St Catherine at the Trust

I met up with Professor Cotillion at the National Trust's Greys Court. The place was thronged with visitors, such that the car park was one in, one out. Eventually we got in, but took so long over lunch and attending to the needs of the Professor's lovely King Charles spaniels that the house was shut with only half an hour to go before all the patrons were expelled. Well, I'd paid for my ticket, so I snuck in the back door while nobody was looking and made my way around the (not all that inspiring) house in the wrong direction. On the stairs was an unexpected reward for my duplicity, a stained glass image of St Catherine. It looks 17th or 18th-century to me, but more than that I couldn't venture: German, to judge by the black-letter Gothic text? Big sword, I'll hazard that.

Holiday

What a lot I managed to do during my week off. Resisting my natural instinct just to lie in a darkened room for five days, I amassed a pleasing list of folk seen: Ms Brightshades and Fr Fretboard in London, Lady Arlen (visiting Dorset for a festival) and my family in Dorset, Cara and her husband at Emwood, and Dr & Mrs Abacus in Surbiton. Their daughter was so small the last time I saw her that she took some convincing it had ever happened. 

And as well as taking in Art Deco buildings in Dorset, I saw plenty of other nice things too. Adverts on LiberFaciorum kept arguing that I should visit Tower Bridge, so eventually I did. Some of the views of the staircases are positively Piranesian. I was relieved that the walkways between the towers weren't open to the air, but they do have glass sections which children seemed happy to walk over but I found completely terrifying. I sometimes get vertiginous standing on a chair.

Lady Arlen and I had a few minutes to kill before seeing my Mum, so we took a little stroll on Turbary Common. The Speckled Wood butterfly was a pleasure though perhaps not an unexpected one, but we weren't anticipating meeting cows. Later in the day I paid my respects to the Shelleys in St Peter's Churchyard - it always tickles me that Mary, Bysshe, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft have ended up in Bournemouth of all places - and had an ice cream on the beach.

I may share some images of St John's Church in Wotton another day: for now, here's the churchyard and its view into the Surrey hills on Wednesday. The churchwarden let me into the building.

Finally Friday found me at historic sites just into Kent. Bayham Abbey is a ruin in - at the moment - a baking field of dry grass with a little Gothick house adjoining. It was dissolved ahead of England's other religious houses in 1525 as Cardinal Wolsey raised funds to build Cardinal College in Oxford. Apparently the local people rioted in protest, though it's so out-of-the-way it's hard to see where they can have come from. A small riot, perhaps. 

Not far away is Scotney Castle. I hadn't realised that this was the family seat of Christopher Hussey, the architectural historian who did so much to bring to public record both the history of the English country house and of the Picturesque (and so I know his stuff quite well). By his time the family lived in the New Castle built on the top of the hill by Anthony Salvin, while the Old Castle formed a colossal garden feature on its island below a quarry. It's a beautiful site, which I saw in gorgeous sunshine. I bought books in the National Trust secondhand bookshop (including one about the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, in Italian but the pictures are great), and tried the pea-and-mint soup, a decision which didn't go too badly. Betty Hussey's very, very pink bathroom was a bit of a challenge, but interestingly the NT says Scotney has come with a bigger collection of objects than any of their other properties, attics stuffed full of them which they are still cataloguing after 15 years. One of these is this amazing child's fairy fancy-dress costume, laid out in one of the bedrooms. 

And no sooner had I entered the New Castle that I encountered my patron saint. 'Madonna and Child', the caption describes this painting by Luca Longhi, but that's St Catherine: she's brought her wheel along, otherwise she might not be recognised and let into the party. 

Wood and Water

Back in the days when you didn't risk being burned to a crisp when you stepped outdoors, I went for a walk around Frensham Ponds; I combined it with a visit to a church which I'll share on another occasion, but here, as something gentle and undemanding, are some pictures from the walk. The bird, so Mrs Abacus told me, is a stonechat, the first I can remember ever seeing which I think is rather fantastic. The obelisk, more imposing in real life than it looks here, is a memorial raised by William Robertson to his brothers, both killed in WWI and in whose memory he gave Frensham Common to the National Trust. The Council is begging people to stay away from Frensham Ponds in the current baking conditions - I wouldn't dream of trying to get there!

