In 1961, Country Life published two architecture articles by Mark Girouard on a striking Scottish property called Abercairny Abbey, in the same number of weeks.

The first article described the house as: 'Perhaps the finest example in Scotland of a Gothic abbey of the early 19th century.'

However, these were no ordinary architecture articles. They were the building’s obituary because in 1960, on the orders of its owner, Abercairny was paid a short and terminal visit by the demolition men.

Abercairny was situated deep in the bucolic Perthshire countryside, a few miles from the spa town of Crieff. It, like so many others, stood on the site of another building, demolished to make way for a newer model.

Colonel Charles Moray inherited the Abercairney estate from his brother, in 1784, initially employing Thomas White — Capability Brown’s former foreman — to tame the Scottish landscape. It is presumed that White was responsible for the picturesque lake and main planting schemes.

Satisfied with the land, Moray turned to the house. He tinkered around with plans to extended and enhance the existing property, but finding no solution that pleased him, was determined to begin again. He would settle on a grand and very fashionable Gothic-Revival abbey.

It took a few years for Moray to find the right architect. He eventually plumped for Richard Crichton, who had trained under the exacting eyes of Robert and John Adam. His accolades include the Bank of Scotland building on The Mound in Edinburgh, Balbirnie in neighbouring Fife, and Dunglass in East Lothian.

The building work began in 1804, but its progress was slow — hampered by supposed tensions between architect and client. The latter had one too many opinions. It was still a shell when, on October 18, 1810, Moray died.

Work began again, a few years later, on the instruction of a descendant, Colonel James Moray. According to contemporary newspaper reports, he introduced curling to his lake, to entertain local farmers during the frosty winter of 1812.

Crichton died, aged 46, in 1817, and the Abercairny project was handed to Richard and Robert Dickinson of Edinburgh. The house and stables were finally finished five years into Queen Victoria's reign. If it had survived, it would've have been a contender for the set of The Traitors.

Inside, stucco was moulded and painted to imitate more conventional, but expensive wood and stone carvings. They were executed by David Roberts — who started his career designing theatrical sets.

So intriguing was the castellated mock abbey that on September 12, 1842, Queen Victoria, passing through, alighted from her carriage to inspect it. She was said to have only got out 'for a moment', so it's hard to gauge what her reaction was.

Subsequent heirs made changes to the striking building, including the 1869 addition of a tower by Charles Stirling Home Drummond Moray.

This Charles, who also owned Blair Atholl, died in 1891. After this date, the building, which was, by now, no longer fashionable, fell from family favour. In 1904, adverts to rent Abercairney appeared in Country Life. By the mid 20th century, it was suffering from neglect.

It was requisitioned as a hospital for the majority of the Second World War, but managed to hang on to its original, Victorian gilded wallpapers, heavy damask curtains and stucco ceilings. Following the war, and with little protection in place for Victorian piles, the family decided to move to a smaller house on the grounds and do away with the expensive-to-maintain property.

Country Life’s photographs are considered to be the most complete visual record of this remarkable building.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

When Walter Basset married Cecilia de Dunstanville in 1150, he not only gained a wife, but one of the most important (and profitable) estates in England. And, over time, the Basset family would go on to become one of the most powerful Cornish mining dynasties. In fact, the family, their home and ancestral lands were so well known that Winston Graham wove them all into his epic 'Poldark' series.

When Country Life decided to photograph the gardens in the late 19th century, the Basset estate encompassed land from Redruth to St Ives, and 12 miles of Atlantic coastline.

It's safe to assume that the Editor was not very happy with the resulting images. Fourteen survive in our Archive, but none of them were ever published. Until now.

We own plenty of unpublished photographs of Britain's great country estates and gardens, but what makes this situation unusual is the fact that the photographer would have suffered through an arduous and expensive steam train journey — on what would go on to become the Riviera Express.

On the odyssey — which culminated in a bumpy carriage ride from the station to the house — the photographer would've been encumbered by a heavy camera, lenses and tripod. Plus a number of fragile, large-format glass plates.

In the background of these photographs, there are tantalising slivers and wholes of the now-lost Tehidy House. A myriad houses took it in turns to stand on the Basset's land during their tenure of it, and this one was relatively new.

Tehidy was commissioned by John Francis Basset in 1861 and was a vast expansion of an existing Palladian house by Thomas Edwards of Greenwich.

Edwards’s elegant, symmetrical mansion was built with large quantities of imported Portland and Bath stone, supplemented with granite from the family’s quarry at Carn Brea. His grand design consisted of a central pedimented main block connected via curved, sweeping quadrant wings to four detached corner pavilions.

Inside, the property was decorated with sumptuous Adam style ceilings and fireplaces, and paintings by Peter Lely, Sir Anthony Van Dyck and Thomas Gainsborough.

John Francis's enhancements were overseen by William Burn of Piccadilly — and the result was what is now considered to be Cornwall's first modern manor house.

In just two years, the property doubled in size, eventually comprising a grand entrance hall, seven reception rooms, 21 principal bedrooms, 14 servant's bedrooms and a very generous, for the time, six bathrooms. Plus, electric lights, a hot-water heating system and fire hydrants.

This modernisation, however, came at a cost: £150,000 to be exact, or more than £16 million in today's money.

Unfortunately, the family fortune — built on the tin and copper mining industries, both of which were now in decline — was dwindling. John Francis, however, didn't have too long to worry about things. Six years after the build was finished, he died, aged 39.

His two brothers inherited the estate and its mounting debts, but they too died, in 1888, and so it passed to a son called Arthur.

Arthur’s main passion in life was racing — a disastrous hobby for anyone in financial difficulty, but he clung on to Tehidy until 1915. Remarkably, it did sell — to Cornwall County Council. Their plan to convert it into a much-needed tuberculosis isolation hospital succeeded and by late 1917 the first patients were in place.

On February 26, 1919, Sister Everett — who was comforting someone about to succumb to the disease — noticed an unusual smell and raised the alarm. The building was on fire.

The local fire brigade battled valiantly to extinguish the flames but, by the next day, all that remained of Tehidy were the exterior walls and the quadrant pavilions.

The hospital was quickly rebuilt, but without, of course, the wonderful original interiors. In 1986, it was transformed once again and divided into luxury apartments.

The grounds, and parts of the Basset estate now form Tehidy Country Park.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

Nicholas Leke, the fourth and last Earl of Scarsdale (c. 1682-1736), led a reasonably blessed life. He served as Lord Lieutenant of Derby, and as an envoy to Vienna. And, in 1707, he inherited some land after his elder brother died without issue.

By 1724, he'd tired of the house sitting on it and, wanting to leave a lasting impression on his ancestral plot, decided to build something better. It was said that he asked for something grander and ever more impressive than Chatsworth.

The 4th Earl commissioned Francis Smith of Warwick — who designed nearby Derby Cathedral — to build this new mansion. Sutton Scarsdale Hall.

The resulting structure was definitely imposing. Standing three stories high and nine bays wide, it loomed large over the land from a lofty ridge. Constructed from biscuit-coloured ashlar from Rang Quarry, a mile away, it featured work by some of the era's most refined craftspeople.

These included master carver Edward Poynton of Nottingham, who dressed the stonework with exquisitely hand-carved pillars and pilasters, topped with fine Corinthian capitals. And artists Albert Artari and Francesco Vassalli from Italy, who laboured over the fine stucco work in many of the rooms, including the grand entrance hall. 

Needless to say, this all came at a cost and the extravagance was said to have inspired William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress. When the Earl died in 1736, aged just 53, he left behind no heir and a mountain of unpaid debts. 

The house was sold off and changed hands numerous times in the following centuries, eventually landing in the hands of Richard Arkwright, the son of Sir Richard Arkwright, inventor of the Spinning Jenny, in 1820. It still belonged to the Arkwright family when Country Life was invited to visit in 1918.

The ensuing article, published a year later, did not mention any problems, but it is clear from the photographs — reproduced here — that something was amiss. Hardly any photographs of the interiors were taken and, in those that were, there are just a few pieces of oddly-placed furniture. In photographs of the outside, the lawn and beds look unkempt. The photographer, out of choice or under instruction, also went to great lengths to conceal the fact that the gardens no longer overlooked peaceful green fields. Sutton Scarsdale Hall was now surrounded by coal fields.

In June of that same year, the preliminary notice of the sale of the whole estate was announced in the press. By October, the 70-house village, the Arkwright Arms pub and more than 340 acres of land (not including mineral rights) had been auctioned off. The hall was sold afterwards to a consortium of local businessmen.

This group wasted no time in calling in the asset strippers. If something could be sold, it was — even the roof, which left Artari and Vassalli’s presumably unsalvageable, exquisite work exposed to the elements.

In 1946, Sir Osbert Sitwell, a local landowner, purchased the decaying remains to stop them from being entirely demolished. They were duly awarded Grade-I listing in 1951. Sir Osbert, realising the enormity of the cost of preservation, then gifted the hall to the Ministry of Public, Building and Works (now English Heritage). 

In 1970, a second article by Country Life helped to publicise the hall's plight and secure some much-needed funding.

It is still possible to visit the bones of Sutton Scarsdale. The once crumbling walls are now safe, but the roof and windows have never been replaced. It's also possible to visit parts of the hall in a less exposed setting. Sections of three of the principle rooms are on permanent display in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a fourth, pine-panelled one lives in its entirety in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Originally acquired by notorious newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, it then sold to a Hollywood production company — who used it as a backdrop in Kitty — before making its way into the Huntington’s collection.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

Ardross Castle in Scotland’s beautiful Ross and Cromarty is famous both sides of the Atlantic Ocean for murder, deceit and seduction. Yet far from being about the Scottish Baronial castle’s past, this truly traitorous behaviour has everything to do with its present and, given its popularity, its future.

Here, we invite you to join us at a large, round table in order to delve into the Country Life archives and uncloak the history of the turreted Highland castle made famous by the global TV franchise The Traitors.

We also invite you to marvel at how often the castle has been bought and sold, and for how much — for it's quite staggering that at some points in its history, it's changed hands at prices that would make you weep...

The 60,000 acre plot on which the magnificent Ardross Castle stands was sold, in 1845, to one Sir Alexander Matheson, by the then-Duke of Sutherland, for an eye-watering £90,000 (according to the Bank of England's inflation calculator that is roughly £9.5 million in today’s money). Matheson, a Liberal, had started his career as a merchant in China trading, it would appear, in both the highly-faithful British staple of tea, and the definitely treacherous commodity of opium. He subsequently went on the be, among other things, a director of the Bank of England, a director of the East and West India Dock Company, and chairman of the Highland Railway Company. The clearly-talented, well liked and very well-connected businessman subsequently set about developing his vast lands into well-drained roads, tenanted farms, sporting habitats and tree plantations.

The castle itself was the creation of architect Alexander Ross, who Matheson had first encountered during his tenure as chairman of the Highland Railway Company. Ross designed the stunning Scottish Baronial castle around an existing hunting lodge on the plot, adding more than 30 rooms to property, including the now infamous turrets. Ross also laid out extensive pleasure grounds around his masterpiece.

Matheson ploughed huge quantities of his personal wealth into the estate, but when he died in 1886, his son and heir Sir Kenneth Matheson quickly showed that he did not share his father’s passion for the tamed lands in the north east of Scotland. He first let out the property, for a decade, before selling the castle, the village of Ardross and some 36,000 acres in 1897 to a Mr C. W. Dyson Perrins—the grandson of the co-inventor of the still-secret recipe for Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce. Perrins, who was from Malvern and had served as a Captain in the Highland Light Infantry, was a philanthropist and collector who also had interests in the Royal Worcester porcelain company. Perrins purchased the property as a summer retreat and much like the Royal Family, he, his family, guests and staff would travel from Worcestershire to the Highlands on his own train for an annual two-month-long holiday — where he would host shooting and fishing parties on his grouse moors, in his salmon-stocked rivers, trout-filled lochs, and deep in his numerous deer forests. He, too, lavished his vast fortune on the estate, adding electricity, bathrooms and formal gardens to the castle, while also purchasing further hunting grounds to expand his sporting opportunities. He also restored and modernised his farms and farm buildings, and in 1899 invested in the new (for the time) polled Aberdeen Angus cattle for his farms. Like Matheson before him, it would appear he was also a considerate landowner, too. A report in Glasgow’s Daily Record in 1911 described Perrins as doing a '…great deal of good for the people on his estate, who look upon him as the ideal landlord'.

Perrins stayed with his Highland retreat until 1936, when he seemingly-reluctantly put the whole lot up for sale. (Seemingly reluctantly, as he bought back the Factor’s House on the estate for his own use.)

When advertised for sale in the pages of Country Life, the property seemed to have devalued greatly despite the amount of love and attention he had showered upon it. An article dated November 14, 1936, the estate amounted to 53,000 acres and was described as 'very compact around the Castle.' The whole lot sold faster than Alan Carr delicately wiping a grain of poisonous pollen across the cheek of his best friend.

In little under two months, it was sold to a client of one Percy Deas of Duns. He went on the divide the land from the castle, according to an account in Country Life from January 23, 1937. An advert was placed for the castle alone on February 27 of the same year, asking the mind-bogglingly low amount of £6,500 (about £385,000). The main selling points will be instantly recognisable to fans of The Traitors. Listed as the top attractions were a library, a billiards room and a panelled oak room. It then went on to list other exceptional features such as a magnificent galleried ball room, indoor swimming bath, dressing rooms, 28 principal bedrooms, six bathrooms and 26 secondary and servants rooms, plus many other amenities — all for the 2025-comparable price of a London studio flat.

A history professor, and son of a tobacco company director, Austin Mardon snapped up the castle. He was quoted as saying they would live in 'as many rooms as necessary', and that he had bought the vast property so his children could 'grow up in perfect freedom'. Contemporary newspaper reports state how the adventurous Mardon camped out with three of his older sons while waiting to take up ownership of the property. The Bristolian explained that as the father of nine children, he was not welcomed into any hotels in the area, so had left his American wife with the youngest while he and the boys awaited the handover of the (presumably sizeable) keys. This inauspicious start does not seemed to have dampened the family’s ambitions for their use of the property, as it did not change hands again until 1983.

An advert placed by Savills in that year shows the remains of the formal garden in a sorry state in front of the still-magnificent castle. Almost unbelievably, it was advertised at 'offers over £70,000' for the building and 80 acres.

Adjusted for inflation, that's about £240,000 — though as we all know, house prices have outstripped inflation wildly over the past couple of generations. So let's put it this way: in 1983 the average house price in the UK was £27,000; today, it's around £270,000. In other words, you — or more likely your parents, or perhaps your grandparents — could have bought the Traitors castle for the same price as this terraced house in Guildford.

The McTaggart family bought the structure and nursed it and its gardens slowly back to health. Used to this day as a wedding venue, its main starring role is playing host to The Traitors — a television show broadcast in the UK and USA. It’s strange that a building with such a positive history should be the backdrop for such backstabbing, but then perhaps that what makes it the perfect faithful.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. An additional 50,000 assets from the historic archive are scheduled to be added this year — with completion expected in Summer 2025. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

'It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then,' said Alice to the Caterpillar during her Adventures in Wonderland. And so, too, would it be useless in trying to re-create the magnificent gardens at Cowley Manor, Gloucestershire, as they were when Country Life published an article on them in 1906.

Lewis Carroll was said to have gained inspiration for his famous tale of transitioning from childhood to adolescence while staying at the nearby Cowley Rectory. During his time in the Cotswold idyll, he was permitted to wander through the high-Victorian, heavily-manicured gardens of Cowley Manor. Their fantastical scale and exoticism were believed to have fed into the author’s imaginary world that he later created.

Situated to the south front of the lofty manor house, the impressive terraced gardens — said to be based on the Villa Borghese in Rome — tumbled down to a lake fed by two of seven springs said to be the source of the River Thames. Another source fed the dramatic water cascades, which saw pure spring water gush from the mouths of lions, past stone eagles and into another ornamental lake in the pleasure grounds.

By 1906, when Country Life paid a visit, the vast property was in the possession of a man who, along with his brother, had made their fortune from selling spring water. Well, spring water mixed with malted wheat and dried milk.

The drink was originally called Diastoid, which, frankly, sounded dire. Wisely, the decision was taken to use the family name instead, and James and William’s beverage launched first in Racine, Wisconsin, USA, and then in Slough, UK. It was a huge success. Their surname? Horlick.

The Horlicks had been born in Ruardean, some 26 miles west of Cowley Manor. They had both moved to the USA to make their fortune, with James returning to England in 1890 in search of a property in which to invest some of his new-found wealth.

James Horlick bought Cowley Manor in 1895, vastly extending the square house on the site built by James Hutchinson in 1850.

By the time Horlick had finished, his new country seat included a 65 feet by 40 feet ballroom, 31 bed and dressing rooms, six bathrooms and, by the 20th century, electric light powered by the property’s ever-present water. But Horlick’s main passion was the outdoors.

By 1906, he had planted a pheonomenal 700,000 trees on his land and the surrounding area. Roses were, according to the article of 1906, 'everywhere to be seen', and his statue-festooned terraces were ornamented in the distinctly dated (by that time) Victorian style of potted shrubs and seasonal annuals.

The grounds were graced by all manner of exotic creatures. Imported parrots, macaws and Australian swans were among the collection of non-native birds to be found in the grounds. And grazing majestically in the distance from his magnificent water gardens was Horlick’s prize herd of English Shorthorn cattle.

Despite all this magnificence, Horlick decided to sell in 1911, with adverts appearing in Country Life marketing the house, pleasure gardens, village, woodlands and the local George Hotel at Birdlip all to go as one lot.

The newly-knighted Sir James Horlick then retreated to the south coast, renting at first the famous West Dean house and gardens, before eventually ending up at Kidbrooke Park.

Cowley didn’t sell, so, by 1915, he took the decision to rent his Cotswold home out. It was leased to Mrs Enriqueta Angela Scully until 1929. In 1921, Sir James died.

The property was inherited by one of his sons, Sir Ernest, who had to take legal action against Scully in 1927, where she was found guilty of not keeping the ornamental lakes and boat house clear of mud. Ordered to pay £300 (just shy of £17,000 in 2026) to make good the lakes and a further £20 (£1,122) for the deterioration of the fishing water, she relinquished her tenancy.

In 1928, Cowley Manor was put back on the market for the 'sacrificial price' of £14,500 (£813,714.89), eventually heading to and being withdrawn from an auction after it only garnered bids amounting to £7,500. There was talk of demolition.

In March 1929, however, it was bought by a local man for an undisclosed sum. From there, it changed hands once more before going into service as first a school, then a care home for the remainder of the 20th century.

Cowley Manor’s formal Victorian gardens have long-since disappeared, but the house and grounds are once more thriving in the form of a throughly modern luxury hotel. And Sir James Horlick’s ornamental lakes remain a very good spot by which to enjoy a drink accompanied by a good book.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

How best to record the passage of time is a problem which has exercised the mind of man from the beginnings of history. The mechanical clock dates probably from the end of the 13th century, and since that date clock-making has evoked the finest and most precise — and often the most complicated — mechanism of which each succeeding age was capable. Not content with that, the clockmaker called in every appropriate form of applied art to decorate his efforts — the goldsmith, silversmith, enameller, lapidary and others.

The study of horology is, therefore, one which covers a great many forms of mechanical and artistic effort.

No one even remotely connected with horology would ever think of referring to 'the Ilbert Collection of Clocks and Watches.' All over the world the Ilbert Collection, without qualification, is known as the most complete collection of clocks and watches there ever has been, or is ever likely to exist.

The making of it called for the leisure, means, mechanical knowledge and artistic taste that are rarely found in one man. Courtenay Ilbert had them all, and he devoted 50 years to his tremendous achievement. Primarily, the emphasis of the collection is mechanical and scientific, but nearly every form of decorative art is also represented, and there is hardly any — certainly no important — aspect of horology from about 1500 to 1850 which is not worthily represented.

Ilbert died in February, 1956. The British Museum quickly realised the importance of acquiring his collection for the nation, and for two years his executors continued to hold it while the Museum has investigated the possibilities of raising the relatively modest sum of £85,000 for which it was offered to them. Unfortunately, at this time, their budget up to the end of this year had been fully bespoken, and although various substantial offers have been made towards raising the sum, the Treasury has so far refused a special grant for the balance.

Accordingly, despite their desire for the collection to remain intact and in this country, the executors and beneficiaries under Ilbert's will can no longer delay, and short of a miracle or a change of heart by the Treasury, the clocks will be auctioned at Christie's in November. This unique and never-to-be-repeated work of a lifetime will thus be broken up, and probably many treasures of national importance will go out of this country.

The oldest surviving clocks date from the late 14th century; they are monumental mechanisms such as the Salisbury Cathedral clock of 1386. Exceedingly few domestic clocks exist from before 1500 and the Ilbert Collection starts at about the beginning of the 16th century with the typical late Gothic house clocks, with iron movements, and up to three trains, for the main timekeeper and for striking hours and quarters. These are surmounted by one or two bells carried in a framework with crocketed decorations. The trains are weight-driven, and the escapement is the verge and foliot which was universal for clocks until the application of the pendulum in 1657, and for watches until the practicable development of the balance spring in 1675.

