Dust sheets

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I came upon these dust sheets in one of the unrestored rooms at Calke Abbey, Derbyshire. The wallpaper was stained from what seemed like an ingress of water and the fireplace looked as though an overmantel of some sort had been removed. The furniture that the room held was only suggested by the shapes of the sheets: chairs were obvious, tables and cupboards less so, and what, I wondered, was the tall, thin piece under its sheet? Times past and time suspended were suggested by the anonymous shapes. One could imagine that as the room was painted, papered and readied for visitors the sheets would come off and, with a flick of a duster and a rub of polish, all would be as it once was.

I took my photograph because the jumble of shapes intrigued me. I also liked the contrast between the well-lit pieces by the window with the darker corners of the room, and the limited range of colours that worked well together.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 12mm (24mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/80 sec
ISO:3200
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Belton boat house

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I've long felt that the UK's country houses are largely stuffed with expensive tat, objects that serve no purpose other than to provide something on which the wealthy owners can spend their excess of money. Truly, shopping as a leisure activity didn't begin in in the malls of the second half of the twentieth century, but much earlier, on the Grand Tour and in the workshops of painters, wallpaper manufacturers, and craftsmen who decided that there was a living to be made parting the wealthy from their cash by selling them elaborate and ornate versions  of everyday articles, or specially created objects whose sole purpose was to be collected.

The last of the photographs I am showing from our visit to Belton House near Grantham, Lincolnshire, is a view of the boat house. This small building sits at the edge of a man-made lake that is surrounded by trees. Like much else at Belton it is more than it needs to be. However, it makes a nice eyecatcher in its location and doesn't quite scream "money" in the same way that the house does, even though it was designed by the notable architect, Anthony Salvin, in 1838-9 and is in the style of a Swiss chalet with fish-scale tiled roof and walls of basket-weave pargetting.

photo and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 42mm (84mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/125 sec
ISO:200
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Pantries, larders and disappearing words

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When I was young the words "pantry" and "larder" were often heard. My parents used both of them, interchangeably, and I knew they signified a small room adjoining the kitchen where food was stored. Only when I was older, and picked up a little French, did I realise the derivation of the words - the pantry was originally the room where bread was stored, and the larder was the store for meat, probably initially, bacon. However, houses gradually stopped being built with this specialised room-cum-cupboard, complete with stone or concrete shelf, and food storage passed to a group of small cupboards in a fitted kitchen. Today, in the UK, we are at the point where pantry and larder are no longer everyday terms.

I was reflecting on this recently when visiting an old house in the care of the National Trust at Canon's Ashby in Northamptonshire. I'd entered a low, basement-level room that had been set out to show how it was originally a food store. I pondered whether it was a pantry or a larder and concluded that it was neither, being too large for such a humble designation. It was presumably chosen as a food store for its cool, cave-like qualities, a place where food suitably stored would have an extended life in the lower temperatures it offered.

The National Trust had set it up quite nicely with a good selection of jars and pancheons. There were even hares and pheasants (presumably stuffed) hanging from joists, and if you look carefully you'll see a couple of rats (also stuffed). The light and subdued colours of the room were very appealing and I came away with a couple of shots that I quite liked, of which this is one.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 14mm (28mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f3.5
Shutter Speed: 1/30 sec
ISO:6400
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Belton House

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I recently went to Belton House for the first time. This large country house is now in the care of the National Trust and is open to the public. However, it being a Monday in January only the gardens and grounds were open so we didn't get to see the inside. On returning home I read a little about the building and was surprised by what I found.

Nikolaus Pevsner describes Belton as "perhaps the most satisfying among the later C17 houses in England". I can only think that he is referring to the interiors because the exterior is decidedly eighteenth century in style and fact, the whole having been given, as Pevsner says, "the facelift of 1777-8 by James Wyatt". The neat stonework and layout of the south front can only be described, to my mind, as ordinary. And the fact that the north front is very similar, a couple of details notwithstanding, doesn't help. The "H" plan hints at the seventeenth century underpinnings, but to the casual observer the building wears an eighteenth century face interesting only for its lack of interest.

For much of our visit the sun lit the south front like a floodlight, good for showing off the warm stone, but bad for modelling the architecture. This view of the facade that overlooks the formal gardens appealed more with its surface patina due to the reduced light. I particularly liked the way the building sits in its carefully planned surroundings. As I took today's distant view of that elevation I had an idea that it would make a good candidate for conversion to black and white: the smooth, frosty grass, silhouetted trees, and the building's chimneyed and towered shape under a lightly figured sky all suggested it, and I'm quite pleased with the outcome.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Nikon D5300
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 22mm (33mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/320 sec
ISO:100
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Kitchens old and new

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I don't keep abreast of fashion in interior design: it changes too often for the flimsiest of reasons for my liking. However, interior design - in fact design of all kinds - and the way it has changed down the centuries and decades is something that does interest me. I have the feeling, from my admittedly limited experience, that the aesthetic inspiration for many of today's cutting edge kitchens is the mortuary or perhaps the operating theatre. All those easy-clean surfaces of black and white tiles and stainless steel put one in mind of places where flesh is opened and saw meets bone. There was a time in the Victorian period when a similar approach was taken to kitchen design. In large country houses they were often laid out with ergonomics, industrial scale food preparation and easy maintenance in mind. Rows of Belfast sinks, scrubbable hardwood surfaces, serried ranks of utensils, heavily tiled floors and walls and enormous cooking ranges all suggest a similar kind of utilitarian rationale underlying their construction.

