L M Montgomery, translated into fifteen languages and a favourite world wide, was first published as a serial in a Sunday school paper.

Green Gables is now on Canada's list of historic houses.

A-Z Challenge 2017 - Houses, some real, some not - 'F'

F - Ferryside

In 1926, when she was 19, Daphne du Maurier's family found Swiss Cottage, a house on the bank of the River Fowey in Cornwall.

Swiss Cottage

Daphne later described that discovery in Vanishing Cornwall:

"There was a smell in the air of tar and rope and rusted chain, a smell of tidal water. Down harbour, round the point, was the open sea. Here was the freedom I desired, long sought-for, not yet known. Freedom to write, to walk, to wander, freedom to climb hills, to pull a boat, to be alone. It could not be mere chance that brought us to the ferry, and the bottom of Bodinnick hill, and so to the board upon the gate beyond that said For Sale. I remembered a line from a forgotten book, where a lover looks for the first time upon his chosen one – ‘I for this, and this for me."  

The house subsequently renamed Ferryside is inhabited today by Daphne’s son, Christopher (Kits).

It was at Ferryside in 1929 that she wrote her first novel, The Loving Spirit, the title taken from a poem by Emily Bronte:

Alas! the countless links are strong
That bind us to our clay;
The loving spirit lingers long,
And would not pass away!

The discovery of the wreck of the schooner Jane Slade in Pont Creek inspired Daphne. The Slade family were shipbuilders in the nearby village of Polruan on the same side of the Fowey estuary as Ferryside. Daphne researched the family and visited their graves at the local church of Lanteglos. In the book, Polruan became Plyn, Lanteglos became Lanoc and Jane Slade became Janet Coombe. The Loving Spirit is a family saga spanning four generations of the Coombe family, shipbuilders and mariners in and around the Cornish village of Plyn. The figurehead from the Jane Slade was later added to the front of Ferryside.

Ferryside

If you look closely you can see the figurehead on the right hand corner of the house, next to the tree.

A-Z Challenge 2017 - Houses, some real, some not. - 'E'

E - Englefield House

An AD 871 battle between Saxons and Danes on what was to be called the "Englishman's battle field" or the "field of angels" is possibly the origin of the name of Englefield.

The Englefield family were lords of the manor from as early as the 9th century.

However it was via a John Constable painting that I first heard of Englefield House.

Constable's Englefield House© V & A Museum

The Berkshire mansion, with 18th and 19th century modelling is built loosely on the Elizabethan E-plan.

Sir Francis Englefield, the last of the Englefield family to live here, was prosecuted by Queen Elizabeth 1 for his Catholic sympathies. The house was seized by the crown in 1585.

Elizabeth gave the house to her favoured Earl of Essex. He later fell from grace and was executed for treason.

In 1635 the house was purchased by John Paulet, the 5th Marquis of Winchester. Paulet had married the daughter of Walsingham, Elizabeth's spymaster.

Englefield House became the main residence of the Paulets after their Basingstoke palace burnt down, It has remained in the ownership of the descendants of them ever since.

Englefield House - 16 April 2010
(ex geograph.org.uk - by Richard Croft - CC BY-SA 2.0)