Until these two dates, accuracy of timekeeping made little progress and, perhaps as a compensation, this is the great age of decoration in clocks and watches. Watches, or at any rate portable, spring-driven time-keepers, date from the end of the 15th century. The oldest spring-driven clock is dated 1525 and belongs to the Society of Antiquaries of London. The earliest surviving watches, which could be carried about the person, date from 1550, and the Ilbert Collection has a small, drum-shaped instrument from the mid-century, almost completely without ornamentation, which was certainly intended to be carried. Towards the end of the century watches became less uncommon and the collection is well represented with French fusee and German stackfreed specimens in typical pierced and engraved, metal-gilt cases of flattened drum shape. Clocks became more adventurous, such as the lovely little drum clock with rock-crystal sides and a superimposed, dome-shaped alarum.

An alternative to the fusee or stackfreed, as a means of equalising the variable torque of the mainspring, is found in a mechanism by Hans Kiening. The almost drab, box-shaped case contains a movement of superlative finish in which the depth of engagement of the verge with the crown-wheel is reduced as the pull of the mainspring diminishes. Part of the pierced and engraved blued-steel fretwork which decorates the movement plates was missing, and a replacement was made by Ilbert himself. It is indistinguishable from the finest contemporary work.

Of unparalleled importance is the great clock of 1598 by Nicholas Vallin; it is the earliest dated clock of British make, and probably the oldest surviving musical clock. At each quarter a long performance is made of 13 bells, and the outer case is of architectural form, in metal gilt.

The first half of the 17th century saw increasing richness of decoration, and the collection has a superb variety of watches cased in painted enamel, cut rock crystal, engraved silver and silver-gilt, form watches, pin-work, and so forth; and examples of the early Baroque table clocks with complicated astronomical movements and gilt cases in 'tabernacle' shape.

The collection may have had rivals, but it is with the invention of the pendulum for clocks and the balance-spring for watches that it really comes into its own. Reasonably accurate time-keeping became possible after some 350 years of little or no progress; and British masters leapt at the new opportunities, so that within two decades they had established themselves as pre-eminent, and an export trade had been established.

The Dutchman Huygens first brought the pendulum to a stage when it could be produced commercially, and he confided his method to Samuel Coster, who made the first examples. The Dutch family of Fromanteel had previously settled in London, and they sent John Fromanteel to Holland to learn the new system from Coster.

By 1658, they were advertising pendulum clocks in England, and cased them in what was to become the standard British long-case or grandfather clock. Ilbert's specimen, from details of the pediment-topped case, can be identified as probably the oldest surviving British long-case clock. From it stems a selected range of long-case clocks. Next is an early example of the long pendulum and anchor escapement (Britain's first great contribution to horology) in the form of a superbly proportioned, very simple clock by Joseph Knibb. Then come three Tompions; a year clock by Quare; and then one of the first regulator clocks by Graham. George Graham, by his invention of the deadbeat escapement and mercury-compensated pendulum, brought timekeeping from limits of a minute or two a week at best, to a few seconds a month by soon after 1725. Ilbert's Graham regulator is a superb example, giving sidereal and mean time. It is matched by the slightly later sidereal and mean time regulator of Thomas Mudge, with a gridiron pendulum. This perfectly-proportioned piece was about Ilbert's last important addition to the collection.

Then came John Harrison's first practicable marine timekeeper and Mudge's invention of the lever-escapement. Of Harrison's two successful marine timekeepers one is in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich and one, belonging to the clockmakers' Company, is in the Guildhall Museum. No example is in private ownership; but of the next steps in the development of the marine chronometer the Ilbert Collection is unsurpassed. Mudge's constant force escapement was too complicated for quantity production, but its performance was unsurpassed for a century. Of the three earlier timekeepers made by Mudge, Ilbert has one. Mudge is also not known to have made more than three instruments with the lever escapement, of which the only watch belongs to Her Majesty the Queen. Of the two clocks, Ilbert's is certainly the first. By 1780 John Arnold and Thomas Earnshaw were producing relatively cheap marine chronometers on lines which have not been seriously departed from or improved upon. It is questionable if any very early Earnshaw survives, but the Ilbert Collection has every important type of Arnold's work, and typical specimens of Earnshaw's.

Correspondingly came improvements in the accuracy of pocket watches, with the development of Mudge's lever escapement by Emery, Leroux, Grant and Breguet, and the detent escapement by Arnold and Earnshaw. All of these are represented in fascinating profusion, with cases of appropriately simple perfection. The last great step in the perfection of the pocket watch, by the virtual elimination of position errors, was Breguet's tourbillon. His first perfected specimen he gave in a simple, silver drum-case, with an inscription dedicating it to John Arnold. This unique piece and many other Breguet examples are in the collection.

Also of this final period of the artist-craftsman, before Swiss mass-production methods took the field, are some superb late decorative watches such as transparent enamel over engine-turning, complicated astronomical movements and a variety of unusual French clocks, including a bracket year clock by Berthoud.

As a background to all these mechanically and decoratively perfect clocks and watches is a huge chest of some 2,000 watch movements representing every imaginable facet of mechanism from earliest to latest.

There are many fine collections in the world of clocks and watches, but none covers the whole field so comprehensively as Ilbert's vast collection. With the fierce competition among collectors to-day such a thing could never be got together again. For the three and a half centuries covered by the collection, horology has commanded man's greatest mechanical and decorative skill. That the nation, on the responsibility of the Treasury, should throw away the chance of securing the finest horological collection there will ever be, for the want of part only of the agreed valuation of £85,000, seems almost unthinkable.

The Country Life Archive contains more than a century of British architecture, rural life, photography, and property records dating back to the magazine's launch in 1897.

You can search and explore historical content using the Country Life Archive tag on our site, or access the complete backfile (1897–2005) via the ProQuest Country Life Archive.

John Robartes, the 4th Earl of Radnor, was not a fashionable man.

He lived at Radnor House, in between Horace Walpole's (Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford) Gothic wonder that is Strawberry Hill and Alexander Pope's Villa on a highly desirable stretch of the River Thames in Twickenham. In the Georgian era, the then village west of London was very fashionable and the place to see, be seen in and, ideally, live.

Lord Radnor remodelled the riverside building in 1745 in an ornate Gothic style, which drew mild mockery from Walpole. The British politician nicknamed the neighbouring property Mabland — a reference to the overly ornamented and tacky public gardens in London's Marylebone. Rumour has it that he was also upset that someone had built in the Gothic style before he'd had a chance to bring Strawberry Hill to life.

Radnor’s miniature battlements framed the sprawling gardens, which ran all the way down to the river's bank. In the middle, Lord Radnor constructed a double-storey, Chinese-inspired summerhouse. He drew further ire from his neighbours by choosing to decorate the house's insides in a jumble of classically-inspired styles. There was a Baroque ceiling on the ground floor, by French artist Jean Francois Clermont, a Rococo-style one in the dining room and a bay window in the Teddington Room decorated with some interesting decorative plasterwork.

It was in these richly-decorated rooms that Lord Radnor desperately sought the company of the cream of London society. However, he wasn't the best of hosts.

In 1749, actor David Garrick, who lived in nearby Hampton, wrote: 'My Lord Radnor plagu’d our hearts to dine with him, we at last agreed (for we hate to dine from home) & he had invited the Parson’s Wife to meet Mrs. Garrick—but such a Dinner so dress’d & so serv’d up in unscour’d Pewter, we never Saw; the Wine was worse, but made somewhat better by the dead flies, in Short, we were soon both sick & unsatisfy’d; & we rattled the one horse chair home as fast as we could, where we recruited our Spirits again, with a clean Cloth, two roasted Pigeons, and the best currant Pye in ye Kingdom, the county of York excepted.'

Radnor died in 1757 and the curious house passed through the hands of multiple owners until, in 1903, it was purchased by Twickenham Borough Council. They had little interest in the house, and wanted, instead, to open up the garden to the public.

By 1937, the house — sad, unloved and used only occasionally as an office — was in a state of disrepair. Rain had made its way through the roof, damaging some of the painted ceilings, and the threat of demolition reared its ugly head.

At the last moment, it was recognised by someone as a building worthy of redemption.

Queen Mary declared Radnor’s retreat to be 'unique among the small houses of England', and was an early donor to a campaign to raise £1,000 towards the cost of repairs. Imagine how proud Lord Radnor would have been to see a member of the Royal Family declaring his home so fashionable.

Country Life rallied to the cause, publishing unusually hurried and ill-composed photographs of the interiors to illustrate the desperate need for further donations. The council happily handed the house over to the newly-formed Radnor House Preservation Society.

By early 1939, enough money had been raised to begin the preservation works, but Radnor House was not to have the Cinderella-style, fairytale ending it deserved.

A year after the works began, on the 10th day of The Blitz, the house was eviscerated by one of the thousands of bombs dropped on the British capital.

Today, a school stands on the site of the stricken house; its neighbour, Strawberry Hill, remains in fine fettle. And Radnor Gardens are, still, a public park for everyone to enjoy.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

Charlotte Anne Fletcher was just 12 years old when she inherited her family's business. Her early years were split between London and the more tranquil surrounds of Peel Hall (not to be confused with Kenyon Peel Hall, in the same Lancashire village) — a new-build property, reportedly designed by Charles Barry for her grandfather, Matthew Fletcher.

The Fletchers’ wealth came from coal and it was this 'black gold' that Charlotte inherited following the untimely deaths of her mother, Anne, in February 1857, and her father, Jacob Fletcher Fletcher, two months later.

In 1870, after her guardians released her inheritance, Charlotte spent some of her mammoth wealth on Park Hall, a beautiful Elizabethan house on the edge of the market town of Oswestry, in Shropshire. A Latin motto was inscribed above the front door: 'Quod tibi fieri non vis Alteri feccris', or, 'Do not do unto others what you do not want done to yourself'.

In 1866, 20-year-old Charlotte had married the Hon Robert Wellington Stapleton-Cotton. Though she bore him two children, the marriage was far from a happy one and Charlotte petitioned for divorce in 1879, citing abandonment. The case was reported in the national press. Evidence included an astonishing, three-year-old letter from Stapleton-Cotton:

‘I have behaved to you as badly as a man could do, and by the time you receive this I shall be far away with another woman. You may blame me, but you must own that we were never suited to each other. Forget me if you can, and think of me as never having belonged to you. It will be no use in to make us go back, as nothing will ever make us retract from the step we have taken. If you can be kind to my brother and sister as regards to the allowance they have had from me, I implore you to do so.’

A divorce was granted, though it appears that Charlotte was left to pick up the costs. It was to be one of the best decisions of her life.

In 1886, she remarried. This time, happily, to Major Alfred Wynne Corrie of Itchen Abbas, Hampshire. By this time, Charlotte was so respected for her charitable deeds that the Mayor of Oswestry presented the happy couple with a diamond star, on behalf of the town.

It was a great union. The couple set up home in Park Hall, managing to modernise it (including installing a lift in 1910), without compromising any of its historic charm. Wynne Corrie went on to become Mayor of Oswestry, a Deputy Lieutenant and Justice of the Peace, dedicating his life to the service of his new community.

In 1903, they invited Country Life to visit Park Hall. The writer was enchanted, describing it as ‘commodious and comfortable’, and a ‘mansion of very excellent and original character’. Photographs from the article, reproduced here, show intricate and detailed woodwork and carvings throughout the principal rooms.

Nine years later, the couple celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary at home.

On June 18, 1913, Charlotte was in the lift, heading downstairs for dinner, when its rope snapped. She died two days later from shock and her injuries.

Alfred put Park Hall up for sale a year later, by which time the First World War was looming large. It failed to sell and so, like others, he offered his land to the military for training purposes. He then volunteered for service and served as an honorary Major in the Volunteer Defence Force for the duration of the war.

In the ensuing years, Park Hall’s land became a temporary home to thousands and thousands of men — including the poet Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) — as they perfected the terrifying art of trench warfare. It eventually housed a sizeable prisoner of war camp.

Months after the hostilities had finally ceased, another disaster struck. On December 27, 1918, a fire took hold in the chapel. It quickly spread through the wooden hall, consuming the entire building in hours.

Wynne Corrie died four months later. He had remarried in 1916, but was laid to rest with Charlotte in his childhood home of Itchen Abbas.

In August 1919, the Government announced that it had purchased Park Hall’s land for an undisclosed sum from the executors of Wynne Corrie’s estate. The plan was to use it as a training ground for demobilised soldiers who wanted to become market gardeners, but nothing came to fruition. Instead, an existing hospital continued to operate; during the Second World War it was used as a military camp and, after that, by troops on National Service.

The land has finally found a semblance of peace in the 21st century, as a new estate of 110 houses. And Park Hall’s former farm is now an adventure park where children can interact with the animals, drive small tractors and run around in trenches as they are taught the history of the land on which they stand.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

Cartier

Founded in Paris in 1847, 50 years before the inception of Country Life, Cartier grew from a small jewellery workshop into one of the world’s most celebrated maisons. Under the direction of Louis, Pierre and Jacques Cartier, the family expanded into London and New York, winning royal patronage and an international clientele. Queen Alexandra, Maud Alice, Lady Cunard, Victoria Sackville-West, Baroness Sackville, Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor and Consuelo Yznaga, Duchess of Manchester were notable British-based clients.

Cartier’s jewels are synonymous with the great styles of the 20th century, from the garland style of the Belle Époque to the geometric exuberance of Art Deco. The house pioneered combinations of platinum and diamonds, while its fascination with India, the East and exotic materials produced some of its most distinctive creations.

Boucheron

Frédéric Boucheron opened his atelier on the Place Vendôme in 1893, becoming the first major jeweller to establish himself there. The house embraced the naturalism of Art Nouveau before moving towards Art Deco; all the while, its designers experimented with unusual materials and sculptural forms.

Boucheron’s celebrated clients included royalty, Maharajas and society figures, notably the Maharaja of Patiala. In August 1928, he arrived at Boucheron’s Paris premises carrying six iron safes filled with his own gemstones: more than 7,500 diamonds and 1,400 emeralds, as well as rubies and pearls. He commissioned Louis Boucheron to turn them into 149 pieces of jewellery, including emerald-and-diamond collars, multi-strand pearl necklaces, belts, earrings, sarpeches (jewelled turban ornaments) and bazubands (armlets).

Kutchinsky

Hirsch Kutchinsky fled Poland because of persecution and founded his jewellery house in 1893, in London’s East End — drawing on his family’s experience as jewellers to the court of Ludwig of Bavaria.

Under Hirsch’s grandson Joseph, Kutchinsky flourished after the Second World War, moving to Knightsbridge in 1958. Large-scale jewels in textured gold, diamonds and vivid stones such as turquoise, coral, lapis lazuli and tiger’s eye became its signature. The business was sold to Moussaieff in 1991.

Tiffany and Co.

Tiffany’s & Co. is arguably the world’s best-known jewellery brand. It was founded in New York in 1837 and by 1886 had perfected and introduced its six-prong Tiffany Setting, a single, brilliant-cut diamond elevated above the band by six slender prongs — better allowing it to capture and refract light.

Its gemmologists introduced Americans to rare stones including kunzite and morganite. In the 20th century, Jean Schlumberger introduced fantastical, nature-inspired jewels; Elsa Peretti revolutionised everyday jewellery with sculptural silver and fluid forms; and Paloma Picasso introduced bold colour and graphic motifs. Together, they established Tiffany as a byword for American jewellery.

Mappin & Webb

Founded in Sheffield in 1775, Mappin & Webb evolved from a silversmith into one of Britain’s leading jewellery houses, opening its first London showroom in 1849. Its jewellery became closely associated with royalty after Queen Victoria granted the firm a Royal Warrant in 1897, followed by commissions from royal households around the world.

The house produced elaborate diamond and gemstone jewels, embracing the changing fashions of the late Victorian, Edwardian and Art Deco periods. Its commissions included striking jewels for the Siamese royal family in the early 20th century.

Garrard

Garrard started life as a goldsmith serving aristocratic patrons. In 1843, it was appointed the first official Crown Jeweller by Queen Victoria and subsequently created generations of royal jewels, from Queen Mary’s tiaras to Diana, Princess of Wales’s sapphire and diamond engagement ring.

The house is famed for its love of cluster settings (a design technique where multiple small gemstones are set tightly together to create the visual effect of one large, brilliant centrepiece or an ornate pattern), utilising it to create treasures such as a sapphire-and-diamond brooch, given to Queen Victorian as a wedding present by Prince Albert.

CHANEL

Gabrielle Chanel dipped her toe into the fine jewellery world in 1932 with Bijoux de Diamants, an audacious collection of more than 45 pieces. Its celestial motifs — comets, stars, moons and suns, alongside ribbons, feathers and fringes — remain central to CHANEL’S haute joaillerie vocabulary.

Chanel famously applied the principles behind her fashion designs to her jewellery, rejecting rigid clasps and favouring transformable pieces that could be worn in different ways.

CHANEL’s first dedicated fine-jewellery boutique in London opened in April 1997, on New Bond Street. Contemporary reporting in The Independent describes it as the first European CHANEL jewellery store outside Paris.

If you’ve ever owned or been owned by a cat you’ll know that they like to loll in the most inconvenient places (on top of laptop keyboards in the middle of a high-pressure meeting, for example) and refuse to move until they, and only they, are ready.

The same feline stubbornness was rumoured to have greeted Victorian visitors to the country estate of Murray Edward Gordon Finch-Hatton, 12th Earl of Winchilsea and 7th Earl of Nottingham.

In the drawing room, guests would often be greeted by the Earl’s pet lion lounging on the sofa — he picked it up while touring Egypt. Anyone for tea? Or should that be does anyone want to be the tea?

Haverholme Priory was consecrated in 1139 as a rare Gilbertine monastery — a uniquely English medieval order which allowed nuns and canons to commune under the same roof. In 1164, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket was said to have sought refuge at the property after falling out with Henry II for the umpteenth time.

It took six more years for the then King to rid himself of Becket, and six more Henry's until Haverholme Priory's life as a monastic retreat came to an equally abrupt end.

In 1539, when Henry VIII forced the Gilbertines to relinquish the land they’d drained and tended and made habitable for four centuries, Haverholme was first handed to Lord Clinton and then to a succession of different families.

When Country Life was invited to pay a visit in the early years of the more genteel Edwardian era, the house had been in the possession of the Finch-Hatton’s — or the Earls of Winchilsea and Nottingham — since 1831.

This family was responsible for a series of huge renovations, including extensions constructed with local Ancaster stone. Now a 30-bedroom, four reception room mansion with a wrap-around terrace, Haverholme also boasted 70 cottages, small farms, a pub and 800 acres of woodland and a heronry.

The lion wasn't even the weirdest bit. In the garden, an array of presumably, Gilbertine monk’s coffins studded the lawn. And it is reported that, from time to time, the ghostly footsteps of monks and nuns could still be heard on the chipped stone terraces.

The lion-owning 12th Earl died aged 47 in 1898 (the big cat was, at some point, gifted to a zoological society), just two years after he inaugurated the first-ever London to Brighton car run. He had also, to his great credit, formed the National Agricultural Union which campaigned for better rights for all agricultural workers. His widow, Lady Edith, remained at Haverholme.

He was succeeded by his brother-in-law, Henry Stormont Finch Hatton, the father of Denys Finch-Hatton of Out of Africa fame, and Haverholme's last owner.

By 1921, the post-war depression had put a massive strain on the family's finances, so the 13th Earl took the decision to sell the priory in order to preserve some of his other ventures. Unsurprisingly, Haverholme lingered on the market. In fact, it lingered on it for a very long time.

Five years later, the Earl had to sell off the estate in individual lots — the priory sold to a demolition company.

On November 13 of the same year, Country Life broke the news that all of the estate's deer had been culled, the woods felled and the heronry — heron's nest on the same site, every year — destroyed.

The conservatory was sold for £23 (£1,747 in 2026), a porch fetched £28 (£1,529) and the tower clock, which ended up in St Edith’s Church in nearby Anwick, made £25 (£1,365). Adverts for the 'CHEAP' Ancaster stone balustrades and Tudor chimneys appeared inside the magazine.

In 1927, a 52-year-old woman, Edith Fernie, was killed by a train at a level crossing. She was in the process of building herself a new home at Woodhall in Lincolnshire and was hoping to use a large quantity of Haverholme's Ancaster stone and ornamental gate. Rumour has it the now spare stone was used to fill in some holes in Liverpool's Docks.

A very small, ruined portion of the priory still stands in a field to this day.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

The only surprise about Methley Hall’s demise is that it didn't come sooner. Demolished in 1963, the writing had been firmly etched on the wall of the West Yorkshire property since at least the Victorian era. 

Methley Hall was purchased by John Savile in 1588. His descendants who go on to become the the Earls of Mexborough.