I was in one such kitchen recently. It is at Audley End, a large country house of the Elizabethan period and later, near Saffron Walden in Essex. The building is owned by English Heritage, is open to the public, and often offers activities in the Victorian-period service wing. This group of rooms features a kitchen, pastry larder, cook's room, servants' hall (now the restaurant), meat safe, game larder, coal shed, scullery, dry larder, wet laundry, dry laundry, dairy maid's sitting room, dairy and dairy scullery. In the house's heyday these would be filled with servants of many ranks and job descriptions producing all the food, washing and other services that were needed to keep the owners of the house, their family and their guests in the comfort and style that they felt they deserved. Today English Heritage stages reconstructions of some of these activities with, for example, staff in period costume making bread or other food using the implements available in the kitchen.

Today's smaller photograph shows one of these re-enactments. In the main photograph you can see all the shelves that can be glimpsed on the left of the smaller image. The rows of gleaming copper pans, shiny silver serving dish covers and the  contrast of the white of the pottery on the plain wooden shelves made an interesting composition for a photograph.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 11.8mm (32mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f4
Shutter Speed: 1/40
ISO: 500
Exposure Compensation:  -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

The sanitized past

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Much of the past that is presented to us in film and television, print and the web is a heavily sanitized version of reality, a past that is made more acceptable for modern consumption by being scrubbed clean and tidied. This is especially so with regard to heritage sites. There are a number of factors that give rise to this. Much of what remains was the property of the rich, is durable, designed to be visually attractive, and consequently over-represents their part in history. The remaining artefacts and homes of the poor are much fewer, less substantial, and are invested with less ornament. Unlike the rich, the remains of the past's poor frequently lacks a written narrative or primary sources that allow a detailed story to be woven around it. History is written by the victors, and the victors were invariably the rich.

England's National Trust has often been criticised for their lack of representation of the poor in the properties that it owns and chooses to receive or buy. It has responded to this by attempting to show the lives of servants in country houses as well as those of the owners, and by giving greater emphasis to the everyday activities - cooking, cleaning, gardening etc - alongside the usual interpretation of the building, art, sculpture and furniture. To further counter this criticism the Trust has also acquired a wider range of properties, including, for example, Southwell workhouse. For some critics, however, the final product looks like tokenism. Stephen Bayley has called it, "Disneyfication" and "intellectual slumming".

Today's photograph shows the inside of a large kitchen at Audley End, a Jacobean country house in Essex. This building, like most of its kind, was modified by successive owners. The kitchen presented here dates from the Victorian era. It looks quite a sight with its large, blacked range, white tiles,  glowing copper pans and rustic basket. What's missing of course is the army of servants engaged in hours of drudgery, using the range and pans to prepare meals and burnishing it between times. In fairness to English Heritage, who are now the custodians of this building, staff in period costume do make an attempt to show something of this. It does, however, like most re-enactments, come across as all rather jolly fun rather than a daily grind of long hours and hard work.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 27mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/15
ISO: 3200
Exposure Compensation:  -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Yew hedges and country houses

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A couple of weeks ago I was cutting my side of a conifer hedge that separates part of our garden from a neighbour's. It's about 10 feet high and 50 yards or so long. It took me and my wife a morning of hard work to accomplish the task. My relatively light travails came to mind the other day during my visit to Audley End House in Essex as we took a break from our journey down to London. When I got my first glimpse of the Jacobean country house I was impressed - by the size, symmetry and setting of the building - but moreso by the fine yew hedge that stretched diagonally forward from one end of the main facade.

The hedge must be about 15 feet tall, very wide and many yards long. It is cut in the "bumpy", abstract style that is favoured by many country house gardeners. One often sees topiarised yews and geometrically cut yew hedges in such settings, but frequently these cyclopean hedges feature too. Often they act as screens separating areas of garden or block views that offer little of interest or perhaps an eyesore. At Audley End it serves to mask the hotch-potch of service buildings - kitchen, dairy, laundry etc - from visitors as they approach the front of the house. The hedge, unusually, isn't wholly yew, a few other evergreen shrubs have been allowed to intermingle.

