Attingham House

Our second big stop of the day was Attingham, another Herefordshire home and garden now maintained by the National Trust. By my lights, it was a nice Georgian place, undone by the dissipating habits of a late 19th century lord, then restored by his younger brother, who had done well despite the lack of title (merely ambassador to Italy). The latter had the remarkably good sense--well ahead of his time--to rid the place of its Victorian decor and to return it to its Georgian heritage. Bravo! Let decor match the architecture. If you can afford it.

The house

Music room

Room with tables and chairs

Nice ceiling

Dead bird collection

Library

Table without a view

Probably not the servants' stairs

Pseudo-Caravaggio soon to be sent to the Prado, we were told

Another nice ceiling

Headless receptionist (was rude to callers)

Art Nouveau portion of house

You rang sir? Episode 22,572; a feeble attempt to do a 360 pano
of the bells

Butler's sitting room

Kitchen

Order of the day

Junior servants' dining

Each place setting describing a real person, a real role; the
women were paid about half what the men were paid...

Vicki says this must be wrong, since it is not how it was done in
Downtown Arby's; ;-)

Some of the silver brought back from Italy by
the successful non-dissipating younger brother

How elections were won in the 1800s; a jug and
a mug on election day; nowadays it is more
efficient to buy entire legislatures and thus
gerrymander entire states' votes

Berrington Parkland: Culpability's Last Stand

Lancelot "Capability" Brown changed British landscapes, and tastes, in scores of great houses and grounds throughout the 18th century, and we have seen many, if not most of his works. Berrington was his last commission, and certainly of a piece with its predecessors. He had a vision ("raze the village or move it over there behind the forest; divert the river; dig a giant twisty hole there, making it the serpentine lake; put the diggings over there, making a hill; install the ha ha over there to extend the grandest pastoral view; dot the landscape with clumps of eye-catching specimen trees and also a few follies...") and never much swerved from it, so far as I can tell.

Presenting the largest wisteria ever, so far

In the (non-Capability) walled garden

Nice cedar, close to the house

Grounds, lake

The ha ha a little more conspicuous than it should be

The Plan, with eye-catching red beams...

The embroidery celebration of Capability is a national thing,
and Berrington had the largest and perhaps best exhibit we have
seen so far

Especially this exquisite thing, the size of a postcard, nano-
detail

More grounds

Herefordshire hills

From a tree that fell ages ago, a singe limbs leaves out

Millstone and track near the house

Britain in the late spring

Berrington Hall

Sunday was a two home-and-garden day, as we drove from Leominster to Berrington Hall and then to Attingham, and then all the way to Welshpool, in Wales, for an over-night in its downtown car-park. Berrington was Culpability Brown's last commission--Croome, you will remember, was his first, two days earlier--I'd hoped to do an alpha and omega thing in the same day...but it was not to be. I can't say our Capability Brown set is complete, but we do have both the book-ends now. In any case, Berrington will require two posts.

Berrington Hall; Georgian

It was done up in Georgian entirely, including
these mannequins dressed in paper costumes...
someone very talented with paper

Berrington was in the family of Admiral Lord Rodney, famed in
the Seven Years' War and also in the War of Independence; it was
Rodney who, owing to illness, failed to show up in relief of
Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown; and the rest is history; in any case,
there are paintings of sea battles all around

HMS Rodney, 1944; one of the more remarkable battleship/gun
platforms ever built...in the inter-war Nelson class, the RN's
only 16-inch guns afloat; just FYI; hurled scores of broadsides
into the Bismarck at scarcely more than a mile's range; sank
the Bismarck...

We return now to our regularly scheduled programming

Smocks, Tawana; all the laborers in the fields wore smocks...
see below

Men in smocks

In the dress-up room

We never miss the dress-up room

Display on Georgian dress

Looking down the servants' staircase

Butler's pantry

In the laundry...a washing machine

Drying racks