Despite being extensively remodelled by Anthony Salvin in the 1830’s, the property was regularly left unoccupied and fell into a state of considerable disrepair. However, it was to be offered a brief reprieve from one of industrial Victorian Yorkshire’s greatest figures. 

Titus Salt — the Bradford mill owner, politician and renowned philanthropist who created the Victorian model village of Saltaire — moved into the hall on a vastly reduced rent in 1858.

Salt, with all his entrepreneurial vigour and connections, took on the task of repairing the dilapidated mansion, enlisting architects, joiners and craftsmen. The roof was made sound, the gardens made more pleasurable and the rooms were redecorated. The deer park was fenced with smart new iron railings to keep the aforementioned gardens clear of ruminating bucks and does.

According to a census, Salt had moved back to his beloved Bradford by 1871.

Country Life’s 1907 architecture feature on the lofty pile was far from optimistic about its situation. It opened: 'Methley… is a great house in a park, caught, to its misfortune, by a net of railways that make for Leeds, Dewsbury and Wakefield. All the discomfort of Yorkshire prosperity is at hand; the drift of smoke comes down the air from far-distant chimneys, collieries throw up their dark mounds and the water of the Calder flows inkily foul from the washing of shoddy [a recycled wool product].'

This far-from bucolic scene was worsened by what was going on underground. Somewhere underneath the hall's castellated towers, miners were toiling day in, day out to bring precious coal to the surface of the Savile Mine. 

In 1916, the 5th Earl died. The 6th owned the more practical and pastoral Arden Hall in Hawnby, North York Moors, and did not move in. Instead, it was used to entertain visiting royalty and for shooting parties.

It must have been kept in a fairly good state because, in 1935, newspaper reports indicate that Queen Mary popped in for tea, following a visit to an antique shop in Pontefract where she was much amused by a clock that chimed God Save the King.

Four years later, Methley Hall was, like so many other great houses, requisitioned for the war. By the time it was returned to the Mexboroughs, it was in a bad state.

In 1949, it was reported that the Ministry of Fuel and Power were to begin open-cast mining in Methley Park. It was hoped that the 60-room, 15th-century mansion could be bought and repurposed as a school or hospital, but just nine years later, mining activity had made it all the way up the park and to the front door.

Suffering from considerable subsidence, dry rot and, to add insult to injury, the theft of lead from the roof, a decision was reluctantly made to bring the grande dame down.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

The Gibbs family fortune was made in shipping and banking — and an exclusive concession on extremely profitable Peruvian guano. (Guano is the accumulated nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium-rich waste of seabirds. It is one of the most powerful organic fertilisers in the world and helped to fuel the First World War thanks to its use as an ingredient in gunpowder.)

When his father died, Henry 'Hucks' Gibbs joined the family business. In time, he would take complete control of it and work as the director and then governor of the Bank of England.

Among all of this work, Gibbs did find time to play and indulge his passion for gardening. He certainly had the fertiliser required to adequately feed one.

In 1869, he acquired Aldenham House — an imposing Queen Anne-style, red brick manor house in the commutable district of Elstree, Hertfordshire. The land was flat. Unrelentingly flat. And the soil was heavy with clay. This, however, was no problem for a man with Gibbs’s vision.

He laid out impressive formal gardens and acquired neighbouring parcels of land. One of these included part of the town's High Street which he rerouted away from his home and sunk into a 10-foot cutting so as not to spoil the view from his pleasure grounds.

James Pulham and Sons — the brains behind a form of decorative concrete called Pulhamite — were called in to create a water garden. They used rubble as a base and fashioned small hills out of Pulhamite with waterfalls cascading down them, and Pulhamite old-world-style bridges.

Pulham and Sons and Gibbs were assisted in their endeavours by the latter's son, Vicary, a confirmed bachelor, head gardener Edwin Beckett, a shrubs and trees expert called Arthur J. Sweet, and a team of 58 gardeners.

Together, Hucks, Vicary, Beckett and Sweet amassed a mind-boggling collection of plants that was so vast and so varied that Aldenham was said to rival Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Vicary — a disqualified MP who would go on to be editor of the first two editions of The Complete Peerage — was an obsessive plant collector, collating rare specimens of trees, shrubs, and flowers from around the world for Beckett, Sweet and the team to tend.

Hucks died in 1907, but his horticultural legacy was secure and the team went on to win numerous awards including RHS Victoria Medal of Honours for Vicary and Sweet, and multiple RHS Chelsea Flower Show medals for Beckett (specifically for his work with vegetables). All three men wrote articles for Country Life and published books on their specialist subjects.

Upon his death in 1932, Vicary had collated more than 10,000 species of trees and shrubs at Aldenham, including more than 200 varieties of oak trees alone. It was truly unique.

In 1933, Vicary’s older brother, Lord Aldenham, rented out the house and it was converted into a club. Auctioneers were called in to dispose of the plants and, very sadly, 60 years of extraordinary horticultural history were brought to a close.

The house was requisitioned by the BBC for the duration of the Second World War. It went on to serve as picturesque backdrop for television shows such as The Saint and The Avengers and an MGM film called The Village of the Damned and was then turned into a school. It is still one today.

The playing fields are surrounded by some impressive specimens of trees, a small reminder of Hucks, Vicary, Beckett and Sweet.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

When looking through Country Life’s incomparable collection of architectural photographs, it is fairly common to spot items that are less than favourable to modern sensibilities.

Fashions, tastes and social norms change. Some will later return to favour. One item of decoration we can all agree should never return to the interior decorators’ arsenal, however, is the guillotine, displayed in a hallway (or any other room for that matter).

Country Life’s photographers and writers visited Weald Hall a remarkable three times in the magazine’s first 15 years, recognising its significance and complexity.

Weald was vast and, depending on which angle you approached it from, looked like an old hunting lodge, ivy-encrusted Tudor mansion or grand Georgian pile.

The original structure was built using Henry VII-era red brick, but the south facade was given a distinctly Georgian makeover at some point in the ensuing years. Think an imposing Ionic-columned portico and double-height entrance hall.

Situated on the outskirts of Brentwood, Essex, the ancient land on which Weald stood had first been documented as a Roman camp.

By the 11th century, it was in the possession of Waltham Abbey and used as a retreat for monks, who, according to a report by Country Life, published in 1897, enjoyed visiting the nuns of Cheshunt.

Following the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the land, deer park and mansion landed in the lap of Sir Brian Tuke, Henry VIII's friend and 'treasurer to the royal household'. It passed hands several more times, until 1759, when Thomas Tower took possession.

The prominent member of society and MP was one of the first Georgia Trustees, a group of men who pushed through a plan to free up space in English prisons, by deporting the prisoners to the USA, where they were forced to build and defend a new settlement.

The Tower family's main seat was Huntsmoor Park in Buckinghamshire, but, as the second son, Thomas Tower knew he was unlikely to inherit it, so set about finding somewhere suitable to live.

Subsequent Towers inherited the property including Christopher Tower who, in 1778, commissioned Robert Adam to remodel the 'eating room' into something less Tudor, and Victoria-era Towers, voracious collectors all of them, who hung works by Reynolds, van de Velde, and van Dyck on its walls. However, other than that, Weald retained much of its original character.

At some point the aforementioned guillotine arrived on the scene — which local and visitor accounts claim was the same one that separated Marie Antoinette's body from her head. The presence of the bloody instrument is linked to Captain Tower (Christian name unknown) who helped escort Napoleon to his Elba exile in 1814 and acquired various bits of memorabilia on the way.

Weald Hall entered the 20th century in rude health. According to the 1911 Census, Christopher John and his wife Cecilia lived at the Hall with their two sons, Christopher Cecil and Hugh Christopher, and 12 servants.

In April 1913, Christopher Cecil married Dorothy Cynthia Surtees in Eaton Square, London. They received Weald Hall as a wedding present and Christopher John and Cecilia retired to the estate's Dower House. The newlyweds had two children in quick succession: Pamela Sophia in 1914 and Christopher Thomas in 1915.

Unfortunately Christopher Cecil was killed in Flanders on October 2, 1915, aged just 30. His younger brother Hugh, who signed up for the newly-founded Royal Air Corps, was killed a year later over France.

Christopher Thomas wasn't even two years old when he inherited the hall, so it was looked after by a trust and rented out to multiple families, including British motor-racing ace Dick Seaman's.

By the time Christopher Thomas came of age, the Second World War was fast approaching. He celebrated his 21st birthday in 1936 at Weald and was presented with gifts from the church, his tenants and tenant farmers. The local newspaper reported how he 'expressed the pleasure it had given him to visit the old home of his father.' However, he never actually lived in it.

During the Second World War, Weald was given to the military during whose tenure it was badly damaged by fire.

In 1946, Christopher Thomas decided to part with the badly damaged old house he had never really called home. He gave parcels of land to the church and sold the rest. By 1951, Weald Hall had been flattened.

No one knows what happened to the guillotine, but one can only hope it was a victim of the fire. The remaining grounds — Weald Country Park — are now enjoyed by thousands every year.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

Lymore Hall, in the historic county of Montgomeryshire, was a remarkable and rare example of a country house hardly altered from it inception in the 1670s.

Built around an old hunting lodge during the reign of Charles II, the half-timbered, multi-gabled house was commissioned by Edward, 3rd Baron Herbert of Chirbury to replace his ancestral homes of Black Hall — destroyed by fire — and Montgomery Castle — seized and devastated by Cromwell’s Roundheads.

Lord Herbert clearly heeded history's lessons. Recognising the perceived necessity for a swift departure, the new property was said to feature 'hiding places, odd corners and dark passages communicating with unexpected exits.'

Fine oak panelling, oak and elm floors and oak beams held the house together, developing a unique patina and warping with time.

Lymore also sheltered a striking family heirloom: a unique, hand-hewn, Jacobean-era staircase that the Parliamentarians had uncharacteristically left in one piece and salvaged from Montgomery Castle.

Sadly, Lord Herbert died just three years after Lymore was finished. The house first passed to his brother, then to his wife and, later on the Earls of Powis. The aristocratic family already had other, more modern properties to live in, so antiquated Lymore was treated as a very occasional second (but more likely third or forth) home. According to records, the last person to sleep under the grand old building's roof did so in 1886.

Aesthetically speaking, this served Lymore well and it entered the 20th century with the vast majority of its original features still intact. However, its emptiness did not serve its structural qualities quite so fairly.

'Everywhere ceased to be a quite straight line or an exact right angle,' wrote someone in a 1908 article for Country Life, 'for Nature has most engagingly insisted upon modifying man’s over-precise geometry, so that every floor waves and every floor leans.'

Somehow, Lymore survived the First World War, but during a 1921 fundraising fête for the local orthopaedic hospital the floor collapsed, dumping about 30 philanthropists, including the Earl and Countess, into the very old cellars. Mercifully, no one was seriously injured.

After this near catastrophe, Lymore was abandoned for good.

George Charles Herbert, 4th Earl of Powis, did try his hardest to preserve the unique building, but in a letter to County Life, published inside the October 5, 1929, issue, he outlined his reasons for demolishing it.

'SIR,—As I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that it is necessary to demolish the interesting old half-timbered house Lymore… I think that I ought to give the public….the reasons which have compelled me to arrive at this decision.

'...Lymore is scheduled as an ancient monument by H.M. Office of Works, and about two years ago H. M. Office of Works gave me a full report on the condition of the house, when it was found a considerable amount of money would have to be spent upon it to preserve it...

'I offered it on lease for £1 per annum [about £56.51 today] to a tenant who would be prepared to put the house in order either to preserve it as it is or to use it as a residence. I then offered it through H.M. Office of Works to the nation, but it was declined on the ground that the OOW had already undertaken the repair of many castles and buildings as they were able to deal with out of the grant made available to them by Parliament.

'I then advertised the house in this country and America for removal and re-building elsewhere, but without any satisfactory result.'

The letter concluded: 'I have, therefore, reluctantly come to the conclusion that the only thing to do is to sell the panelling, staircase, oak, etc., in the house by lots by auction of October 23rd, and I have obtained the consent of the Office of Works to do this. POWIS'

By 1931, no trace of the building still scarred the landscape. However, as always, small fragments do survive.

In 1931, Packwood House in Warwickshire was being extended. Floorboards from Lymore — presumably not the collapsing ones — were used in the Long Gallery, where they remain to this day.

The Lymore Estate still welcomes scores of walkers who pass the ghost of the house as they traverse Offa’s Dyke

And the ornate staircase? It was moved to its third home — Aldborough Hall, North Yorkshire — where it still elevates the great and the good.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

The best watch advertisements in Country Life's 130-year-old archive are a timely reminder that great watchmaking never goes out of fashion.

From Victorian pocket watches to modern feats of engineering, the adverts chart the watch's evolution from practical precision instrument to object of desire — as well as consumer's changing tastes.

However, one thing remains reassuringly the same: there's always time for a beautiful watch.

Mappin & Webb

Founded in Sheffield in 1775 by Jonathan Mappin, Mappin & Webb began as a silversmith before becoming one of Britain's foremost jewellers and makers of silverware.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the company sold its own pocket watches and wristwatches including the robust Campaign watch which was popular with British military officers and the Admiralty.

Today, Mappin & Webb no longer manufactures watches under its own name, instead acting as one of the UK's leading authorised retailers for prestigious Swiss brands.

Garrard

Garrard is the world's-oldest jeweller and has long been associated with exceptional watchmaking — especially during the 19th and early 20th centuries when it retailed elegant pocket watches and wristwatches.

The former Crown Jeweller (1843-2007) stopped manufacturing watches about two decades ago, but second-hand timepieces regularly appear on the market for affordable amounts. Look out for models made with nine-carat gold.

Vacheron Constantin

Vacheron Constantin was founded in Geneva in 1755 by Jean-Marc Vacheron making it the world's oldest watchmaker in continuous operation. The maison's motto, 'Do better if possible, and that is always possible', reflects its relentless pursuit of excellence. It is one of the prestigious Holy Trinity of Swiss watchmaking brands, alongside Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet.

Watches of Switzerland

Watches of Switzerland was founded in London in 1924 as a specialist retailer dedicated to Switzerland's finest timepieces. Since then, it's expanded across the UK and into the USA.

Zenith

Zenith was one of the first watch manufacturers to bring every stage of production under one roof when it was founded in 1865.

Renowned for technical innovation, the brand achieved horological fame in 1969 with the launch of the El Primero, the world's first high-frequency automatic chronograph calibre. Its movements have powered some of the industry's most celebrated watches, including early Rolex Daytonas.

Jaeger-LeCoultre

Jaeger-LeCoultre has created more than 1,400 calibres and holds hundreds of patents. Its most celebrated creation, the Reverso, debuted in 1931 with a swivelling case designed to protect the watch face during polo matches.

Tissot

Throughout its history, Tissot has pioneered innovations including the first mass-produced pocket watch and the first watches made from materials such as plastic, stone and wood.

It is the official timekeeper of numerous international sporting events and synonymous with precision and reliability.

Piaget

Piaget began as a maker of high-precision watch movements before establishing itself as a leading luxury watch and jewellery house.

The brand's defining product was the Piaget Altiplano (1957) which was powered by an ultra-thin mechanical calibre (Calibre 9P). A 2018 iteration — the Altiplano Ultimate Concept — measures just 2 millimetres thick.

Omega

Official timekeeper of the Olympic Games since 1932, Omega also made history when the Speedmaster became the first watch worn on the Moon in 1969.

Along with the Speedmaster Moonwatch, the Seamaster and Constellation models best encapsulate Omega's legacy. The latter — pictured above — was its flagship chronometer.

Patek Philippe

Rolex

Rolex was founded in London in 1905 by Hans Wilsdorf and Alfred Davis before relocating to Geneva in 1919. The company created the first waterproof wristwatch, the Oyster, exactly 100 years ago; subsequent iconic models include the Submariner, Datejust, GMT-Master and Daytona.

Most of the grand, stately homes ‘lost’ in the 20th century were victims of war, taxes or fire — and occasionally all three. Warter Priory, however, bucked the trend(s).

Situated in the bucolic Yorkshire Wolds, the property that Country Life arrived to photograph in about 1905 was not actually a priory, but a vastly extended 16th-century house.

'Warter' was said to be an Anglo-Saxon word for 'felons' or 'gallows tree', or, simply, a reference to the abundance of water in the area; the 'Priory' part was a nod to a lost Augustine Priory once situated about a mile away.

In 1878, Josslyn Pennington, 5th Lord Muncaster, sold the priory to Charles Henry Wilson of Wilson's Steam Ship Company.

At the time, Wilson’s leviathan enterprise was responsible for the UK’s largest, and therefore highly profitable, trans-Atlantic cargo fleet. The acquisition was more personal than business-minded: Wilson's family had been tenants on the land for centuries and his grandfather was born on the estate in 1746, later moving to Hull's docks to work as a lighterman. The victorious Charles returned, two generations on, as Lord of the Manor. He wasted no time.

Wilson and his wife, the imposing Florence Wellesley, eldest daughter of a nephew of the Duke of Wellington, got to work greatly extending and enhancing the house. A vast baronial hall clad in impressive, carved wood panels sat behind a new porte-cochere and clock tower — ensuring visitors were awestruck as soon as they arrived. Impressive staircases in oak and carved marble were installed. By the end of the works, Warters boasted about 100 rooms, 30 of which were bedrooms for visiting guests.

Wilson, who was also the Liberal MP for Kingston-upon-Hull, the East Riding’s Justice of the Peace, and Deputy Lieutenant, was a philanthropist who busied himself with many charitable deeds in the area. However, one of these, was the closing of the village pub — the fabulously-named Creeping Kate Inn — on account of his strong belief in abstinence. This belief saw him introduce a bill in Parliament for the closure of all public houses on Sundays.

Wilson died in 1907 leaving his widow to entertain alone. She hosted regular shoots, one of which was attended by Sir Winston Churchill, and reportedly 'terrorised' her estate workers, frequently conducting spot inspections on their cottages.

By 1927, Florence's health was failing and the now deeply-fashionable mansion was put up for sale. Against all the odds, including the fact that she demanded being laid to rest on the estate, Warters sold to the Hon George Vestey, who had made his own fortune in the meat trade.

Unusually for the time, Vestey had the financial means to keep the house in the Victorian manner to which it had become accustomed. To this end, he retained a vast staff to keep his vast mansion, its gardens and estate running like clockwork.

When he died, in 1968, Warters' valuable land was sold to the Marquess and Marchioness of Normanby. The house was surplus to their requirement.

Four years later, a local newspaper reported that it was to be bulldozed and the remains dumped in its own ornamental lake. Initially branded 'fatuous', on May 5, 1972, Country Life wrote about a 4½-hour fire sale of fixtures and fittings: businessman L. W. Hill of Chesterfield bought the Great Hall's oak panelling, the marble staircase, an oak staircase, a marble chimneypiece and a minstrel’s gallery for a £1,515 (about £18,460). Warter Priory was flattened shortly afterwards and, as the newspaper had said would happen, used to fill in the lake.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

Throughout history, Muntham Court — situated on the South Downs, four miles north of the seaside enclave of Worthing — was a place souls retired to to indulge in their hobbies.

Unusually for a large country estate, Muntham was not passed down through generations of the same family. Instead, different characters would arrive and then depart, leaving a trail of clues as to who they were when they had occupied the land. Neighbouring Cissbury Ring, Britain's second-largest Iron Age fortification, hints at the first occupants.

In the early 1950s, archaeologists working at Muntham uncovered evidence of a sizeable Iron Age settlement and a Roman-era 'village'. Fragments of even-earlier Bronze Age weapons were also found.

Throughout the years, the land was bought and sold by the Munthams (who are presumed to have built the first house on the site), the Cornwallises, the Apsleys, the Shelleys, the Gorings, the Crowes, the Middletons and the Montagues, until, in 18th century, it was purchased by William Frankland.

Frankland, a descendant of Oliver Cromwell and the rumoured inspiration for Jane Austen’s Henry Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, was, it is fair to say, eccentric.

Born in India to the then-governor of Bengal, he amassed a vast fortune in the East India Company. By the age of 40, he determined to venture west, taking three years to travel to England, sometimes (for safety, apparently) disguised as a Turkish messenger, via Baghdad, Jerusalem, Babylon, and Palmyra.

At Muntham Court, the confirmed bachelor dedicated his latter years to scientific research and inventing. He extended the property, filling rooms with all manner of devices he invented. There were whirring textile machines, printing presses, spinning devices and electrical apparatus. And if that wasn’t enough noise, he also fashioned machines to play musical instruments and filled what space was left with timepieces, which presumably chimed on the hour.

When Frankland died in 1805, his vast collection was immediately auctioned off.

Muntham was then sold, and then sold again, until, in 1850, Harriet Thynne (nee Baring), the Dowager Countess of Bath, moved in, after ceding control of Longleat (of stately home safari fame) to her son.

The Dowager Countess recognised the estate's potential, but was far from impressed by its appearance, famously declaring that: 'The upper classes do not live in red brick!' She employed local architect Henry Woodyer who refaced the house with local flint and added Jacobean-style Dutch gables, and, later, a Bath stone extension.

The Dowager Countess was also determined to overhaul the gardens.