As yew hedges go it's one of the biggest I've come across. Not as big though as this example at Montacute House in Somerset that takes 4 gardeners three months to cut! For a couple more examples of this kind of hedge see this Spalding, Lincolnshire example and this one at Melbourne, Derbyshire.

click photo to enlarge

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 50mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.67 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Nevill Holt, Leicestershire

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The first time I saw Nevill Holt in Leicestershire was when I'd cycled up out of the Welland Valley from Drayton. I was breezing along cheerily, having left the uphill section behind me when it appeared between a line of mature, roadside trees. What was it? A country house? A private school? A little research showed that it had been both those things, and was also a small village of 28 people (2001 census).

The oldest part of this scenic collection of buildings is the church of St Mary with its Norman font, late C13 transept arch, sedilia and piscina, tower of C15, porch of 1635, and various parts from restorations of 1865 and 1878. However, parts of Nevill Holt Hall, the country house that is physically attached to the church, and constitutes most of the buildings seen in the photograph, also dates from the 1300s (hall and roof), a large bay window is from the 1400s and much else is C16, C17, C18 and C19: this is a place that grew with successive inhabitants -principally the Nevills, and in the C19 the Cunards (of shipping line fame). Incidentally, the large brownstone building on the right with the clock tower was the late C16 stables. Around 1830 the owners Gothicised much of the Hall's main elevation. In 1919 the house was sold and became a school. This closed in 1998, and by 2000 the building was once again in private ownership.

So what of the village? Well, behind this magnificent assemblage of buildings are a few houses, the dwellings of the small number of people who live in this lovely rural location. I took this photograph on a cool March day of blue skies and sharp shadows, when cycling was quite the best way of getting around. I composed my shot with the shadows of the roadside trees filling the grassy foreground, the Hall's facade stretched across the frame, and the blue sky and clouds above.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 14mm (28mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/1000
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Grimsthorpe Castle, Lincolnshire

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Quite a few visitors to Britain are surprised by some of the castles they see. If they go to Bodiam in Sussex, and survey its squat drum towers, solid walls, machicolated defensive entrance, battlements, moat, etc, then they see the epitome of medieval might in a building that offers everything that the word "castle" means to the average person. Conway, Chepstow, Beaumaris, Harlech and many more offer a similar experience. It's not these buildings that mystify people, however, it's the castles that are barely distinguishable from country houses (stately homes) that are the problem.

The fact is, that castles gradually evolved from strongholds with a very real military purpose - either defence or oppression - into large, comfortable, ostentatious houses, which retained the title of "castle" often because of the aristocracy's emotional attachment to buildings that both looked and sounded impressive. The increasing power of the monarch, the greater stability of Britain, and the widespread use of gunpowder brought an end to the building of castles in the medieval period. Those castles that were erected later had the trappings of their forebears, but would have been of limited value in any fighting involving a well-armed foe. An example is Tattershall Castle in Lincolnshire. Made of brick, with stone details, it would have impressed the local population, kept peasants with pitchforks at bay, but would have soon succumbed to cannon.

Many castles were converted into large dwellings when their initial purpose disappeared. Today's photograph shows a case in point. From the north Grimsthorpe Castle in Lincolnshire, is a typical, grand, Baroque country house displaying architecture in the classical style by Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor. From the south it is a much more domestic-looking building of the sixteenth century with pitched roofs, gables, projecting bays, domestic windows in wood and stone, and not a sign of fortifications. Except, that is, for the towers at each end of the elevation. The one at the left (like the two on the north front) is a much later addition designed to increase the resemblance of the building to a castle. The one on the right of the photograph is the original tower from the castle that was built here in the 1200s by Gilbert de Gant, and is known as King John's Tower, its age betrayed on the exterior by the pronounced batter (slope) at the base of its walls.

I took my shot with the overhanging trees and their shadows framing the elevation, and used the gravel path to add a leading line and a little more foreground interest.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 16mm (32mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/1250
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Anglesey Abbey

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Anglesey Abbey, a country house near the village of Lode, Cambridgeshire, is now in the care of the National Trust. Much of the building, the 98 acres of garden, and the nearby eighteenth century Lode Water Mill, are open to the public. The house, as its name suggests, began life as a religious foundation. During the reign of Henry 1, i.e. between 1100 and 1135, Augustinian monks built a priory here. It continued as a religious building until the expulsion of the monks during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1535. Around 1600 it was taken into private ownership and converted into a house. The ruinous remains were extended and improved in subsequent centuries, taking on the appearance of a building of the C17 and C18 with earlier remains. In 1973, on the death of the owner, the building and gardens were left to the National Trust.

The great temptation with a subject such as this is to fill the frame with a main facade or perhaps a corner, giving emphasis to one side of the building, letting the light model the walls, window bays, doorways, roofs and chimneys. On my visit I took some shots that did this. However, an image that gives a house context is also desirable, particularly one such as this where the setting, surrounded by trees, lawns and gardens, is central to the way its owners conceived the building. On the day I was there the sky was flawless blue, so this composition that minimised the overarching blandness, and offered a glimpse of the main facade across lawns from behind trees and shrubs, seemed a good approach. The dappled shadows of trees behind me gave foreground interest on a clear, cold, winter day.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 21mm (42mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/500
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On