Tyntesfield House

And now the house tour...

Garden view

Main entrance; Gothic, yes?!

In the library; best organized library yet

Now in the dining room; Tyntesfield was one of the first great houses to get
electricity; the switches were carefully concealed in the glorious paneling and
woodwork

Wonderfully-carved side board in the dining room; we thought the walls were
covered in leather; but no, it is fabric, the pink background of which was painted
white by servants; four giant walls

"You rang, sir?" episode #23; out in the hall behind the dining room, the kitchens
behind us, the servants' main block beyond the door; a boy was stationed in the
hall here to monitor the bells and notify appropriate servants which rooms were
ringing

Gothic writing desk

Gothic fire place

Up the main staircase, family portraits

Including founder William Gibbs, Emperor of Guano,
reputedly the richest commoner of the age; his company
cornered the South American bat guano market; all these
British gardens require a lot of fertilizer

And then, after the bedrooms, quite a few rooms of furnishings the Trust
apparently hasn't decided what to do with...

Including this incredible bed; still has the Christies' auction
tag on it, I think

Now in the family chapel; serious Gothic; they were reportedly very devout

And finally, an outside view of the chapel

Tyntesfield Gardens

Our next stop was Tyntesfield, a relatively young house, Victorian, and a relatively recent National Trust acquisition, 2002, by way of L20,000,000 two-month public drive that rescued the house and all its contents from public auction. It is a neo-Gothic country house, suberbly done, all of a piece, with four generations of Victorian and later furnishings; plus several hundred acres of park and gardens. We started our visit with a garden and park tour.

A beautiful asian plane tree that caught my attention even before the guide said
it was her favorite tree at Tyntesfield

A giant purple beech, one of several

The interesting thing is, when you stand under a purple
beech, the leaves are green

Waste not, want not...well, that didn't exactly work out for the Gibbs family,
but they did save much, benefiting all the rest of us; these are spiral staircase
parts later used as a planter in one of the gardens

Garden view of the house; a giant monkey puzzle had stood here for years, now
replaced by this youngster

A disused azalea maze that the Trust hopes to rebuild; they have much work to
do here, as elsewhere

Beautiful green; it's summer now, despite the fact the
temperature has yet to go much above 70

Out in the building adjoining the walled (kitchen) garden and green-houses;
the green-houses were heated, so some of the servants slept out here, in the
little bunk cabins, to keep the fires going

Cherry tree on the kitchen garden wall

A chef's "chop and chat" out in the garden; wonderful free samples of breads,
strawberries, fruit drinks, etc.

Dyrham Park House

The house, with its large orangery to the left (conceals servants' block)

One of two bookcases designed by Blathwayt friend, diarist
Samuel Pepys; the other is in the V&A

Marrow spoons; we've just got to get some for our camping kit

Murillos' boy teasing a woman eating porridge

Staircase, as seen in...

An episode of Dr. Who filmed at Dyrham

Flower vase, reflecting the Dutch thing... there were several
more

Inside the door is A View Down a Corridor, by Samuel van Hoogstrattaen

Royal bed--just in case the monarch dropped by--never
did, never slept in

Figurine collection

During WWII, Dyrham was home to babies and toddlers moved away from the
areas being bombed by the Germans; a photo from the garden

"You rang, sir?" episode #7

Hundreds of antique Delft tiles, once, presumably, from Blathwayt's office, now
adorning the dairy

Dyrham Park Garden

Our next home and garden was Dyrham Park, up very close to the Bristol Channel. There is a great house, 17th century and later, and a large deer park. We chose to walk the deer park first, then do the garden tour, then tour the house. We were in for a surprise.

In the deer park, Hinton Hill, an iron age hill fort, now a bovine stronghold; in
577, seriously, the culminating battle between the Britons and the Anglo/Saxons
was fought near here: the Battle of Dyrham: Cuthwine and Ceawlin slew three
Briton kings, Coinmail, Condidan, and Farinmail and took the cities of
Gloucester, Cirecester, and Bath; sadly, I can never hear nor read the word
"Briton" without remembering... "'Ooare the Britons?" "Well we all are! We are
all Britons. And I amyour king" "I didn't know we had a king! I thought we were
an autonomous collective" "You're fooling yourself! We're living in a dictatorship!
A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes--" "There you go,
bringing class into it again" ... sadly

In the deer park, a menage a trois of deer

A deer nursery

Looking down to the house; we have already walked downhill a good bit; this
house is in a hole!

And at the top of the hill, a statue of Neptune; what is going
on here?

It wasn't until the garden tour that we discovered what was going on...Dyrham
was most importantly the property of one William Blathwayt, a businessman
and civil servant who happened to be fluent in Dutch at just the right time, the
arrival of William and Mary; Blathwayt served as the king's secretary of state
for a decade and was by that time wealthy enough to build himself a country
estate with a Dutch water garden (think Versailles, smaller scale); ponds and
watercourses and falls and fountains; all this needed a water source higher than
the house and garden, and thus the house was in a hole; alas, within a century--
fashions and fortunes change--his descendants had plowed the whole thing up
and covered it over with more deer park (the map above is the only
representation of the original estate's gardens)

This rectangular pond is about all that remains of the original water park

But slowly, the Trust is restoring its beauty

Thus

Very slowly, very carefully; this is what a parterre looks like without the flowers
(taken out for some repairs on the house)

Our day at Dyrham ended in the parking lot, noticing a camper with Washington
state licence plates: and we later met David and Lou, doing pretty much the same
things we are doing...

St. Cyriac's Parish Church In Lacock Village

St. Cyriac's is a beautiful little parish church, Medieval in origin, renovated in the 15th century, with some lovely interior carving and the Renaissance tomb of Lord Sharington, the original owner, after Dissolution, of the Abbey. Outside, looking around the building, however, things get weird; and then weirder...