Yew trees — long associated with sacred ground — were abundant so she had them fashioned into walls, walks and clipped into symmetrical shapes. She also planted a Judas tree, a species native to southern Europe and East Asia that produces vivid rosy-pink flowers every spring.

Country Life’s photographs of Muntham Court date to 1907, 15 years after the Dowager Countess had died. By then, it was in the possession of Lady Ulrica Thynne, her widowed daughter-in-law. She, in turn, passed the property to her son, Colonel Ulric Oliver Thynne.

Thynne was a much-decorated veteran of the Boer and First World Wars and, by 1922, the standard bearer of His Majesty’s Royal Bodyguard of Gentlemen-at-Arms. He was also, as was common among the gentry of the time, a keen marksman and trophy-hunter. His Muntham contained more than 50 taxidermied animals, including a hippopotamus, which lived in the Billiards Room.

Thynne and his stuffed menagerie stayed at the house until the outbreak of the Second World War when, like so many other large properties, it was requisitioned by the War Office. Unusually, after hostilities ended, he returned, living there until his death in 1957. He was buried in the grounds and the estate was put up for sale.

No attempt was made to sell the house as a home; instead, it was advertised as a possible school, hotel, convalescent home or residential development. Sadly, no one's appetite was whetted.

The house and majority of its land was eventually purchased by Worthing Council who at the time had little regard for antiquity. In 1961, Muntham Court and its gardens were flattened. It's now the site of Worthing Crematorium — where souls still go to retire.

The Judas Tree — reportedly the largest known specimen in Europe — still blossoms every year, but the hippo’s whereabouts are unknown.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

Unlike its namesake, Papillon Hall managed to live a lot longer than a brief spell. But, still, it perished far too quickly.

On May 4, 1912, Country Life published a supplement focused on the latest works of Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944). One of the prolific architect’s works under the microscope was his modernisation of Papillon Hall in Lubenham, just outside Market Harborough, Leicestershire.

In the opening years of the 20th century, Lutyens had been called in by Captain Frank Ashton Bellville, heir to the Robinson’s Barley Water and Keen’s mustard fortunes, to greatly extend his octagonal, 17th century, semi-fortified home.

The heart of Bellville’s home, built — and lived in, for some time — by the French architect David Papillon, came with one small, but seemingly potent problem.

According to local legend, Papillon, the person, not the house, had a Spanish mistress who he kept prisoner in the attic after she fell from his favour. The poor woman died in mysterious circumstances sometime around 1715. When Bellville acquired the house, he also took possession of her 'cursed' brocade shoes. Locked behind a grille, legend (and legal documents) had it that if the shoes ever left the house, misfortune would befall its owner.

The original hall was retained at the centre of Lutyens' designs, and an extra storey added to it. There were four new wings, built in the shape of a butterfly, which contained a dining room, billiard room, kitchen and servants' hall. To the south was a sunken pond, dotted with water lilies; to the east, the flower gardens were replanted inside the wings, in the cottage garden style of Lutyen’s great friend, Gertrude Jekyll.

For the duration of the works, the brocade shoes were kept at Bellville’s solicitor's offices.

Reports show that work progressed slowly; contractors pulled out at the last minute and there were numerous accidents and one death. The skeleton of a long-dead woman, presumably Papillon’s mistress, was discovered in a bricked up cavity in the roof. Then, in August 1905, Captain Bellville was badly injured when he was thrown from his jaunting car (a small horse buggy). Against all the odds, he recovered.

However, the shoes were on the move again — this time, to a museum. Soon after, George Rathbone, an electrical engineer, died in a car car crash. He was in Bellville’s car being driven by Bellville’s chauffeur. Sarah Clark, a servant, was accused by later acquitted of infanticide after a dead baby was found in her room. Lastly, Bellville was flung from his polo pony. (Amazingly, he recovered, again, which somewhat disproves the lucky shoes theory.)

Bellville died in 1937, at the age of 68, and Papillon Hall passed to his son, Rupert.

Rupert was described in contemporary news reports as a sportsman, airman and one-time amateur bull fighter. He also fought alongside General Francisco Franco's troops during the Spanish Civil War. In fact, at the moment his father died, he was in Spanish prison.

Rupert reportedly fell into the enemy's hands because he presumed Santander had been taken by the Spanish nationalists, so flew himself and the head of González Byass to the latter's headquarters, to pick up a few cases of celebratory sherry. Upon landing, he discovered a) his error and b) the opposition.

The sherry-seeking Franco fighter was released following a series of heated negotiations and, when he arrived home, set about painting every gate on the estate in the dictator's colours. Then, in 1938, he put it all up for sale. However, it failed to actually sell.

During the Second World War, Papillon Hall hosted the 319th Glider Battalion and the 82nd Airborne Division of the American Army, who, naturally, were not overly worried about building and garden conservation and Lutyens' unique creation fell into a state of seemingly-terminal disrepair.

After the War, the decision was taken to demolish it, but not before Rupert’s wife 'saved' the remaining slipper (Rupert had taken one with him to Spain which explains quite a lot). Today, only small parts of the garden remain; the shoes are on display at the Harborough Museum.

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When George Devereux De Vere Capell, 7th Earl of Essex inherited Cassiobury House from his grandfather in 1892, it wasn’t, to be totally fair, in the rudest of health. But then, according to reports, neither was its new owner. His predecessors has invested considerably in rebuilding and decorating the family seat and stuffing it full with an impressive art collection, but fortunes had since dwindled.

In the 17th century, the sprawling Tudor pile had sprouted 'new' wings, designed by Hugh May and decorated with early examples of woodcarving by master craftsman Grinling Gibbons in what was believed to be his first major commission.

At the start of the 19th century, James Wyatt was brought in to modernise the property again. Thankfully, he left the majority of May and Gibbons’ work alone, but, externally, he added a somewhat controversial Neo-Gothic exterior and an orangery.

In the early 20th Century, a Country Life writer visited and their article struck a melancholic tone: 'Cassiobury has had its ups and downs, and is one of the too frequent examples that teach us that alteration is not always an improvement.'

When he inherited the house aged 35, Lord Essex was already a widower. His first wife, Ellenor, had died in 1885 at the tragically young age of 25 while in Cannes, leaving behind an infant son, Algernon, and a grieving husband.

Alone and not in the finest of financial positions, Lord Essex was forced into action. In 1893, he sold a myriad of valuable furniture and painting, including three works by J. M. W. Turner. And in December of the same year, he married the insuppressible Adele Beach Grant — an American socialist and vegetarianism activist. The wedding took place at St Margaret’s Church in the Palace of Westminster, and the bride wore a dress decorated with optimistic, silver sun rays. They honeymooned at Cassiobury.

Lady Essex was one of society’s savviest, smartest, roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-on-with-it, so-called 'Dollar Princesses'. Her father made his fortune building railroads, but it would appear that this was not just a marriage of convenience — they actually liked each other.

This attachment to one another would come in handy when it became apparent that Lord Essex had inherited his family's passion, and total lack of skill, for playing cards, and Grant's father did one bad deal too many.

Lady Essex was not one to sit and bemoan her ill fortune and in a 1901 Rocky Mountain News article, titled 'The Poorest Countess', the writer describes how 'with pluck and enterprise this charming noblewoman has set to work to earn her living.’

The article went on to explain that Lady Essex was the brains behind a company that leased, furnished and let London apartments and had made a 'snug sum', concluding 'the poorest countess in Great Britain' is 'the happiest also.'

In 1902, at the Coronation of Edward VII and Alexandra of Denmark, Lady Essex was widely admired for her Russian-style Cartier tiara, reportedly fashioned from recycled diamonds from her family’s collection.

In 1904, Lady Essex announced that she was a vegetarian and began hosting fitness classes. The classes, which were held in fashionable Carlton House Terrace, comprised lifting and throwing exercises, and the swinging around of another exotic American import — the pumpkin.

By 1909, Lord and Lady Essex had rented out Cassiobury and auctioned off a few more artworks. Large swathes of parkland had also been sold to Watford Council for development purposes. And then the First World War hit. The grounds were quickly turned into a billeting area and, eventually, a Red Cross Hospital. Before the War's end, Lord Essex was hit by a taxi, suffered severe bruising and shock and, eight months later, was dead from an suspected heart attack.

Algernon took on the family title and Cassiobury, but was suffering from injuries sustained fighting at the front. In 1920, the 8th Earl made the decision to sell the house, but its poor condition made it impossible for him to find a buyer.

Further tragedy struck in late July 1922, when Adele, Dowager Countess of Essex, was discovered dead in her bath, also, seemingly, from a heart attack. Arthur Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, and Sir Winston Churchill attended the remarkable woman’s memorial service.

A few weeks later, it was announced that Cassiobury had been purchased by a syndicate who set about the stripping it, Grinling Gibbons and all. Little remained by 1927.

Two parts made their way back to the Dowager Countess's native New York: a large consignment of Tudor bricks and a magnificent staircase, later attributed to Edward Pearce, which is now on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's (The Met) English Gallery.

And, finally, the magnificent Essex Tiara — it is still rented out, on occasion, by Cartier. Clementine Churchill wore it to the Coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, and more recently, in 2016, it adorned the head of pop princess Rihanna on the cover of W magazine. Like the sun rays on Adele’s wedding dress, her legacy still shines bright like a diamond.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

If you ever find yourself stuck in a jam on Queensway — Birmingham’s inner ring road — spare a thought for a) the most influential designer of the Gothic Revival movement, b) pop star Cher, and c) a long-lost architectural gem.

The story starts in 1838: Queen Victoria had been on the throne just a year when Bishop Thomas Walsh decided to commission a brand new Catholic Cathedral — the first structure of its kind to be built in Britain since Henry VIII’s Reformation. The man charged with bringing this vision to life was Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin.

Pugin was a lover of all things medieval. His devotion and promotion of the Gothic Revival movement saw him design hundreds of buildings and their interiors, many of which inspire awe to this very day. The most iconic are the interiors of the Houses of Commons and Lords, and Elizabeth Tower, known more affectionally as Big Ben. All of which had the central missive of being beautiful, but always useful. Frippery, in Pugin’s book, was not to be indulged.

Progress in Birmingham was swift. The cornerstone of St Chad’s Cathedral was laid in November 1839. By June 1841, the building had been consecrated. Over the road, Pugin concentrated his talents into his first attempt at marrying his beloved, Gothic style and domestic ecclesiastical architecture. The result was the magnificent Bishop’s House.

The architect firmly believed the property should project the same magnificence as the church, but should absolutely not copy the 'violent… drawing-room of an Anglo-Protestant prebendary, with its piano, nick-nacks, mirrors and ottomans!'

The main house was entered through a a small cloister on Bath Street. Inside, there were, among other rooms, private chambers for the bishop and each of his priests, a private chapel, a grand hall or dining room capable of seating 60, and eight 'cells' for visiting guests.

Pugin papered the inside with handmade wallpaper and elaborate encaustic tiles hand made at Mintons, and decorated with heraldic shields, beasts and fleur-de-lys. He designed light fittings, chairs and even a fire surround shaped like a bishop’s mitre.

Somehow, the house and cathedral made it through the First and Second World Wars, largely unscathed, despite the a bomb falling through the roof of the latter. The explosive bounced across the floor and hit a central heating pipe which, in turn, flooded the floor and extinguished any flames.

However, the bishop's house's luck ran out shortly afterwards. In 1941, Birmingham's city engineer and surveyor, Herbert Manzoni, who believed that the city's buildings held 'little of real worth in our architecture', was busy reimagining things. His plans required the wholesale destruction of vast swathes of Georgian and Victorian buildings and the construction of tower blocks and motorways, including three new-fangled ring roads.

In 1946, lawmakers passed an Act of Parliament approving Manzoni’s ambitious plans and objections fell on deaf ears. The Catholic church was told that if they foot the bill for rerouting the ring road in whose line the Bishop's House now stood, it would be spared. Unfortunately, they were unable to take on the mammoth expense and the house was sold to the council for £44,000.

Country Life was invited to record the exterior and some of the interiors before the bulldozers were called in — though the majority of photographs remain unpublished, until now.

On April 29, 1960, the magazine published an article about the discovery of a first edition of the Old Testament, printed at the English College in Douai, during the demolition. It was taken, along with the house's library to the St Chad’s crypt for safekeeping.

Other items saved from the wrecking ball include two Glastonbury chairs produced to Pugin’s designs by George Myers and a fireplace, which both now reside at V&A Storehouse in East London. A Gothic Revival brass hexafoil corona light also survived the wrecking ball and somehow turned up in Malibu in California, where it dangled from the ceiling of Cher's beachside mansion. In 2009, it sold at auction with Bonham's.

And as for St Chad’s Cathedral? It is marooned on an 'island' in the middle of Queensway, but instead of Bishop's House, it now looks onto nine lanes of traffic, an unremarkable hotel and an NCP car park.

Pugin once said that 'in pure architecture the smallest detail should have a meaning or serve a purpose.' While the road might have some purpose, it arguably has little meaning. If he could speak now, he'd surely borrow Cher's words: 'If I Could Turn Back Time'.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

War, neglect, fire and/or insufficient means were generally the main reasons why thousands of Britain’s architectural masterpieces were destroyed in the 20th century. But one former house in Wiltshire has the dubious double distinction of being one of the last great houses in the country to be deliberately destroyed, and for that destruction to have been due to the wrong paperwork.

By the 18th century, the Fonthill estate in Wiltshire was vast. The land had a centuries-long history of demolishing grand structures when they had been determined to have reached their sell-by date. Indeed, four large properties on the sprawling lands had been erected by the then-landowners, the Beckfords, then eviscerated over the centuries.

By 1897, half of the estate was owned by the art collector Alfred Morrison, the second son of a wealthy Edinburgh textile merchant. Alfred died at the end of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee year, leaving Fonthill House to his wife, Mabel. Probate records reveal he also left a staggering £869,174 12s 6d (comfortably over £100million in 2026) to his brothers, Charles and Walter Morrison. His oldest son, Hugh, received a generous allowance, and the rest of the Fonthill land on which to build his own home.

Hugh determined to build high (ish) on a lesser wave of rolling Wiltshire chalkland opposite the old drove road of Great Ridge. Little Ridge house was to become a truly unique, 20th century building. For a start, it wasn’t a new build at all.

Architect and stonemason Detmar Blow had traveled to nearby Salisbury Plain in 1901 to advise on repairs to Stonehenge — a severe storm had blown over two of the great monument’s stones on New Year’s Eve, 1900. Hugh, in search of an architect, is presumed to have met Blow at the neolithic wonder, found a meeting of minds with the disciple of the Arts-and-Crafts movement, and the pair, along with Hugh’s wife, Mary, set about designing their new home. (As an aside, Stonehenge wasn’t reconstructed until 1958, but that, as they say, is a story for another day).

At the heart of Blow’s ‘new build’ was a grand, 17th century manor house from the neighbouring village of Berwick St Leonard. The aging property had reportedly been reduced to being used as a barn by the 19th century. By the birth of the 1900s, when Blow and Hugh conspired to save it, it stood roofless and forlorn.

The remains were dismantled and documented stone by stone. Cosseted in straw, they were painstakingly transported three miles down the road by traction engine for reassembly on Fonthill land.

The manor house formed the historic skeleton of Little Ridge, with Blow and his team of local craftsmen providing abundant, ample flesh around the aging bones. Plaster, wood and stone decoration and embellishments inside the home were all hand-crafted by artisans. The result was a masterclass in traditional methods.

The Country Life feature of 1912, from which the accompanying photos to this article were first published, was most effusive with its praise for this formidable piece of recycling. ‘No one knows better than Mr Blow the difficulty of wedding the airy spirit of three centuries ago to the sturdy need today, and no one has learnt to overcome it more successfully.’

Soon after the new/old house was finished, Hugh and Mary, who had been trying to conceive for many years, finally received the happy news they were to become parents. They immediately called Blow back, who swiftly designed (the designs were charmingly called ‘The John Wing’) and built a connecting nursery wing on the property. During this time, baby John was born.

In 1915, a fire broke out in Fonthill House, the property owned by Hugh’s mother, Mabel. While the local fire brigade were successful in saving the main house, the servants quarters were wrecked and the main house damaged by the necessity of fire equipment hurriedly being pulled through the rooms. It stood empty.

Mabel had long since moved away to London. Hugh and Mary had their own house, so the decision was eventually taken in 1921 to demolish Fonthill House. And here is where the fatal mistake was made in some local paperwork.

Following the demolition of Fonthill House in 1921, Little Ridge was renamed. It was renamed Fonthill House. Fast forward to the late 1960s and a very changed Britain. Struggling under the burden of an array of crippling taxation measures, falling yields, raging inflation and other joyless woes, John, now Baron Margadale of Islay, took the decision to demolish his parent’s large and costly incarnation of Fonthill House and erect a more modest property on the little ridge of land.

Destruction of the unique house should, however, by this time never have been allowed. A swift check by local officials presumed it was the property damaged by fire in 1915. Lord Margadale was told he wouldn’t need planning permission to tear the house down. The demolition contractors were called in.

The Victorian Society, realising the error, mounted a swift campaign to stop the demolition. They pleaded with the Department of the Environment to issue an emergency spot-listing to protect the house. It fell on deaf ears when they, too, presumed the house to be the fire-damaged property from 1915. By the time the error was uncovered, it was too late. Like the stones at Stonehenge that New Year’s Eve in 1900, Little Ridge had fallen.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

The Derbyshire land on which Drakelow Hall once stood has a long-standing association with terrifying, fire-breathing monsters. It was first recorded as Dracan Hlawe, in the year 942AD, and its ancient English name translates to 'Dragon’s Mound', indicating a burial place with a guardian spirit.

The land was gifted to the Gresley family in the time of William the Conqueror, and remained in their care through the reign of more than 30 monarchs — a record unsurpassed by any other European dynasty. Perhaps they had some help from a mythical beast lurking somewhere underneath.

A Country Life article, published in 1907 noted, incredulously, that, ‘A Gresley was in arms against Henry III and yet did not lose Drakelowe utterly; another rode against Charles I, and the Drakelowe family was undisturbed by the Restoration. In the long line of Gresleys there must have been plotters and gamesters, men of wasteful fancies and lovers of change — a long pedigree never fails to record such — but Drakelowe remains unforfeited, unsold and unbartered.'

The magazine visited Drakelow a total of three times in the early 20th century. Blanketed by creepers, the romantic building, which dated back to the 16th century, boasted multiple chimneys and a castellated south facade. Inside, its most striking feature was the dining room, which was wrapped in a floor-to-ceiling fresco of a landscape, designed to trick the diner into believing they were outside.

The artist was Paul Sandby, a founding member of the Royal Academy, and he incorporated into his masterpiece scenes of north Wales and a chimneypiece decorated with crystals and seashells, to represent a grotto. The room's doors were cleverly incorporated into the painted design.

The Gresley dragon finally ran out of puff in the 1930s with the First World War and subsequent depression taking its toll on the family's fortunes. On August 8, 1931, Country Life reported on the sale of Drakelow's contents: 17th-century oak court cupboards; an Adam mahogany sideboard; fine Belgian tapestries; portraits of ancestors by notable artists, and George II, George III and William III ancestral silverware.

In 1933, Drakelow itself, along with more than 700 acres, appeared on the market. The Automobile Racing Association announced plans to purchase the house and turn it into a country club, and install two three- and eight-mile-long race tracks which would make it possible to legally host international races in England for the first time.

The plans quickly burnt out and by 1934, Drakelow was back on the market. It was snapped up by brewery director Clifford Gothard, who waited all of four years before demolishing it, citing soaring repair costs.

By 1955, Drakelow A Power Station had risen from the Elizabethan mansion's ashes, followed, in time, by Drakelow B and C. The power station's time standing was considerably shorter than the house from which they took their name with the first one closing in 1984. Until 2006, six massive cooling towers loomed overhead, until they, too, were bought crashing down. Today, half the site is occupied by about 2,100 homes, the other half by an energy-from-waste facility.

A few parts of Drakelow Hall, survive, somehow, to this day. A sunken garden, gate piers, stable blocks and cottages all enjoy listed status. And one wall from Sandby’s fantastical fresco made it’s way to the the V&A Museum, where it can be seen on display in their very 21st century East Storehouse. So far, there have been no reports of dragons in the vicinity.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

Ardenrun Place, in Surrey, did not live a long life, but did, at least enjoy a riotous, Gatsby-esque few years for the time it was around.

In the September 17, 1921, issue, Country Life run an article about the modern mansion's surprising sale. Built by Ernest Newton in 1905 for Hans Henry Konig and featured in the magazine's architectural section in 1911, Ardenrun had failed to sell at auction in 1919.

Konig was a confirmed bachelor who made his considerable fortune as a banker, in London and New York. His pennies paid for Ardenrun — in which he installed electricity, central heating and a telephone — as well as 1,000 acres, a working farm, golf course and stables.