Contested Landscape at The Devil's Punchbowl

The Portal sculpture at The Devil’s Punchbowl has been there, apparently, since 2013, so I must surely have seen it before giving my repeated visits – but can’t remember doing so before going there yesterday. The change in the landscape here is hard to exaggerate. Before its diversion, the London-to-Portsmouth A3 road skimmed the lip of the Punchbowl: it regularly snarled up with traffic due to its constricted site. In 2011 it was rerouted to run through a mighty tunnel, avoiding the nature reserve completely. The site of the old road is now a broad path, a pebbly strip between the trees; and in the middle of it sits Portal, a great block of what else but Portland Stone all the way from Dorset, carved into enigmatic and sometimes indistinct shapes. Among those shapes a Celtic cross and a great crouching Devil can be discerned most easily. The organisation behind the sculpture was A3D, an arts initiative set up by a Hindhead resident to provide a legacy of the vast engineering project that was the A3 diversion. A team of twenty students from local schools worked with sculptor Jon Edgar to produce the sculpture, although I’m not completely clear how the various ideas were arrived at. Over the winter of 2012-13 Mr Edgar spent a lot of time outside in the snow and ice and was occasionally joined by the schoolchildren who gave the stone a thwack or two with a mallet. There was always going to be a Devil and a Cross, though the latter moved about a bit and, if I understand rightly, the whole stone was upturned at some point. It wasn’t until 2014, nearly a year after the sculpture was unveiled during a snow shower, that it was named Portal: although the artwork isn’t obviously a literal portal of any sort, the name alludes to the tunnel to which it owes its existence, and also suggests it might be the starting-point of an imaginary journey.

I am wary of representations of the Adversary, especially if they are formed in a massive block of limestone that will last for centuries. In Portal, he is trapped within the stone, but also pushes away the Cross on the stone’s other side, and I can’t put lightly aside the reason why the real Cross was put on the top of Gibbet Hill a few hundred yards away – to defuse the malign energies of the place, generated out of fear and superstition. These are not positive things. And yet the sculpture admits that the landscape is a contested place, not a site of one meaning. Its ambiguity refuses to tell a single story, and that’s an admirable decision for a memorial to make. And a memorial to a road at that!

Petworth House

My last holiday trip was not very far to the south, to Petworth. I'd walked round the park before, and I and Ms Formerly Aldgate had even ventured into the house, but it had been frightfully overrun and coming home rather than fighting our way around was the right decision as we weren't paying for it. This time, of course, I was, but on a dull Epiphany day only a handful of visitors were making their way around, dwarfed by the scale of the place.

Petworth is unusual as you get a clear impression of life below stairs in the kitchen wing, a range of grandiose rooms basically designed as backdrops for the Egremonts' art collection, and not much else. The family themselves vanish in the face of the paintings and the sculpture. The house is always associated with Turner, who often stayed there, but even he doesn't feature very prominently. I spotted one little Turner work, high up on a dark wall, depicting Jessica from The Merchant of Venice and described by one of the artist's early biographers: 'Only a great man dare paint something so bad'. Instead it's as though the house has its own personality, or series of personalities, separate from any of the people who have lived there - the clear Marble Hall, the umbrageous Great Staircase, the Chapel panelled in black wood, the musty North Gallery, as well as the low and slightly resentful kitchen wing. 

I look instead for strange nooks and details, and find them in the background figures of John Leslie's Sancho Panza and the Duchess and the horrified face caught in the midst of Blake's Day of Judgement. 

Nymans

Given that Nymans in Sussex provided so much interest when I went there last week, I'm puzzled that I've got no recollection of hearing about it before. It was moderately busy though only at certain points, the grounds extensive enough to swallow up most visitors so that I could walk some stretches without seeing anyone at all. Nymans is not a Gothic Garden, because its follies and arrangements are not intended to produce a shuddersome thrill, but it does include ruins which was the draw as far as I was concerned. However those ruins are not what they seem. 

The gardens are formed into an eclectic sequence of landscapes, a rose garden, a walled garden, a sunken garden with an Italianate loggia and a Byzantine wellhead, and avenues of hedge leading to herms and statues. They are varied, and amusing.

At the centre of the gardens sits the house of Nymans. When German-born banker Ludwig Messel bought it in 1890 it was an unremarkable early-19th-century structure which he transformed into a weird mock-Tudor mansion with a colossal tower on one side. In due course Ludwig's son Leonard took over. Leonard's wife Maud really didn't want to move to darkest Surrey from London. She was an artistic soul. This is Maud, pinched from the National Trust guidebook to Nymans. Just look at that dress. Imagine the colours.

Maud refused to move unless the house was rebuilt around her own fantasies as a medieval manor. She got her way, and what we have now is an astonishingly convincing pastiche of a building which has grown over a long time. Maud and Leonard's daughter Anne - eventually Lady Rosse and mother of Lord Snowdon - stayed on at Nymans as 'Garden Director' after it passed to the National Trust in 1953 until her death in 1992: that's her in the amazing portrait below. It's no surprise that the house is packed with miscellaneous bits and pieces that are of all periods and none, just like a proper lived-in manor and a bit like an analogue of the gardens where you will even find a Roman altar-stone if you keep your eyes open.

Ah, the ruins. These were not an intentional part of the composition. In the bitter winter of 1947 the staff got into the habit of defrosting the pipes in the morning with blowtorches, and lo and behold one February dawn a fire broke out burning down one wing. That's the ruin.