Hatfield House

As it is World Goth Day, I will delay relating what happened at the Bishop's Supper in favour of this topic. which has some vaguely relevant aspects. Yesterday I visited Hatfield House with Lady Wildwood, who is, after all, one of the very first people I met in London Gothic many years ago. Her Ladyship has just finished working in the tourism and heritage sector in Hertfordshire and is now marketing director at a London arts venue, so she knows Hatfield and the other local attractions very well, while I'd never been there. It seemed surprisingly quiet for a bright late-Spring Saturday, but Lady Wildwood says this is quite common: Hatfield makes most of its money from events and hiring itself out, and visitors are so relatively unimportant that it recently closed its souvenir shop. Both house and estate are appropriately grand but I will remember some of the smaller details best: the famous portrait of Margaret Beaufort; the tapestries of the Four Seasons lined with little allegorical vignettes which were only deciphered in the last ten years; the bust of Queen Alexandra in the robes of a graduate of the Royal College of Music; Queen Elizabeth's sleeve in the Ermine Portrait.

The last stage of our visit took us round the woodland walks, as far as The Castle, a Gothick folly dating from the 1780s which is fun but, at the moment, dreadfully underused when it could so easily make a splendid holiday let a la Landmark. We'd both have stayed there quite happily!