Rather than restrict himself to one architectural style, Konig commissioned an Adam-style breakfast room, a Georgian-style dining room (complete with Wedgwood friezes), and a Louis XVI-style tapestry room, orangery and an elegant billiard room. There were also marble floors, carved Portland stone features, plasterwork ceilings and an unpolished Italian walnut staircase with intricate limewood carvings in the style of Grinling Gibbons.

Konig enjoyed a decade in his new-build palace, but, in 1919, his poor health dictated a move to the South of France. Even in the wake of the First World War, it was presumed that Ardenrun would sell quickly, but two years went by before swashbuckling racing driver Captain Woolf Barnato stepped in to save the day.

Barnarto stood at an imposing six feet — several inches taller than the average British man in the first half of the 21st century, and still tall for a driver — and had inherited his father’s gold and diamond mining fortune. He served in the War, including at Ypres, and, afterwards, dedicated his time to having fun.

The Champagne-swilling, fun-loving man soon instilled the spirit of the jazz age in Ardenrun. In 1923, newly-divorced from his American first wife, Dorothy, he installed a mock-Tudor pub in the basement called the Ardenrun Arms — and developed a reputation for lavish parties. (He once entertained the Australian cricket team, including Don Bradman.)

A talented sportsman, Barnarto kept wicket for Surrey, boxed, played tennis to a 'country house standard' and had a love of racing power boats. However, he reserved his strongest affections for anything on four wheels. Soon after purchasing Ardenrun, Barnato bought his first Bentley. Twelve months later, he purchased a controlling share in the company itself.

The leader of the glamorous Bentley Boys (a group of wealthy British motorists who drove Bentley sports cars to victory in the 1920s), Barnarto achieved three consecutive wins out of three entries in the 24 Hours of Le Mans race — a perfect record which stands to this day. He also staged time trials in the grounds of Ardenrun, including alongside his good friend, Ettore Bugatti.

Barnarto's desire to win wasn’t just confined to sports. On March 28, 1932, The Pittsburgh Press reported that San Franciscan society beauty Jacqueline Quealey was bombarded by radiograms from a desperately in love Barnato. His persistence and charm paid off. She agreed to marry the fast-living, fun-loving sportsman, and upped sticks from California to Surrey.

On the morning of Tuesday, January 17, 1933, a fire was discovered in the nursery at the very top of the house. Despite the efforts of three fire brigades, little could be done to stop is spreading. Furniture and other valuables were carried out by staff and a dressing-gown-clad Barnato and two wings saved, but the main body of the house and fine staircase were reduced to ashes.

Barnato and his new, pregnant wife, San Franciscan society beauty Jacqueline Quealey, moved to a hotel in London (Jacqueline gave birth to a son the following month) and then to Grosvenor Square, where they lived until a new house, named Ridgemead in Englefield Green, Surrey, was built for them by Robert Lutyens.

As for Ardenrun? It were abandoned. Like Gatsby, it couldn’t live forever.

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One or two people have been saying of late in the E-type Jaguar is getting long in the tooth and fails to compare with its more recent rivals. This week it celebrates its 10th birthday by shedding what might have been termed its milk teeth and replacing them with a brand new set that will put it well to the fore in sports cars for a good many more years yet. The Series 3 E-type, to give the latest version its full title, looks much like its forebears, but incorporates many XJ6 components in the longer wheelbase previously the preserve of the two-plus-two coupé.

By far the most important feature of the Series 3 is the engine. This is the first completely new design to emanate from the Coventry factory since the start of the immortal XK series of six-cylinder units more than 20 years ago. The new engine is not a replacement for the XK series, which continues in production for the XJ6 and as an option in the E-type. This long-anticipated new power unit is a V12 aluminium engine of 5,343cc with a power output of 272bhp at 5,850rpm.

The engine started life as a five-litre V12 built with a view to Jaguar resuming racing. Unfortunately for the enthusiast this policy was not pursued, though the resultant product could well be seen in circuit events before long. It has a 60º angle between the banks of cylinders and bore and stroke dimensions of 90mm by 70mm. The block and head are aluminium, a point of some initial concern owing to the likely higher noise level over a cast-iron block. Jaguar engineers were more than pleasantly surprised when the installed engine was as quiet as any iron unit. The obvious advantage is the saving in weight over the ferrous block, this being 116lb, and the removal of a hundredweight of metal from the front end was well worth while.

The very noticeable feature of the V12, compared with all previous Jaguar engines, is the adoption of a single overhead camshaft for each bank of cylinders. The reasons were multiple, for the drive for twin cams would be highly complex and Jaguar were keen to stick to chain drive rather than toothed belts because of the considerable experience they had with them. The other main reason was the adoption of the flat-head combustion chamber, which was developed out of work done with a number of single-cylinder units, and also in experience gained by Mr. Walter Hassan, Director and Chief Engineer — Power Units, Jaguar Cars, the designer of the Coventry Climax racing engine. Cost also played a part in confirming the decision to opt for single cams, as well as a further incidental saving in weight of 22lb per bank of cylinders.

The V12 configuration, with its short piston stroke, allows plenty of scope for high crankshaft speeds and there is obviously considerable potential from the seven-bearing unit. It also lends itself to scaling down should the need arise in future. In the early stages of development, the compression ratio was 10.6 to 1, which worked well on 99 octane petrol. This was subsequently lowered to 10 to 1, and finally 9 to 1, which will cope with 97 octane and is suitable from the exhaust emission viewpoint.

This question of exhaust emission is naturally foremost in motor manufacturers’ minds at present, and particularly in the mind of Jaguar, who have so much of their business in the United States. Efficient fuel atomisation and distribution are important in meeting these requirements and this was one reason for the adoption of the Lucas Opus ignition system. This system, another instance of racing-car design paving the way for improved road cars, is fully transistorised and has no moving parts and, therefore, needs no servicing or adjustment. Consequently, poor timing is eliminated and this constant state of tune is a vital efficient combustion and exhaust. This is the first time that the system has been used in a volume production car.

The V12 has been designed to operate with either conventional carburettors or with fuel injection. Carburettors have been chosen for their better emission control, but work proceeds on fuel injection and the Jaguar engineers say it shows great potential in the long term. Four Zenith 175 CDS carburettors are mounted, two on each side, on a pair of aluminium plenum chambers that open on to manifolds of a length designed to give a ram effect to the mixture and also boost the torque in the middle speed range where it is needed.

While at Jaguar’s factory recently, I was able to have a brief driving session in the Series 3 E-type covering some 60 miles in both manual and automatic versions. The shape is the same as before, but is distinguished by the flared wheel arches, giving a dilated nostril effect. This is necessary to accommodate the wide-rimmed wheels with the Dunlop SP Sport E70 VR15 tyres developed for the XJ6. In addition, the radiator grille has been redesigned and from the back the four exhaust tail pipes, the V12 badge and air extractor on the boot lid give the game away.

The roadster is still offered alongside the lovely two-plus-two coupé, but now shares the same 8ft 9in wheelbase, 9in longer than the old roadster; the overall length is 15ft 4.4in. Another XJ6 feature is the incorporation of anti-dive front suspension geometry for improved roadholding, particularly under braking. The brake system is now of the dual circuit safety variety, with inboard discs at the rear as before, but using ventilated front discs for cooler operation under heavy braking.

Several other modifications and improvements have been made in the Series 3. The engine subframe has been enlarged to take the V12 or the XK as required and also allows the engine to be removed with less difficulty. Another advantage of the new subframe is the improved turning circle, which is now 36ft. The lower bonnet panel has been reshaped to take an 18 gallon petrol tank, which is four gallons more than hitherto. The new grille also allows a greater flow of air into the radiator, which has to cool 36 pints of water. The additional 9in on the roadster wheelbase have been used to increase the door size and also the luggage area behind the two seats; a new and more roomy detachable hardtop is now available. For the V12, a three-silencer exhaust system is installed.

To transmit the power of the V12, manual and automatic boxes are available, the latter being an innovation for the roadster. The automatic is the new Borg-Warner Model 12, replacing the former Model 8. This three-speed unit gives greater manual control as required, with full use of second gear being possible for overtaking. The manual box is the Jaguar 4-speed synchromesh type with a bigger clutch. Final drive is with a Powr-Lok limited slip differential on the V12. Steering is rack and pinion with power assistance similar to that on the XJ6.

Impressions of the car were brief, particularly as there was no opportunity to attend the performance on Warwickshire lanes in the snowy weather of early March. However, I was left with two main sensations: silence and effortless acceleration. The quietness of this engine has been matched by the attention paid to the tuning of the sound of the body and suspension. For five litres of power it is very quiet indeed, which seemed all the more remarkable when the accelerator was depressed and speedometer and rev counter swung smartly across to bring the car up to the legal limit. The performance was matched by the splendid roadholding on the Dunlop radials with their anti-aquaplaning tread pattern, and the Girling brakes, which brought the speed down at a touch. The steering retains enough feel through the new wheel to keep the driver firmly in command of the situation.

Performance with the V12 looks exciting enough for most tastes, with a top speed of 150 mph, and a standing start ¼ mile in 14.5 seconds. Fuel consumption should be in the 13 to 18 mpg bracket according to conditions. Prices of the Series 3 range run from £2,866 (including tax) for the 6-cylinder roadster with manual transmission, to £3,529 for the V12 automatic coupé; higher than before but offering a degree of refinement unattainable at anything like the price anywhere else in the world.

There is a saying that an Englishman’s home is his castle. Rushbrooke Hall in Suffolk, while technically not a castle, boasted an impressive moat, and was associated with two of the country’s most famous monarchs: Elizabeth I and Charles I. Castle-worthy qualities, surely?

Described as an exceptionally beautiful, red brick building, with gables and turrets, Rushbrooke was built for Sir Robert Jermyn — grandfather to the Stuart courtier and visionary property developer Henry Jermyn, the 1st Earl of St Albans. (The Earl was responsible for the development of land to the north of St James’s Palace in London, including what we know today as the West End, Duke Street, and Jermyn Street.

Good Queen Bess graced Sir Robert with her presence not once, but twice, during her reign, holding court at Rushbrooke in 1577 during her summer progress through East Anglia.

Later, his grandson, Henry, was to go one step further in courting royalty, 'befriending' Henrietta Maria of France, the wife of Charles I. There were even scandalous rumours that Henry was Charles II's father. Whatever the truth of the matter, the relics sold at a sale of items from the hall in the early 20th century spoke to an exceptionally close relationship to both the Elizabethan and Caroline eras.

In 1903, Country Life's H. Avary Tipping and photographer Charles Latham visited Rushbrooke and reported it to be in rude health. Now in the possession of a Mr R. W. Jermyn Rushbrooke, the charming property had been vastly improved upon during the preceding centuries. There was a vast, Kentian double height hallway with a magnificent marble fireplace, held up by caryatids. The ornate wood and plasterwork chimneypiece was festooned with swags. And a vast oak staircase ferried visitors to the upper floors past a dizzying array of family portraits executed by the likes of Sir Peter Lely and van Dyck.

Tipping was enchanted, writing: ‘ It is one of those old mansions that seem to breathe the spirit of former times. We may even fancy we still hear there the footfall of the old cavalier and the rustle of his lady’s gown.'

Sadly, the First World War brought things to a rude halt. On the August 23, 1919, Rushbrooke and the associate village and farms, were put on the market, alongside a heartbreaking array of other estates around the country, now bereft of men and means. In fact, there were so many houses of good standing on the market that Rushbrooke only featured on the eighth page of the property supplement it was listed in.

Knight Frank, then Knight, Frank and Rutley, organised the sale of items from the hall in 1919. An Elizabethan four-poster bed in its original state fetched 850 guineas (more than £50,000 in today's money) and a van Dyck of Henry Jermyn realised 500 guineas. Bizarrely, Charles I's silk brocade suit only made 35 guineas, and his a clothes chest, 50 guineas.

In 1921, Rushbrooke's salvation arrived in the form of Lord and Lady Islington (he was a governor of New Zealand and served in the governments of both Herbert Henry Asquith and David Lloyd George; she was the granddaughter of Baron Napier of Magdala) — who showered it worth attention and care until Lord Islington's death in 1936, when it was purchased by Lord Rothschild.

He, in turn, lent it to the Red Cross in the Second World War, who used it as a convalescent home (the first in Suffolk).

After the war, Lord Rothschild had little use for the ageing home, but failed to find anyone willing to occupy it. By 1955, it was in dire need of about £50,000-worth of works (£1.6 million).

In October of the same year, it was reported that Lord Rothschild had offered numerous local councils any of the contents that they deemed suitable for their own use of preservation, but none of them took him up on the offer.

Unable to give away the treasures or to spend the required amount to make the building viable, Lord Rothschild had to agree to have the property demolished in 1961.

Rushbrooke Hall was placed in the hands of demolition contractors, but before they could wreak their own havoc, a fire ripped through the centuries-old hall, taking everything that remained with it. It was a tragic end to the one-time home of the man who created many of London's most impressive, and still standing, streets.

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Treworgey Manor, situated in the mystical parish of St Cleer, south of the famously harsh Bodmin Moor, was built from granite hewn from the surrounding foreboding hills and had existed in its wild surrounds since the reign of Henry VIII. Neighbours included Bronze Age burial kists, striking rock formations (such as Cheesewring) and menhirs (ancient standing stones).

The manor house, whose name means 'farmstead by the hill' in Cornish, was a modest one, erected for a successful Wiltshire tanner called Cannock or Connock (spellings vary). It remained in the same family well into the 20th century.

It was rumoured that, inside, there was a secret staircase, concealed by a floor-to-ceiling mirror. This, so the story went, led to a passage containing the coffin of a former owner, buried with his treasure. Another member of the family was said to have been starved to death while incarcerated in a dungeon in the outer courtyard. His crime? Refusing to denounce his Roman Catholic faith.

Yew trees flanked the eerie house — a plant long associated with three forms of defence. One) poison: ingestion can prove fatal to a myriad creatures including humans and horses. Shakespeare had Macbeth concoct a deadly brew containing 'slips of yew'. Two) bows: the archers at Agincourt and Crécy, and, later, Robin Hood were said to favour the strong wood for their weapons. Three) symbolic protection: yew has long symbolised guardianship, immortality, and resurrection, with a deep-rooted history of protecting both homes and churchyards. What-is-more, yew trees continue to grow and spread even when their heart has died.

When Country Life’s then chief photographer, Charles Latham, visited in 1904, with his giant wooden glass plate camera, he photographed a magical scene: Treworgey Manor nestled in its woodland dell and flanked by four giant yew trees standing sentry, alongside two Roman soldier statues, at the south-west-facing entrance.

Architectural Editor H. Avary Tipping described the trees as 'surely among the most curious in England… the topiary sculptor has gone to work in the spirit of much originality.’ Unusually lost for words, he called on readers to study Latham’s artistry and observe the ‘huge billowy creations’ for themselves.

Tipping had very little to say about the house itself, except an 'excellent staircase' (his pleasure was tempered by the fact that the the oak balustrades were 'wearing a coat of paint') and a curious clock tower — the face of which has the words 'Every Hour Shortens Life' written on it.

A thorough redecoration of the very old property, estimated to cost about £18,000 in today's money, was done in early 1938. However, on May 5, while a strong north-east wind swept the country, a fire broke out.

Owner Billy Marshall hurried his family out of the house (in their 'night attire' according to a local newspaper report) as the Liskeard Brigade prepared to bravely battle the flames. Unfortunately, they were woefully ill-equipped.

Fed by the wind and fresh paint, the fire tore through the house — one of Cornwall's oldest — in under two hours. Only a handful of outhouses, the clock towers and yew trees survived.

Little time was wasted with plans for a new, smaller property submitted by and approved in October of the same year. That house, along with the outhouses, the clocktower and the four yew trees (their protective qualities somewhat up for discussion) still stand today.

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‘Whether decay and disappearance are to be the fate of the whole batch of our oversized country seats is too early to decide, but the doom of Hamilton Palace is imminent.'

So read the eulogy from the opening paragraph of H. Avary Tipping’s 1919 series of articles in Country Life on the sprawling Lanarkshire landmark.

The Hamilton family occupied the hugely-profitable land — that the palace of the same name stood on — since the family were gifted it by James II of Scotland, sometime after 1452. The first known building on the site of the aforementioned Palace dated to 1591.

While the original house was substantially added to over the ensuing centuries — most notably by the 3rd Duke and Duchess, who added a grand entrance portico, executed by James Smith, the like of which had never been seen in Scotland before — it wasn’t until the 19th century that Hamilton Palace was to reach it’s vast, some may say bloated, size that would prove too excessive to maintain in the ensuing one.

Alexander Hamilton was, it would be fair to say, flamboyant (think George IV, and you're not far off). He had spent most of his 20s in Europe, predominately Italy, amassing an impressive collection of artefacts using the allowance his father awarded him. That collection would grow exponentially, firstly after his marriage to a distant cousin, Susan Euphemia Beckford, of Fonthill Abbey, and secondly, in 1819, when his father died.

Alexander believed that he was the true heir to the Scottish throne (his ancestor had married the daughter of James II) and thus went about turning his castle into a palace. The cost of expanding his already-substantial home was leveraged against his newly-inherited wealth from the coal fields on his newly-inherited land.

No expense was spared. Work began in 1824 and the finished structure was said to exceed Buckingham Palace in length. There were more than 140 rooms in which Alexander and Susan displayed their mesmerising collection. This included the Duchess of Hamilton’s library, inherited from her father, William Beckford.

A new double staircase was carved out of black marble; a vast Stone Hall was erected in order to display Alexander’s ancient marble busts and statues; and a Grand Egyptian Hall was build to house his treasures from that land.

However, Alexander went a step further, also commissioning a mausoleum in the grounds and ordering the re-internment of his ancestors in its lower levels. Perhaps inspired by the acquisition of the sarcophagus of an Egyptian queen — ostensibly for the British Museum — he left instructions in his will for his remains to be mummified and placed in the same coffin. Sadly, though he tested the sarcophagus for size multiple times, while alive, he failed to account for his mummified size. And so it was that after his death in 1852, the man who was unflatteringly described in one obituary as 'the proudest man in England' was laid to rest with broken legs (the surgeon charged with mummifying his remains was forced to snap them, in order to shoehorn his body into the ancient resting place).

And more misfortune was to follow. The next Duke had little interested in Scotland or, indeed, the UK, choosing to live, instead, in Paris and Baden. When he died suddenly in 1863, the title passed to his 18-year-old son, William.

The 12th Duke found himself in charge of a vast property portfolio with little capital to maintain it. The pressure was temporarily lifted by his racehorse, Cortolvin, who won the Grand National in 1867, but it soon fell upong the young aristocrat to ‘sell the family silver.’ Fortunately, there was a lot to sell.

Christies hosted the gargantuan sale in 1882 which included gold and silver wares, furniture, fine Japanese and Chinese porcelain, bronzes, busts, rare coins, historical portraits, furniture that once belonged to Marie Antoinette and Madame du Barry, and art by the likes of Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Holbein, Bronzino and Durer.

The sale took place over more than 17 days and fetched an astounding £397,562 (about £42 million in today’s money). Meanwhile, Sotheby’s were entrusted to sell off the Beckford and Hamilton Libraries, featuring rare manuscripts and books, which netted an additional £786,847 — bringing the 2026 equivalent total to more than £125 million.

When the family retreated to the more manageable Dungavel House, the Palace fell largely silent.

In 1919, Country Life’s Avary Tipping and staff photographer Alfred E. Henson were invited to photograph what remained before that, too, was auctioned off.

Entire rooms were sold off and transported around the globe, including 11 which were purchased by the American equivalent of the 10th Duke, William Randolph Hearst.

In 1921, Hamilton Palace was demolished, thanks to coal mining subsidence (the sinking or settling of the ground surface caused by the collapse of underground mine workings) — though they were still at it in the early 1930s.

The 10th Duke’s mausoleum still stands, thought there is no one inside. The bodies were unceremoniously carted off in a coal wagon to a nearby graveyard when it was feared that the monument might also sink.

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In the late 1960s, smoking in public spaces was de rigueur, so it would have come as a surprise to many to read a November 1969 newspaper article about a proposed and experimental smoking ban at a National Trust property called Sudbury Hall, in Derbyshire.

The reason behind the ban was the installation and trial of new, super-sensitive smoke detectors. If only a few visitors lit up beneath the high-tech devices, the local fire brigade would be immediately alerted and dispatched.

Devon’s Dunsland House was the catalyst for this dramatic turn of events. Situated 15 miles north-west of Okehampton, Dunsland was a rare example of an extended and improved provincial property — with the newest part, built by Arscott Bickford, dating to around 1690. It featured exquisite wood panelling and artisan plasterwork, and had been passed down through the same family for centuries until, in 1945, it appeared on the market for the first time in its history.

As to be expected at the end of the Second World War, the house and 91 acres of land took a while to sell — eventually being auctioned for just £7,250 (about £248,510 in today's money) in late 1947. At the time of the sale, the agents, Jackson-Stops and Staff, declared the house to be in need of ‘considerable repair and redecoration’.

However, the new owner paid little attention to crumbling Dunsland House, concentrating his efforts, instead, on plundering the 91 acres of woodland for its timber.

