The Bath House, Walton

It's been many years since my Autumn holiday has taken me to any of the more off-the-wall properties in the portfolio of the Landmark Trust. I returned to that fold this time, though, in the form of The Bath House near Walton in Warwickshire, a place I wanted to visit some years ago but wasn't able to. The Young Lord Declan & Lady Minerva went there, and in conversation with Caroline, a non-stipendiary priest who sometimes comes to our 8am mass, I learned she and her husband have been there too. I further learned to keep the door that leads to the grotto shut, or bats get into the living room (that happened to them). 

For the Bath House is just that: a very salubrious and shell-festooned octagonal shelter painted the most delicate blue (I know it looks green in the photo) over a 'cave' which shelters a cold bath, made for the benefit of the Mordaunts of Walton Hall. The architect was Sanderson Miller, no less, whose own small estate at Radway scant miles away was the first, as we might call it, 'Gothic Garden', a landscape tweaked to provide reflections on melancholy and mortality. It's another building that Landmark has rescued from ruin, and into which a bed, bathroom and kitchen have been crammed despite it never being intended that anyone should spend a night there. 

You approach half a mile or so through woodland, a journey which at least in the morning I found always fraught with pheasants (I wonder if Landmarkers ever run them over?), and come across the Bath House down a slope once you can drive no further. People very rarely photograph this view, so I did: it has a certain Vanbrughian solemnity. It looks very different from the other side, with a clear distinction between the upper bit and the grotto.

Inside, of course, all is refinement and delicacy. Except when you take the cold, damp staircase down to the pool ... In common with most guests, I did go for the full 18th-century experience and take to the water, gradually making my way down the steps into the pool until the pain receded. My feet even, finally, touched the bottom - though not for very long, and on a less sunny afternoon I chickened out of my intention to take a second dip.

Outside, Gothically, there is a small pets' cemetery at the front of the Bath House, but there are living beasts around too. The bats were not a myth.