Holiday 2009

For the last couple of years I've taken holidays in properties owned by the Landmark Trust, that arcane organisation that buys up derelict historic buildings and does them up as holiday lets. This year's stop was the Abbey Gatehouse in Tewkesbury. This is essentially a single, large room over the gateway of the abbey precincts, built in about 1500 and accessed only by a narrow spiral staircase; so narrow, in fact, that when the Trust refitted it the furniture had to be assembled in situ, and in fact the armchairs were upholstered there too. The problem of inserting everything you need for a modern holiday was solved by constructing a sort of room-within-a-room, an oak gallery with kitchen and bathroom either side on the bottom and beds on the top. Genius.


As well as the Victorian gargoyles (dubbed by some earlier visitors Brother Jeremiah and Sister Agnes) there are two disapproving clerical portraits to keep guests in line.

The restored shrine of St Thomas at Hereford Cathedral has a very pleasing medieval garishness. Overall I preferred Hereford to the correct grandeur of the Abbey at Tewkesbury.

A day out took me within a couple of miles of Tintern Abbey, which I couldn't miss for its honoured place in the history of Romanticism. I was too late to get in - but to be honest all I needed was a photo or two. It's difficult now, looking at the ruins tamed and ringed with walls and roads like a lion in a zoo enclosure, to imagine how they must have appeared to Wordsworth and his ilk.

Then there was Tyntesfield, the great Gothic revival mansion in north Somerset recently opened by the National Trust. The chapel is a glorious Tractarian jewelbox, but the rest of it, undergoing frantic restoration, is virtually invisible beneath a cage of scaffolding. Only now and again can you catch a glimpse of the occasional arch or mullion.

I also made it to the Picturesque landscapes of Piercefield and Downton, which I'll add to the Gothic Gardens page on the website.