Concerned for the historic property, the local planning authority asked architect Philip Tilden to make a visit and assess the situation. Tilden had been much sought after in the 1920s, redesigning Chartwell for the Churchills, Port Lympne for Philip Sassoon, and working with Gordon Selfridge on designs for his eponymous London department store, and country estates.

However, by the end of the decade, Tilden’s star had waned. He retreated to Devon where he continued to practice, eventually buying a 15th-century manor house called Wortham, and painstakingly restoring it back to life.

Tilden found Dunsland in a terrible state. In the final chapter of his autobiography, he described the scene that greeted him: 'Two great slate tanks had been fitted at some time above the main staircase to collect rainwater from the roof. The bottom had fallen out of one of the tanks, and whenever it rained all the water from the roof cascaded down the stairs.'

There was only one thing to be done, abandon Wortham and buy the stricken Dunsland from its lazy owner.

According to an article in Country Life, Tilden and his wife lived in 'appalling conditions of discomfort' while they worked to make the most valuable parts of the house watertight and habitable. Sadly, poor health halted Tilden in his tracks and, in 1954, he was forced to offer the house and its land to the National Trust.

The Trust continued with the restoration works — using a sizeable grant from the Ministry of Works — and in 1967 celebrated with a concert held in the 17th-century, panelled Justice Room.

Things came crashing down just four days later when, on November 18, the entire building was consumed by fire. The cause was never established, but it likely won't come as a shock to you to read that smoking is not permitted inside any Trust house.

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Its not often that you can say someone was very, very lucky to have contracted severe pneumonia, by James Ismay was just that.

For had James not developed the pernicious lung infection, he would have joined his older brother, Joseph Bruce Ismay, on the maiden trans-Atlantic voyage of the family’s White Star Line-owned steam liner, Titanic.

The two brothers had been made partners of the prominent passenger and shipping company in 1891; their father, Thomas, retired a year later.

They ran the successful Liverpool-based business for a decade before life took a tragic turn. In 1901, James's wife, Lady Margaret Ismay, died, aged 32, from a blood clot. James was devastated and embarked on a punishing round-the-world voyage before relinquishing his post.

Inside the May 21, 1904, issue of Country Life there was an advert for a 2,612-acre estate in Dorset. Iwerne Minster lingered on the market for three years before, in December 1907, it was announced that it had been bought in its entirety by James Ismay.

James poured his business acumen, knowledge of the land and great fortune into the estate, and went about turning it all into the perfect model village and farm (complete with bacon factory, dairy and its own electricity generator) with the help of an architect called John Francis Doyle — the co-designer of his father's Dawpool estate.

Country Life visited in 1910, and the writer was astounded by the amount of work that had already been achieved.

Ismay’s desire to look after his animals was strong, but his attention to the needs of his tenants was stronger. He believed that a contented workforce was a hard-working workforce, and so set about installing the villagers' cottages with all of the necessary modern conveniences.

He also built a pub and a village shop, and provided new facilities for the village's wheelwrights, bricklayers, plumbers, painters, carpenters and joiners, among others.

On Valentine’s Day, 1914, the magazine published a brief article updating readers on progress at the estate. It talked of James's new and well-catered-for flock of Hampshire Down sheep

Country Life returned firstly towards the end of the First World War — which did little to dampen James's efforts — and secondly in 1921.

During the way, he gave each home a pig, and constructed a secure compound for Germans prisoners of war to live in, in exchange for work on his land. And each prisoner was given a small plot of land in which to grow their own vegetables.

The magazine paid a final visit to the farm in 1929, reporting that the philanthropic landowner had stuck to his principles of quality and fairness (once he'd found a market for his produce, he didn't change course if his accounts showed that a certain sector might provide a higher, short term financial yield).

Unfortunately, James died in 1930, aged 63. The village went back on the market and reverted to a more conventional existence, and his home was converted in a school.

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An feature in the April 14, 1934, edition of Country Life offered wise counsel. Counsel that is as true today as it was then: ‘The main causes of country house fires have been well established. They are of two origins, arising from faulty construction and ill-advised adaptations. Before making any structural alteration to an old house, however small, the question should always be asked: Will it increase the risk of fire?'

The reason for this statement was the recent increase of damage to, or total destruction of, dozens of large historic home across the country. Stoke Edith, Lulworth Castle, Hagley Hall, Clifford Chambers, Aylesford, The Friars and Castle Hill had all been decimated by fire. But this piece referred not to any of them, but to a house recorded in the magazine in 1916.

Carclew was first described in Country Life, in 1900, as a 'cold jewel set in a rich blaze of enamel, formed of banks of multi-coloured rhododendrons.’ Situated near the Devoran Creek, above Falmouth, the stark, granite Cornish house enjoyed a climate somewhat warmer than its austere exterior suggested.

The grand old house had been started, but nowhere near finished, in the 1720s. When its owner died, it languished in it’s unfinished, unloved state for about 20 years.

In 1749, William Lemon, a man whose family had made a considerable fortune in copper and tin, retired to the countryside.

Lemon charged his architect, one William Edwards, with the task of altering and enlarging the boxy granite house. He, sadly, did not get to savour the fruits of his architect’s labours — there's a theme here — because he died in 1760. His son, another William, continued with the works, and Carclew blossomed into an elegant Palladian country home complete with long colonnades terminating in symmetrical pavilions.

The architectural feature of 1916 described Carclew as having a ‘pleasant character’, even if it somewhat haughtily also noted, that it was 'a good example of the classical taste as the Victorians understood it.'

However, it was what lay outside that was said to be the property's crowning glory.

The sheltered position, and Cornwall's sub-tropical climate, proved to be the perfect arena for plant collecting — a passion of Sir Charles Lemon (the first William's grandson).

The third Lemon's wealth meant that he could sponsor Sir Joseph Hooker’s 19th-century, three-year plant hunting expedition to the Himalayas. It was on that expedition that rhododendrons and azaleas were first harvested and brought back to Europe, and Lemon was among the first to establish the extravagant shrubs in British soil.

When Country Life turned up at the door, in 1916, while the house was in the ownership of Lemon ancestors Captain and Lady Tremayne, the colourful, but vigorous plants were said to possess 'so great a girth that a man cannot span their stems.’

The gardens harboured plenty more exotic plants, from all four corners of the globe. Camellias, rare tree-ferns, bamboos and Mexican flame trees all flourished. Cornwall’s eccentric gunnera competition — an informal, seasonal race to see who can grow the largest Gunnera manicata or the now-classified invasive hybrid Gunnera x cryptica — was often won by mammoth-leaved specimens from the estate's grounds

Treymane shared his ancestor’s love of plants, adding vast drifts of Japanese irises to the sides of the two pools in the grounds.

Unlike so many other large properties in this era, Carclew and her Arcadian grounds emerged from the other side of the First World War and the decade that followed relatively unscathed. Unfortunately, this was when things started to go wrong. Very wrong.

At about 2am, on a day in April, 1934, Tremayne woke to find his bedroom full of smoke. He struggled, along with his wife, to escape the fierce flames, even climbing onto the now very hot roof. Thankfully, the couple had installed telephones around the house and a quick call to a housemaid in the basement confirmed that the servant's stairs were currently safe. Everyone escaped with their lives.

Downstairs, Tremayne set to work organising his ‘troops’. (He would later praise his staff for 'working like heroes, paying no attention to their own safety, getting all the children out and all the maids from the attics.’)

Apart from a few Chippendale chairs and a portrait of one of the Lemons, nothing much survived. A Canaletto, a Rembrandt, and other priceless artefacts, were all gobbled up by the fire and everyone from landowner to footman was left with just the clothes they were wearing.

Carclew stood in ruins.

The cause of the fire? It was eventually judged to be the fault of electrical cables, installed around the birth of the 20th century.

There was initial talk of rebuilding, but then came the Second World War. A remaining wing was handed over to American soldiers involved in the D-Day landings and, later, to refugees displaced by the fighting. When the war ended, so did the occupation of Carclew.

The shell of the once-great home still stands today — on private land — and a forest school has been set up in the magnificent grounds.

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Beaudesert Hall (beaudesert meaning ‘beautiful wilderness’) was situated on the southern flank of Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, and had been in the same family since it had been gifted by Henry VIII to Sir William Paget, in 1546.

Over the years, the hall had, like any home, been modernised, extended and tweaked as it was handed down through the generations. So, therefore, it was only natural that when the Charles Paget, 6th Marquess of Anglesey, inherited the pile in 1905, he deemed it necessary to put his own stamp on things.

He implemented a programme of renovations, redecoration and repairs — as well as bringing the building bang up-to-date with the installation of some new-fangled electricity. And he was on the verge of moving in when disaster struck.

In November 1909, a fire, believed to have been triggered by the newly-installed wiring, took hold in the servant’s quarters. Despite swift action from the local fire brigade, 15 rooms were badly damaged. Luck, however, was, believe it or not, on Paget's side. The weather that night was still, and the property shrouded in fog, which fortuitously stopped the fire spreading further.

You could have forgiven him for calling it quits — especially as he had also inherited the equally-sizeable Plas Newydd on Anglesey at the same time as Beaudesert — but he was determined to turn the latter into his family home.

Paget redoubled his efforts, tasking Captain Harry Lindsay, a relative of his soon-to-be wife Lady Marjorie Manners, with the alterations to the building that would be a nod to the different distinct design eras it had lived through. These included an impressive, oak clad, Great Hall as it would have looked prior to Henry VIII’s 'acquisition’, and a tapestry room featuring a striking new Jacobean-style plasterwork ceiling. There was also to be a Queen Anne-style bedroom, and, in the place of a 19th century Neo-Gothic archway, a beautiful rafter ceiling studded with a carved beam believed to date to the time of Henry VII.

The First World War raged on while these alterations were being made and, when it finally ended, the UK, depleted of both men and money, launching a swingeing taxation system to help regenerate the country.

Suddenly, owning and running two huge estates (and a vast London town house) was no longer a viable option. Paget invited Country Life to record his work at Beaudesert, and then, in 1924, put the property into which he had ploughed so much love and money on the market.

It failed to sell.

Beaudesert was, however, kept in good repair — so much so that in March 1935, Harry Roy was able to entertain more than 325 guests who danced in the oak-panelled long gallery and yellow drawing room until breakfast was served. It was to be the grand old building’s last hurrah. Soon after, the demolition men were invited to bid for the task of dismantling thing.

In a letter to The Lichfield Mercury, dated June 26, 1935, the peer felt compelled to explain his decision to do away with Beaudesert Hall: 'The feeling of my family and myself can be imagined, and my regret at the demolition of the house is increased by the feeling of separation from Staffordshire friends.

‘Unfortunately I have not been able to occupy Beaudesert since 1920. The very heavy burden of taxation, since the war, has made it impossible for owners all over the country to maintain everything as in pre-war days, and many heart-breaking decisions have had to be taken; in some cases it has been possible to preserve houses and beauty spots.

In this case Beaudesert has been offered again and again to every possible public body, colleges, British Red Cross Society, school authorities and others, and in every case it was found to be unsuitable for the purpose.

In 1932 Beaudesert was offered for sale by public auction, but not a single bid was made.

It was after long hesitation and not easily, that I finally agreed to the course which has now been adopted. Yours, ANGLESEY.

P.S.—Although the sale is advertised to take place shortly, it would be possible to take advantage of any practical suggestion by which Beaudesert might be preserved.'

The letter fell on deaf ears — a report in November 1935 states that Birmingham City Council acquired about 3,000 square feet of oak from the 17th century Long Gallery.

The demolition had begun.

Despite its destruction, many parts of the building were salvaged and live on today across the globe, including at St James's Palace, London, and, somewhat more surprisingly, in a (then) new-build home in the Adelaide Hills of southern Australia.

The latter belong to Ursula and Edward Hayward who attended a sale of effects while on their honeymoon. The couple purchased the panelling, doors, windows and hefty cast iron and oak Waterloo Staircase — which they subsequently installed in their new home, Carrick Hill. built their new home, Carrick Hill, around. That property is now a tourist attraction in its own right.

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Llanvihangel Court, Monmouthshire, The seat of Mrs Attwood-Matthews was originally published in the May 20, 1916, issue of Country Life. It was written by H. Avery Tipping.

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Llanvihangel Court lies four miles north of Abergavenny town, and in medieval times was a part of that important lordship.

Its position at the foot of the picturesque Skirrid, or Holy Mountain of Monmouthshire, its noble seventeenth century avenues of fir and Spanish chestnut, its approach up stately flights of stone steps combine with its own considerable architectural merits to make it a place of distinction and charm.

The house has been subject to many changes and vicissitudes, but its main characteristics are those of the moderate sized manor house of the period that saw the close of Elizabeth's reign and the beginning of that of her successor. The feeling for symmetry was in the ascendant, but the medieval plan of entering the hall at one end behind screens was retained. When the whole of the central portion of the entrance elevation was taken up by the hall there could not be a central entrance door. It was therefore placed in the return side of a little gable set against one of the larger wing gables, and balanced by a similar gable at the other end of the hall.

This arrangement was discussed in the volume of English Homes dealing with this period of our architecture, and among the places cited in illustration Stanton Court in the Cotswolds will be found to have the same central recessed block and two pairs of gables as still compose the north elevation of Llanvihangel Court.

There is also evidence in the masonry of the original position of the door. But the Charles Il owner altered the arrangement to the fashion of his day and placed the door centrally in the hall. Of recent years a porch has been added as a convenience. Otherwise the front has been little altered since the reign of Elizabeth, when we are told that Rhys Morgan rebuilt the Court. That he merely altered and added to an existing fabric is clear from the survival at the back of the house of one or two windows of Henry VIII's time, if not also from the presence here and there in the interior of linenfold panelling. They are interesting reminders of the home of the family whose heiress was mother to Rhys Morgan the rebuilder.

The modern mind, resting upon the fixed surname system as a bedrock principle, is easily bewildered by Welsh medieval genealogies, and therefore no more will be said than that John a PG wilym Jenkin of Wernddu belonged to the same family as the Herberts, who were dominant about Abergavenny, where they still own estates, and of whom Herbert of Raglan, as the ancestor of the Dukes of Beaufort and of the Earls of Pembroke, is the best known.

In Henry VI's time Thomas ap Jenkin, a grandson of John ap Gwilym, held Llanvihangel, which his granddaughter carried to Philip Herbert, a base son of the Earl of Pembroke, to whom, or his successor, their son, William Herbert, acted as steward. His only child married a neighbour, William Morgan of Triley, and it was their son, Rhys, who largely superseded, in the style of his day, the 'older and inferior house' that he inherited.

The whole of the north side and its three gabled return towards the east were rebuilt by him. To the east side a building with two big bays has recently been added in front of the gables, and also a room beyond them to the south. But above the low roof of this room, in a gable facing south, may be seen a three-light window of the Henry VIII type, suggesting that at this point Rhys Morgan allowed the older fabric to remain.

Of such fabric the massive oak framed and slightly cambered ceiling of one of the bedrooms is an example. In Rhys Morgan's time ribbed plaster ceilings were in vogue, and he introduced them as may be seen in another bedroom ceiling. It belongs to the earlier period of such work where the ribs were small mouldings arranged in an involved geometrical pattern with masks, bosses or ornamented discs at the points of radiation.

It is interesting to note the similarity of Rhys Morgan's ceilings with those at Stanton Court, which has just been mentioned as closely resembling Llanvihangel in plan and elevation.

Rhys Morgan was succeeded by his son Anthony, who had married a Northamptonshire heiress and found no use for the Monmouthshire estates.

In I608 he sold both Llanvihangel and Triley, and the former after a few years' ownership by the Earl of Worcester passed by purchase Nicholas Arnold. Above the Henry VIII window already alluded to may be seen a mural sundial. It has the initials N. A. and the date I627, which will mark the time when Nicholas Arnold made alterations to the house he had recently bought. These do not seem to have been considerable.

Colonel Bradney, the present historian of Monmouthshire, tells us that 'the stables appear nearly as old as the house and are larger and more roomy than stables of this date generally are.' As a matter of fact much finish was beginning to be given to stables in Jacobean days. The character of the fine posts and other woodwork features in the Llanvihangel stables are not beyond what we might expect, and are just as likely, judging from their style, to date from the Morgan as from the Arnold occupation.

But Colonel Bradney inclines to assign them to Nicholas Arnold, whom he describes as 'a breeder of horses importing stud horses from the Low Countries.' This may be true, but the authority is not given, and the only member of the family who is well known to have laboured in this field was Nicholas's grandfather, a much more distinguished man.

The Arnolds originally came from the Cardiff region, but members of the family established themselves in Bristol and Gloucester, where they acquired wealth. Thus the manor of Highnam, near the latter city, came to John Arnold at the dissolution of the monasteries, and he had a son: Nicholas, who was of the King's bodyguard in 1539, and was knighted under Edward VI. Favouring the reformers, he fell on evil times in Mary's reign and twice suffered imprisonment. But with Elizabeth's accession came the tide in his affairs, and he was Lord Justice of Ireland in 1564. After that Highnam appears to have been his headquarters, but he often represented the county in Parliament. Of him Harrison, in his contemporary Description of England, says: 'Sir Nicholas Arnold of late hath bred the best horses in England and written of the manner of their production.' We learn from the Dictionary of National Biography that 'no trace of such writings survive,' and then follow the words: 'but he is known as early as 1546 to have been engaged in importing horses from Flanders', which are almost the same as those used by Colonel Bradney, on what authority I know not, in reference to Sir Nicholas's grandson. His uncle was of Highnam, while his father is described as of Llanthony. He himself became of Llanvihangel about the time when he was returned to Parliament in 1626.

It was in the following year that, as we have seen, he set up his sundial, and in I633 he was sheriff. How he comported himself during the Civil War that followed does not appear. Tradition brings the much pressed King to Llanvihangel Court in I645, and therefore a room there is called King Charles' Chamber.

This tradition is unsupported by Symonds' Diary, as published by the Camden Society in 1859. Richard Symonds was a Royalist serving in the cavalry that was with the King, and his antiquarian leanings made him record points of interest in houses and their owners, as well as the actions of troops and the movements of the King.

Thus we find that Charles came from Hereford to Abergavenny on July I, 1645, and went to Raglan on the 3rd. Symonds and also Parry in his Royal Visits to Wales give full and careful itineraries of the King at this period, and only at Raglan did he 'lay' during the three visits he paid in that neighbourhood before he finally moved north on September I4.

Neither author makes any mention of Llanvihangel or of its owner, and yet faith in a royal visit there persists. Mrs Attwood-Mathews writes: "'There is a very large coat of arms of Charles I over the bedroom door where he slept, it was inlaid with mother-o'-pearl, and there is no doubt it was placed there at the time. I have the King's oak bedstead, which is still in the room. A sort of oak cradle used to be at the foot of the bed, and this was his valet's bedstead.'

Nicholas Arnold died in 1665 and was succeeded by his son John, who married one of his Highnam cousins. Like his father, he served as sheriff and parliamentary representative, and much more than his father did he set his mark on his country seat. When he succeeded to Llanvihangel the movement in favour of tree planting after the destruction of the Civil War was already afoot, and John Evelyn was at work on his Sylva.

Moreover, the fashion of immense formal layouts which Le Nôtre was developing in France was reaching England and taking the form of avenues and of lengthy lines of trees flanking wide open grass vistas.

John Morgan caught this spirit with results that have lasted till today. On the north side of the house, stretching out in the Hereford direction, he made such a vista by setting lines of firs wide apart. As this centred with the house, he moved his front door to the middle of the hall and constructed a set of terraces across which lay flagged landings and successive flights of steps as a descent to the carriageway.

The result at the present day is admirable. Whether we stand where the grass begins and look up at the house, or whether we go up to the front door and look down, the pictorial effect is most satisfying. The rise begins with half a dozen segmental steps spreading out their ample semicircle on to the carriageway, the crannies of the risers thick set with Adiantum trichomanes. Then the scene changes to steps confined between a parapet wall broken at each flight by plinths bearing great stone balls.

At the top rises the ruddy grey house of rubble walling with ashlar coigns and window frames, and roofs of mossy stone tiles. From its windows the broad grass vista is seen stretching out towards the hills and guarded by its veteran sentinels.

There are gaps in the ranks and signs of age, occasionally reaching decrepitude, among the survivors, but the combination of dignity and picturesqueness arrests and retains the attention.

A second fir tree avenue lines the carriageway which runs west from the house to where the village lines the high road. This, however, was only the smaller section of the formal planting, for on the higher ground south of the house were set no fewer than seven avenues of Spanish chestnuts, many of which are still in their prime and have reached immense proportions.

So large and gnarled are many of these splendid trees that two and a half centuries appear less than the span of their life, and their setting has been put down to Rhys Morgan in Spanish Armada times. The scheme of planting, however, is of post-restoration character, and therefore it seems right to ascribe them to John Arnold.

Of him two dated traces remain. The one is a lead cistern (or what remains of it) bearing the letters IAM (John and Margaret Arnold) and the year 1673, while the other is a big iron fireback in the hall which dates from twenty-one years later.

Between those two dates John Arnold no doubt was busy with his various alterations and plantings, but he lived to see the eighteenth century open, when his son succeeded him. He was the last male of the family, and his daughters sold the place to Edward Harley.

He was younger brother to Robert Harley, who became Queen Anne's Tory Prime Minister and Earl of Oxford, with special remainder to his brother's line. In 1702 Edward Harley obtained the lucrative office of Auditor of the Imprest, which he retained until his death in 1735. In 1717 a charge of embezzling State funds was brought against him, but he proved that although thirty-six millions had passed through his hands, yet his accounts were correct within three shillings and fourpence mischarged by the inadvertency of a clerk.

Nevertheless, he became a rich man, whose chief home and estates were in Herefordshire, where, as well as at Llanvihangel, he maintained charity schools. His son succeeded his cousin as third Earl of Oxford in 174I, and Llanvihangel was a possession of his grandson, the fifth Earl, when, in 1797, Archdeacon Coxe visited the neighbourhood, making notes for his forthcoming History of Monmouthshire.

Picturesque scenery had then become fashionable, and the agreeable sensations of awe and terror aroused by 'horrid crags' and 'dreadful chasms' were made the most of. Thus we hear little of the house but much of that very charming but not formidable detached hill, the Skirrid, which plays so excellent a part in the views from the park and appears in one of the illustrations. Coxe found — or rather lost — his way to the top on a hot afternoon after a morning excursion, and the tired body reacted on the mind: 'When I looked down from the narrow and desolated ridge, the boundless expanse around and beneath which suddenly burst upon my sight overcame me my spirits almost failed, even curiosity was suspended, and I threw myself exhausted on the ground.' However, in half an hour he had sufficiently recovered to descend: 'I walked across the meadows, along a gradual descent, through fine groves of oaks and Spanish chestnuts to Llanvihangel house, an old mansion belonging to the Earl of Oxford. It was the ancient seat of the Arnold family, and was sold in I722 to auditor Harley, ancestor to the present Earl. It is now inhabited only by a farmer and contains nothing but some old furniture, a few family pictures, and some good impressions of Hogarth's prints. The place is distinguished by avenues of Scots firs, the largest in England. From the grounds near the front of the house the Skyrid presents itself with peculiar effect, the fissure seems like an enormous chasm separating two mountains whose impending and craggy summits vie in height and ruggedness.'

An 'elegant collation' brought by friends and spread on the banks of the Honddy soon enabled the Archdeacon to forget the 'fatigues of the day.'

Fifty years later Mr Cliffe, another book writing visitor, comes this way, and he also is struck by the firs: 'The avenue is the finest of its kind in the kingdom; the firs are not of the common Scotch species, and about 40 years ago the Government offered 10,000l. for them. Of the house he merely tells us that it is 'a remarkable old mansion belonging to the Hon. W. P. Rodney.'

Two years after Coxe's visit the Earl of Oxford had sold Llanvihangel to Hugh Powell, treasurer of St Bartholomew's Hospital, whose family were connected with the parish, and when he died in I821 it passed to his godson, the Mr Rodney just mentioned. In 1003 his grandson parted with it to a neighbour, Mr Attwood-Mathews of Pontrilas Court.

He, however, died before the house, which needed renovation and addition, was ready for occupation. Mrs Attwood-Mathews therefore completed the work begun by her husband, and since then has largely resided at this very venerable and beautifully situated home.

It is one of the quirks of motoring that hard times breed sumptuous cars. In the depression years of nearly half a century ago some of the world's finest cars were built.

It is equally true that many of the companies that built them were to merge or sink without trace, but that is another story. Yet here is history repeating itself for, as the pound sinks lower on the international exchange, what takes the headlines and steals the thunder at the last London Motor Show?

The new Lagonda costing £24,750.

While would-be buyers almost climbed over each other to buy the Newport Pagnell masterpiece, there were other exclusive cars getting their share of this surprisingly available cash.

Bristol's new 603 coupé and its sister 412 convertible-saloon, introduced earlier this year, were bringing in enough orders to keep the company happy. An output of about three cars a week is small, but that is how Bristol like it, thus maintaining the quality and exclusivity of the marque.

The order book is very healthy, and the convertible-saloon is an export-only product for some time to come with an American dealer having taken an option on a 100.

Across the hall, Panther cars gathered the crowds with the convertible version of their Bugatti-like De Ville, which starts at £30,000 plus options to choice. This splendid combination of a modern Jaguar engine on a massive steel chassis with aluminium coachwork has already been exported, along with its solid- roofed companion.

Panther do not, however, rely on this top model alone. The J72 roadster is still very much in demand, while it has seater with glass-fibre body Magnum mechanical units. Selling at £4,500 it should find a ready market.

In addition, G* the company does a great deal of prototype engineering for the rest of the motor industry and makes coachwork components for long-established coachbuilders such as Park Ward and Vanden Plas.

To return to the first of the exclusive trio, the Lagonda looks like firmly re-establishing the fortunes of the Aston Martin Lagonda company, which ran into grave financial trouble just two years earlier. The new owners have rebuilt the team of crafts-men, many of whom had left, and are now producing the V8 Aston Martin to a higher standard of workmanship than ever. The advent of the Lagonda, for which salesmen were quoting August, 1978, delivery dates was on the stand, should ensure that the Newport Pagnell works is kept busy for years to come.

The car itself is a remarkable piece of styling by William Towns, who was responsible for the Aston Martin and also the ingenious Microdot prototype city car shown by BP. The shape of the Lagonda is striking; it is long (17ft 4in) and low (4ft 3.25in) yet provides exceptional comfort for four adults. The power unit is the aluminium V8 engine, built by Aston Martin, which has been used by mission the company since 1969.

Transmission is the Chrysler Torqueflite 3-speed automatic, which has also been used extensively in the past, though a 5-speed manual gearbox may be specified. The other mechanical components are based on previous experience and have been tried on existing cars before being adopted for the Lagonda. The front suspension uses unequal-length wishbones, coil springs and an anti-roll bar, while the rear axle is a De Dion pattern with coil springs and self-levelling suspension; the drive is through a limited-slip differential.

Those familiar with the Aston Martin will know the very strong steel frame which is built on to the platform chassis, and the same formula has been adopted for the Lagonda. Ventilated-disc braking on all four wheels with independent hydraulic circuits and variable-ratio power-assisted rack and pinion steering are further features already used on the Aston.

But it is the bodywork that catches the attention.

The tiny radiator grille is surmounted by a hall-marked silver motif which sets the tone for what follows. There is Sundym tinted glass all round, and the roof has a glazed panel. Inside the car is remarkably uncluttered, with tan leather seating, electric windows and air conditioning: even the radio is hidden from view when out of use. The driving position includes adjustable steering and pedals, cruise control is also incorporated. A single-spoke steering wheel allows a clear view of the instruments.

These are housed on black Perspex panels in front of the driver and in his door, and are completely black when not in use. Conventional dials and switches are replaced by electronic displays and touch-sensitive areas for gear selection, lights and so forth.

The doors can programmed to lock automatically on leaving the car. A nice nod to tradition is the retention of a fly-off handbrake. The instrumentation was designed by an Aston Martin engineer, and features graphic and digital displays.

The speedometer shows either mph or kph at the touch of a switch. Other readings. indicate engine speed, pressure and temperature, coolant temperature, average speed and fuel consumption on a journey combined with a speed/instantaneous fuel-consumption reading and elapsed time and distance. There is a digital clock showing the date, and a total of 16 warning lights. the majority of motorists well-displayed conventional dials, this unique arrangement gives an insight into what may well one day be commonplace, and, of course, it makes the car a 'must' for the eager oil-rich buyers.

Not all Lagonda production is destined for the Middle East, for there have been orders from States and this country. Sitting in the new Bristol 603 after the Lagonda is a return world of the traditional quality car. It is certainly up-to-the-minute technically and has all modern conveniences, but here one is faced by conventional dials set in a bed of polished walnut and black leather. The new Bristol is available in two forms: the 603S has a 5.9-litre Chrysler V8 engine and sells for {19,661, while the 603E has the smaller 5.2 V8 from the same manufacturer and sells at £19,360. Both run on two-star fuel.

The construction follows established Bristol practice in having a massive steel chassis on which is built the restrained and compact aluminium coupé body. This is a full four-seater for adults and very comfortable. Leather seating is standard, and the whole car is handsomely appointed.

This specification includes Torqueflite automatic Chrysler transmission, disc brakes, power steering, self-levelling suspension and cruise control. A particularly good feature is the driver's seat, which is very well shaped and is electrically controlled for fore-and-aft movement, height and rake adjustment. It folds forward and inwards to provide easy access to the rear seats, and the seat belts are mounted on runners to slide out of the way.

The 603 is a logical successor to the 411 which it displaces, and will undoubtedly appeal to the company's select band of customers.

On a bright, sunny autumn afternoon on October 30, 1849, Prince Albert and his two eldest children, eight-year-old Victoria, the Princess Royal and her seven-year-old brother Edward, the Prince of Wales, boarded the Royal Barge at Whitehall Landing.

Waiting for them onboard were, among others, the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, Home Secretary Sir George Grey, and 24 Royal Watermen waiting to row the illustrious party east along the River Thames to the City of London.

Crowds jostled for position on the banks and bridges hoping to catch a glimpse of Queen Victoria’s husband and two of their children. And the reason for all this pomp and ceremony? It was to open the architectural and engineering marvel that was the London Coal Exchange—one of the first cast-iron, purpose-built office buildings in the world.

Situated on Lower Thames Street, opposite the-then Billingsgate Fish Market (as an aside, the smell was said to permeate the iron heart of its brand new neighbour), the spectacular building featured a central rotunda some 60 feet in diameter that rose up 74 feet to a vast iron and glass dome. Clamped onto the circular walls were three cast-iron balconies that provided access to rented offices for traders and merchants in the trading of that other driver of Victorian progress, coal.

No expense was spared when it came to decorating the unique building. The walls were festooned in encaustic depictions of jolly coal-miners by artist Frederick Sang and artworks of fossilised flora and fauna, discovered by the men toiling in dark underground pits.

The central trading floor was designed to look like a maritime compass, and constructed from 4,000 pieces of rare wood, sourced from across the UK, including black oak from the depths of the Tyne. A dagger blade at the heart of a decorative City of London shield was carved from a mulberry tree said to have been planted by Peter the Great (1672-1725) (who spent sometime honing his craft as a shipwright at Deptford Dockyard).

Prince Albert, well known for his progressive ideas, was suitably impressed. Following the opening speeches and ceremonies, the Prince and chosen guests sat down to an impressive buffet of hot roast beef, hot roast chicken, hot roast pheasant and hot roast peahen, washed down with vintage sherry.

Like so many other buildings across the country, the Coal Exchange suffered damage during the Second World War. It wasn’t, however, fatal. Instead, progress was to be the building's downfall.

In the middle of the 1950s, the capital's city planners decided to build a ‘motorway’ through it, to ease the congestion on the clogged roads. However, one of the obstacles standing firmly in the way was the Coal Exchange. Country Life joined a campaign to save the historically-important structure.

Mark Girouard was permitted to photograph the building in 1958 and joined other prestigious voices such as Sir John Betjemen urging the authorities to change course. Sadly, their pleas fell on deaf ears and, in 1962, the unique, Grade II-listed structure was dismantled for scrap. A large slab of concrete and tarmacadam was laid in the building's place, though care was taken to preserve a Roman hypocaust that was first discovered at the site in 1848.

Even as the Victorian wonder was being taken down, international efforts were being made to preserve parts of it. There was talk of shipping the iron rotunda to the Melbourne Cultural Centre in Australia, supported by Russell Hitchcock, a world-leading authority on 19th-century architecture who pleaded: 'It is a monument of international importance. It can bear comparison with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, or the Pantheon in Rome.' Sadly, the damage had already been done.

However, two small parts of the groundbreaking building do still exist. If you ever find yourself sitting in traffic on Victoria Embankment, look out for two, Portland stone plinths (a clue: they're placed just after the junction for Temple Place). The plinths mark the boundary of the City of London and on top of them are two dragons that once decorated the eaves above the entrance to the London Coal Exchange.

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It has long been fascinating to imagine what Gertrude Jekyll’s own garden looked like in colour. Her engaging descriptions of Munstead Wood, in books and articles, often illustrated with her own black-and-white photographs, spoke volumes, but unless one’s knowledge of colour was as precise as hers, it was difficult to picture the scene in colour. But now autochrome photographs rediscovered in the Country Life archives, spell out what many have speculated about.

The autochromes add a new dimension to Jekyll’s Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden, published by Country Life in 1908, and are still the best guide to her gardens at Munstead Wood.

Fortunately, they were taken at different times of the year, so that the various seasonal gardens can each be appreciated in their prime.

When these autochrome plates were rediscovered in the Country Life archives, it was assumed that they were Jekyll’s own — she was an accomplished photographer. But it is more likely that they were the work of Country Life’s then gardening editor Herbert Cowley, a frequent visitor to Munstead Wood.

By the summer of 1907, when the Lumière brothers were marketing this single-plate colour process, Jekyll was already winding down her photographic career. She would have been intrigued by autochrome photography, which produced flat, dense, and grainy pictures, unlike the rich texture and tonality of black-and-white.

This technique involved green, violet and orange-coloured starch grains being spread over a plate covered with a panchromatic emulsion. Exposure times were long, processing complex, plates costly and good eyesight essential.

Before the rediscovery, garden historians had relied on the recollections of some of the Munstead Wood’s many visitors to help paint a picture of the garden. One such as the eminent plantsman Graham Stuart Thomas, who paid a call in 1931 and was spellbound. He has read Jekyll’s books, but nothing has prepared him for the experience of seeing the actual garden, especially the colour borders.

Surprisingly full illustrations depicted the famous garden in colour: fewer than a dozen paintings, mostly by Helen Allingham. The 10 Country Life photographs, taken in about 1912, now bridge this gap.

It would, however, be misleading to suggest that Munstead Wood looks like these vignettes in any one year. Like most ephemeral works of art, Jekyll’s garden is best remembered by her own words and illustrations, now augmented by the Country Life autochromes.

This feature originally appeared inside the May 15, 1997, issue of Country Life.

The life and times of Gertrude Jekyll

1840s

Gertrude Jekyll was a difficult child. Her father called her a ‘queer fish’; she infuriated her mother by clumping through the best rooms of their Surrey country house in her gardening boot.

1860s

As a young woman, she attended the South Kensington School of Art, where, as a disciple of John Ruskin and William Morris, she imagined herself embarking on a career as a painter and artist-craftswoman.

As a painter, she was unsuccessful, but enjoyed a certain Society fame for her decorative work in inlay, silverwork and interior fabrics. And thus she might have remained, a talented but obscure figure on the fringes of the rising Arts-and-Crafts movement from the mid 19th century.

1880s

Of all those who have attempted to design gardens according to artistic principles, Jekyll was perhaps the most conscientious. She observed the way Michel-Eugène Chevreul’s mid-19th-century theories of colour combination had been applied to annual bedding schemes and applied them to the use of hardy plants, establishing an approach to garden design that remains the basis of much modern work.

1890-1914

Jekyll formed alliances with the garden writer William Robinson and the architect Edwin Lutyens, which resolved ideological struggles and set new standards for garden-making by thoughtful experiment and reasoned moderation.

Her clients were typically drawn from her own background of prosperous gentlefolk. Her design ideas, divided between the neat geometry of her terraced parterres (reinforced with strong evergreens such as yuccas, right, and bergenias) and the sinuous lines of her woodland-edge shrubberies, were spelt out in informative but ponderous books in the years between 1899 and 1914.

Through her association with Lutyens, Jekyll became closely associated with Country Life in the magazine’s formative years. Contributor George Plumptre once said that her partnership with the famed architect ‘provided the alchemy of the modern garden, a magical blend of attitude and action whose legacy became embedded in gardens of the 20th century and beyond.’

Country Life covered Lutyens and Jekyll's first joint commission at Orchards, the home of Jekyll’s friends, William and Julia Chance.

1919-1932

After her pre-war success, the changed nature of society after the horrors of the First World War and her own advancing years meant a quiet final chapter.

Many of her gardens declined in the mid 20th century, but several modern restorations have ensured a renewed and lasting interest in her work, which has influenced successive designers from Karl Foerster (1874-1970) to Piet Oudolf in the present day. Jekyll died in 1932 and was buried in Busbridge churchyard, Surrey.

Her monument, by Lutyens, records her as ‘Artist, Gardener, Craftswoman’. Her obituary in The Times recorded that she did not cease ‘to share widely the fruits of her long and loving apprenticeship to Nature’.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

It was on March 10, 1950, that I reported on my recent test of the Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, and in recent months I have tested both the latest Bentley and the Rolls-Royce Silver Dawn, as well as enjoying a run with the 1909 version of the Silver Ghost.

As both the Bentley and the Silver Dawn were fitted with an automatic gearbox, perfected and built by Rolls-Royce from an American design, I felt it would be of interest to test this as fitted to the Silver Wraith, particularly as the Silver Wraith is more usually regarded as a chauffeur-driven car. Both the Bentley and the Silver Dawn are normally fitted with a pressed-steel saloon body of stan­dard form, but on the Silver Wraith one is accustomed to seeing the work of specialist coachbuilders. The example which I have just tested was fitted with a seven-seater touring limousine by Park Ward.

There is no doubt that few purchasers of Rolls-Royces pay any attention to their tech­nical specification. Rather are they inclined to accept the mechanical details as being above reproach, and to devote their attention to obtaining bodywork built to suit their require­ments and tastes to the tiniest detail. To appreciate the car fully, however, it is necessary to study the specification. In fact, to under­stand properly how the Rolls-Royce has justly earned its high reputation, it is essential to understand the rigorous testing which every car undergoes, but there is not space to discuss that in this article.

The 4½-litre six-cylinder engine is fitted with side-exhaust and overhead-inlet valves, a method of construction which allows the engine to be shorter — and therefore more rigid — for a given capacity. Although the makers do not divulge the total power developed, it must be approximately 130bhp in view of the total weight of over 2 tons. Thermostatically controlled radiator shutters are fitted, which bring the water temperature to the efficient minimum of 75°C very rapidly. The excellent external finish of the engine and its components is indicative only of its internal condition.

The chassis side-members are of box section at both front and rear, and the centre portion is braced additionally by a cruciform. The front suspension is independent by means of helical springs and wish bones, while that at the rear is by leaf springs, enclosed in gaiters. Centralised one-shot lubrication is fitted, operated by a pedal on the dashboard, and the gaiter-enclosed rear springs are included in the system. The rear brakes are mechanically operated, and those at the front hydraulically, but the pedal pres­sure is augmented by a gearbox-driven servo motor. This means that stopping such a heavy car when driving at even a high speed is well within the capabilities of the smallest lady driver.

The Park Ward bodywork is typical of traditional British specialist coach building. The finish of the interior is luxurious without being flamboyant. The facia panel and door fillets are in fine walnut veneer, and the uphol­stery is in soft West of England cloth. Only two can be seated in the front compartment, but from two to five can be accommodated in the rear. The occasional seats are unusually com­fortable for this type. With the central armrest in use, and only two passengers being carried on the main seat, the comfort is certainly equal to that of one's favourite armchair. The con­trols for the wireless are fitted into a rear arm­rest, and are matched by a lady's companion on the other side. A wine or spirit cabinet is fitted against the division behind the front seats, but it is not tall enough to carry one's supplies in the original bottles. Largely because the up­holstery and the roof lining are of cloth the tone of the wireless is pleasantly soft. Separate heaters are provided for the front and rear compartments, and the rear compartment can be isolated by an electrically driven rising glass panel. The action of this was slightly noisier than one would expect on a Rolls-Royce.

When one bears specially in mind the dimensions of the car, the builders are to be congratu­lated on providing very good vision. Both front wings can be seen from the driving seat, and owing to the great expanse of glass vision from the rear seat is exceptionally good.

During the period of my test I did a fast run to Blandford Camp, in Dorset, and it was noticeable that over such typically English roads one was able to appreciate the same qualities as would be stressed on fast Continental ones. The long and effortless stride of the car enables long runs to be clone at a surprisingly high average and — what is equally important — with­out tiring either the driver or the passengers. It is only when one is parking or taking a very narrow sharp corner in the West End that the size of the car is apparent. At all speeds on the open road the size is no worry. This is, of course, largely because of the very good vision, which enables one to judge distances accurately, but it is contributed to by the sensitive and accurate steering. As on other models from the same factory, a remote control for the rear damper is fitted on the steering wheel, and this enables the driver to vary the suspension between soft, for dawdling in city traffic, and hard, when driving fast and taking corners enterprisingly.

While some owners, and chauffeurs, never drive the Rolls-Royce in any manner other than that typical of the town carriage it is only by driving hard that one can fully appreciate the way in which high-speed stability and comfort have been combined.

In the rear compartment, and even more so with the glass division raised, practically complete silence is obtained. lt is only as the speed approaches the maximum that one can

hear the wind, but it would be wrong to des­cribe it as wind roar. The makers are content to have the car judged on its true capabilities, and have not felt compelled to fit a flattering speedometer. The fuel gauge is also accurate, and on long runs this avoids the usual inconveni­ence of stopping unnecessarily often.

My opinion of the automatic gearbox is rather mixed insofar as the Silver Wraith is concerned. My admiration for it on the Silver Dawn, or on the sister car the Bentley, is com­plete, but as in most cases the Silver Wraith will be chauffeur-driven it seems rather pointless to invest in this extra, particularly when one remembers that a competent chauffeur will cer­tainly be capable of changing gear on a normal box without the passengers being aware of it. From the driver's point of view it is splendid, as it eliminates the clutch pedal, and makes smooth driving very easy. Some people have criticised the automatic gearbox on the grounds that it eliminates skill, and the enjoyment of that skill, from driving, but I cannot agree. The skilful driver can still find many opportunities of using the gearbox to the best advantage. An overriding control is fitted, which allows the driver to cancel the automatism of the mechanism. By this third gear can be retained in use on a long twisting hill, where otherwise top gear would automatically be engaged if the throttle were eased on corners. It can also be used to steady the car when entering a corner fast or descending a steep hill.

On the particular car I tested the wind-screen washers were erratic in their action, and there was slight shudder from the front brakes once or twice at low speeds. These slight errors in maintenance were easily forgiven in view of the car's general excellence and the pleasure of driving it, and, from the evidence of my passengers, the pleasure of riding. Much of the enjoyment of a Rolls-Royce is gained from the smoothness and precision with which the most minor details are fitted and work. Door handles, ashtray lids, occa­sional seats and all dashboard controls work as they should on a car of this make. Motoring after dark is equally pleasant; with the heaters giving warmth throughout the body, the subdued lighting of the white-figured black instruments, the non-glare map reading light, and the powerful headlights giving a beam long enough to enable one's daytime cruising speed to be maintained.

Technical details seem unimportant on the Silver Wraith. It is the manner in which the car performs that makes the casual driver of it as enthusiastic about it as the habitual owner.

This article first appeared in the August 19, 1954 edition of Country Life

It is not hard, when watching Theo James write his whimsical screenplay on a typewriter, tinker with a motorcycle and frolic with micro-pigs (yes, you read that correctly) to understand why luxury shoe brand Church’s chose to film their latest campaign at Wrotham Park (below). With its stunning Palladian architecture and expansive 2,500 acre grounds located within the M25, it really does have it all.

But it is not just Church’s who are besotted with Wrotham Park, the estate has long been capturing the imaginations of brands, film makers and artists across many mediums. Wrotham Park has been used as a shooting location more than 60 times which means that chances are you will recognise its famous imposing exterior if you’ve ever watched television (Poirot, Downton Abbey, Bridgerton) or seen a film (Gosford Park, Bridget Jones's Diary) in the past 50 years.

In fact, Wrotham Park has been a subject of fascination within these very pages numerous times over the past 130 years with the first mention of the estate in Country Life dating back to November 1918. The piece by Arthur T. Bolton explores the rather compelling and convoluted family history of the long-time owners, the Byngs, alongside photographs showcasing the house exterior and grounds including lush landscaped gardens and a magnificent winding drive.

There was a resurgence in interest in the early 2000s when the film Gosford Park, in which Wrotham Park served as the primary location for exterior shots as well as some upstairs interiors (downstairs was filmed on a sound stage; bedrooms at Syon House), was released. The house was featured agains inside this magazine's pages in 2002, and it is with some measure of frustration that the author, Tim Knox, describes the ‘questionable Victorian improvements’ that were undertaken by William Cubitt and Company in the late 1800s. You can’t help but get the sense that anybody interested in Wrotham Park just wants to get their hands on it.

When reading about the estate it’s impossible not to get drawn into the history behind it. Acquired in approximately 1750 by Admiral of the Blue John Byng, the estate, originally called Kicks End (rather less grand), was rebuilt by the architect Isaac Ware in 1754. If you have not heard of Byng because of his association with Wrotham Park you might unknowingly be aware of his death — court martialled and executed for negligence after serving in the Seven Years War — because it was satirised in Voltaire’s Candide, when the eponymous character notes: ‘in this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.’

The house survived a disastrous fire in 1883 in which, thankfully, nearly all of the major artworks were saved and are still on display to this day, but the building itself was gutted. The house was faithfully reconstructed afterwards and is still owned by the same family, now run by William Robert Byng, 9th Earl of Strafford, who gave up a career as an insurance broker to dedicate himself to the estate full time.

Aside from the obvious draw of Wrotham Park to artists and brands — that it is less than an hour away from most major London production studios — there is clearly far more to its allure to those who wish to capture it on camera. Perhaps it is the fact of its reinvention and its resilience that keeps filmmakers and photographers fascinated by this estate. There is something rather whimsical and romantic about its beauty, about its barely changed 18th Century interiors, something particularly British in the eccentricities of its history.

There is also something undeniably enchanting about how unknowable it is. This estate is not open to the public. The Byng family now lives in one part of the house, renting the rest out for commercial filming projects, but no visitors are allowed. In the early 2000s, when English Heritage announced a project called ‘Images of England’, where photographs of stately homes would be available to look at on the internet, its custodian was one of its loudest critics, describing it as a ‘gross intrusion of one’s privacy.’ If you are so inclined you are now able to peruse a limited number of images of the interiors of the house on the estate’s own website.

As such, we can only experience the beauty of the estate briefly, in costume and in glimpses on our screens, and in the Country Life Archive, lending so much to the imagination. It gives Wrotham Park almost a dream-like quality. It is rather wonderful that it remains just out of our reach.

Church's new Spring Summer 2026 collection is available to shop now. Click here to see more.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

At the time of the 1921 census, Patrick Bowes-Lyon, Lord Glamis, was at home. Home mostly meaning alive — unlike many of his contemporaries (including one of his brothers) who had not survived the carnage unleashed by the First World War. But also physically at home in Streatlam Castle, near the town of Barnard Castle, in Co Durham.

Lord Glamis served in the 1/5th Battalion, the Black Watch, and was married to Lady Dorothy Beatrix Godolphin Osborne with whom he had four children. He might have had an inkling that his youngest sister would, in two years time, marry Prince Albert, Duke of York, Earl of Inverness, and Baron Killarney, the future George VI — because the couple met properly for the first time in 1920.

Lord Glamis was proud enough of his home that he invited Country Life up to wild and remote Teesdale to photograph and write about it in 1915. However, he did not own it. His father did. And, despite the Streatlam Estate being (sometimes tenuously) in the family for more than 700 years, the 15th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne decided to sell it in 1920.

The Earl owned and lived in a magnificent, fairytale castle — Glamis — in Angus, Scotland, and had further estates in St Paul’s in Walden Bury, Gibside Hall, also in Co Durham, and Woolmers Park near Hertford, among others. Yet another sweep of land and property in post-war times was excessive — even if his son thought otherwise.

An advert placed in the August 14, 1920, edition of Country Life extolled the virtues of the property, chiefly that the 'commodious and convenient' house featured three striking stone cupolas, six reception rooms, 21 bedrooms, excellent servants’ quarters and a 400-acre deer park. It also boasted a stud — which had sired four, mid-19th-century Derby winners, 500 acres of woodland, the colossal, 6,000-acre Cotherstone Moor, and 20 farms, along with 'small holdings, cottages, etc' where local tenant farmers and labourers toiled, loved and lived.

Streatlam Castle was a Baroque-style mansion with a hidden medieval core rebuilt for the Bowes-Lyon family in the early 18th century. The building, described by H. Avary Tipping in Country Life, 1915, as 'delightful and historic', was best known for its wonderful oak-panelled dining room with painted armorial ceiling (which Lord Glamis's mother later had removed to the nearby Bowes Museum for posterity) and a 46-person chapel. The entire structure was characterised by thick walls (about a metre) which included, at various times, small corner towers with parapets, and an elegant and symmetrical design.

Unfortunately the estate failed to sell — likely because, at the time, hundreds of other landowners were also trying to dispose of their estates — and so in late 1921, the Earl changed estate agents and instructed John D Wood and Co. to dispose of the property as quickly as possible.

They succeeded.

The buyer was Norman Field who was part of the Massachusetts family behind Marshall Field & Company, Chicago's first-ever department store. However, Field was not even remotely interested in the castle. He'd recently purchased nearby Lartington Hall and only wanted to get his hands of the once vastly-profitable stud. He took it and put Streatlam, the smallholdings and the rest of the estate back on the market.

By 1927, Field had sold what he could, but was still in possession of the surplus-to-his-and-seemingly-everyone-else's-requirements castle — so a decision was made to sell the contents and bring down the 18th-century parts of the building, leaving just the 14th-century heart behind.

During the Second World War, the Army occupied what was left which did little to improve its condition. It then lay derelict until 1959 — when the Territorial Army took it upon themselves to blow it to pieces as part of a training exercise.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. An additional 50,000 assets from the historic archive are scheduled to be added this year — with completion expected in Summer 2025. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

The 2026 Winter Olympic Games are well underway in the deeply fashionable city of Milan, which means that it would be remiss not to look back through the Country Life archives to see what the fashionable winter sports goers of yesteryear were wearing on the slopes and the ice rinks of Europe.

So, without further ado, button your salopettes and tighten your goggles for a gentle downhill ski through memory lane.

The 1900s

One has to feel for all Edwardian ladies. The outfits that it was suggested they wear for skiing and ice-skating, though undeniably elegant, were ridiculously impractical.

How on earth did anyone manage more than a few steps trussed up in a corset and with those perilously long skirts?

The 1910s

Though the corseted waist have been dispensed of in this picture, the ankle-length skirts are still very much on the scene.

Still, this trio of London ladies appear to be enjoying the delights of winter in the capital — when the ice still froze and we weren’t pummelled by incessant rain.

The 1920s

Praise be to Burberry, who came to our collective rescue in the 1920s with something beginning to resemble practical sporting attire.

The British-born brand manufactured warm woollen sweaters in still-fashionable prints and trousers (which only gained mainstream acceptance among women during the First World War) for snowy conditions.

The 1930s

The 1930s presented us with two very distinctive offerings. The left, again from Burberry, is a (more) practical, no-nonsense outfit for tackling the slopes; the right, from Schiaparelli, is an uber-glamorous ensemble that looks like it belongs inside the wardrobe of Marlene Dietrich.

The 1940s

Following the Second World War, outfits, for a time at least, were a little more muted, but somehow still far from practical.

The one on the left, from Daly’s of Glasgow, features a mini skirt, that I suppose is more practical for skating in. Made from thick corduroy, it was less likely to fly up, but probably a tad uncomfortable if you fell in it. The Lilywhites proofed-cotton jacket with its fold-away hood looks more useful — but cotton in the snow, really?

The 1950s

What this lacks in glamour it makes up for (finally) in practicality and versatility. The pom poms are a playful touch.

The 1960s

Glamour was finally back on the catwalk and the slopes. Somehow the practicality has already gone missing though.

The outfit on the left features knitted trousers, which look impeccable on the model, but would fare terribly in the snow.

The 1970s

Huzzah! We have arrived at the end of our tour through the Archive and, finally, a bold check skiing outfit that is actually waterproof. My work here is done.

The vast majority of lost mansions in the UK were demolished because of three reasons: war, fire or death duties that were imposed on estate-owning families throughout the 20th century. The latter is partly to blame for the demise of London’s Dorchester House — though Country Life dramatically decreed in a February 25, 1928, article that her fate had instead been sealed by 'the English Capitalists'.

Dorchester House was grand. Very grand — built on the site of another demolished building, on the capital's exclusive Park Lane, overlooking Hyde Park. Construction on the 40-bedroom behemoth began in 1849 for the exceptionally wealthy Capt Robert Stayner Holford (he'd inherited more than £1 million (about £97 million today) from an uncle), MP for East Gloucestershire, owner of Westonbirt House, founder of Westonbirt Arboretum and a voracious collector of fine art. Designed by architect Lewis Vulliamy and inspired by Rome’s Villa Farnesina, it featured an imposing porte-cochère with which to welcome visitors into the jaw-dropping marble entrance hall.

The hall and its grand staircase were said to have cost more than £30,000 (about £2.9 million) and featured Derbyshire alabaster balustrading. Each step was a different colour marble and the vast columns supporting the whole structure were carved out of pink granite

Holford and Vulliamy (who sought the advice of Sir Edwin Landseer while creating two arches in the saloon through which to view the marble masterpiece) contracted the finest artisans to work on the interior decoration. The library was hung with green damask silk and a huge, handwoven Axminster carpet laid on the floor. Sir Coutts Lindsay painted friezes in the Red Drawing Room and Signor Anglinatti decorated the ceilings in both this and the Green Drawing Room. No expense was spared — even when it came to one designer, Alfred Stevens, whose attention to the minutest of details pushed the generous Holford to his very limits.

Stevens — whose quality and execution of work was, according to Country Life’s Christopher Hussey, on par with Michelangelo — took a staggering 10 years to complete a chimneypiece in the saloon. In May 1870, the usually Holford put pen to paper: ‘Had I known that the saloon chimney piece would have cost so large a sum as £1,800 [£187.500], I should, while admiring its beauty, have been content with good form and less ornament.'

However, Holford did not terminate Stevens's contract and the work in the dining room continued until the latter died, mid-project, in 1875. When Holford discovered that Stevens had left a few small bequests to some poverty-stricken acquaintances, but no funds with which to honour them, Holford closed his account with a final payment of £100 (about £10,000 today) in the hope that they might receive something.

Dorchester House became, for a while, a hotspot for late-Victorian society. The balls thrown inside its walls were attended by royalty, including the then Princess of Wales (later Queen Alexandra).

Holford, who took great pleasure in showing off his impressive collection of art, died in 1892 and left the grand palace to his son, Sir George, an equerry to the royal household and, according the Manchester Evening News 'one of the best looking men in the kingdom'. Despite his handsomeness, Holford preferred the quiet life to grand state balls and parties, dedicating his spare time to collecting and tending to orchids.

He occasionally resided at the property, but, in 1905, rented it out to Whitelaw Reid, the American ambassador to London whose visitors included Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, Mark Twain and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A press picture from 1910 shows former President Theodore Roosevelt (a regular visitor) departing the house the day the death of Edward VII was announced. The stars and stripes is at half-mast.

In 1912, Reid died and the house returned to Sir George. Two years later, he handed it over to the Government to use as a hospital for the duration of the First World War. Sir George was registered as living in the house in the 1921 census, but his tenure was not to last much longer. He died in 1926, leaving Dorchester House and Westonbirt to the Earl of Morley. Morley was already in a dire financial position having already inherited vast debts from both his father and grandfather and so he immediately put both properties up for sale. Dorchester House was only 70 years old, but already considered too old-fashioned to be worth salvaging — though there were 40 bedrooms, it had only five bathrooms. After a sale to a hotel syndicate was announced, Country Life mourned its imminent destruction:

‘A country that lives on capital, treating Death Duties as income, must not expect monuments of individualism to survive. Had the late Lord Leverhulme been alive and still contemplating he founding of a museum, as he was when he bought Grosvenor House, Dorchester House might have been spared. Had the Italian Government found it convenient to pay an extra £100,000, Italy would have had as worthy an embassy as England can offer, and London could have kept one of its noblest palaces. If Lady Beecham, in her gallant effort to house national opera, had also procured that last £100,000, the building would have been largely preserved.’

As was always the case, a huge pre-demolition sale was held. The vast staircase has depreciated in value quicker than a newly-released iPhone, selling in six individual pieces for a dismal £293. The Evening News reported that most bids were lower than the cost of removal. Solid oak doors, for example, fetched £3 3s (roughly £170).

The wrecking balls moved in as soon as the sale had finished and by 1931, The Dorchester Hotel had risen from its ashes. The luxury accommodation still stands proud in the footprint of Holford’s dream some 95 years later.

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Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell, ironmaster, Philip Webb, architect, and William Morris, Arts & Crafts artist, were not the most obvious of friends — but collaborate they did on a grand country home.

Newcastle-born Bell studied sciences at Edinburgh University, and then travelled to and studied in Germany, Denmark, and at the Sorbonne in Paris — before returning home to Geordie shores to take up a job at his father’s iron and chemical works. As early as 1843, he began experimenting with ironstone, a natural, iron-rich stone found across the Cleveland Hills, on the north-west edge of the North York Moors. His experiments paid off because ironstone was a pivotal raw material of the Industrial Revolution. He and his brother inherited his father's company in 1845, and the pair set about building more and more blast furnaces in order to extract russet-red 'gold' from their ever-growing number of mines.

Bell, who, alongside the ironworks business, went on to be director of the Forth Bridge and North Eastern railway companies, a magistrate, a Fellow of the Royal Society, an officer of the Légion d’Honneur, a sheriff, mayor and alderman of Newcastle, and an MP for both North Durham and The Hartlepools, amassed a huge fortune. And he decided to spend some of it on a North Yorkshire country estate, commissioning friend Philip Webb to design the home.

In 1915, Country Life’s Lawrence Weaver described Rounton Grange: ‘I say significance, rather than beauty or charm, because with all my deep reverence for the work of Philip Webb, I feel that its keynote is to be sought rather in its sincerity and grasp of essentials than in beauty achieved.’

The property stood, in places, some five stories high, a design feature employed by Webb and Bell so that they would not have to fell various mature trees growing on the site. Webb’s original floorplans show a photographic room — installed for Bell who took an interest in the emerging art form.

However, it wasn't just Bell who took an interest in the design and aesthetics of his new home. Over the course of eight years, his wife, Margaret, and one of their daughters, Florence, painstakingly hand-sewed large tapestry friezes inspired by Chaucer’s translations of The Romaunt of the Rose to the designs of William Morris and Edward Burns Jones. The tapestries hung above the panelling in the dining room. The ceilings of the same room were decorated by Morris.

Margaret died in 1886, one year after Bell was made a baronet, around the same time that his love for Rounton appeared to wain.

On Webb's advice, in 1898, Bell purchased Mount Grace Priory in nearby Osmotherley and set about refurbishing it in Arts and Crafts style. When he died at the age of 88, six years later, his will stated he was worth £768,676 (a colossal £81.8 million in 2025). One of his sons, Sir Hugh Bell, inherited Rounton and Mount Grace Priory.

The junior Bell set about modernising Rounton, alongside George Jack, Webb’s understudy. They added a common room and a long room (a gallery-type space), but like his father before him, Hugh appeared to favour Mount Grace.

He died in 1931, closely followed by his own son, Marcus, meaning the family were hit with two crippling sets of death duties that made maintaining the upkeep of two houses impossible.

Reports in the Newcastle Chronicle, dated to 1940, claim that Rounton Grange had been unoccupied for 16 years and in a terrible state when requisitioned by the War Office as a home for disabled evacuees from the at-risk areas of Gateshead and Tyneside. It also moonlighted as a prisoner of war facility and was in such a bad state by the end of the War that the Bell descendants decided to put it on the market. It failed to sell and was offered to the National Trust who agreed to take it on the basis that it came with an endowment. None was available.

A noticed that it was scheduled for demolition appeared in Country Life in 1953. A year later it had largely vanished, bar a walled garden, park and a few out houses. Today, the former is home to a nursery specialising in dark plants. The park at East Rounton remain historically significant thanks to ongoing restoration efforts.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. An additional 50,000 assets from the historic archive are scheduled to be added this year — with completion expected in Summer 2025. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

One of the greatest features of any city are its green spaces — lungs that provide essential oxygen and calm among the fumes, noise and constant goings on.

Our capital is blessed with a myriad green spaces, but less than a century ago, one of London's most famous parks was still in private ownership, hiding a property and grounds, that was, according to Country Life: 'more magnificently harboured than the King himself' (1905).

The house and park in question was Holland House, a vast 17th-century mansion with expansive gardens off London’s prestigious Kensington High Street. The property was said to be one of the most famous examples of early domestic Jacobean architecture in the country, and the gargantuan estate housed formal and kitchen gardens, pleasure grounds and a woodland pheasant shoot. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was the chosen venue for the the RHS’s Summer Flower Show.

As was befitting of such a grand country property within easy reach of the capital (Kensington would have been classified as the countryside when the house was first built), Holland House had many famous (and infamous) owners.

Originally named Cope Castle after its first owner, Sir Walter Cope — a James I loyalist, Gentleman Usher of the Privy Chamber, Chamberlain of the Exchequer and connoisseur, who employed some of the greatest craftsmen and artists of the time to adorn his new home.

Unfortunately for Cope, his love of the finer things in life culminated in him dying with large debts said to amount to more than £26,000 (more than £5.5 million in today's money). With no male heir, the house passed to his daughter Isabel and her husband Henry Rich (of name and fortune).

The couple set about greatly expanding the mansion and Rich, who was gifted the title Lord Holland, decided to rename it Holland House. Unfortunately, he was very ambitious and very duplicitous. He plotted and schemed and lent his support to both the puritans and the royalists, eventually siding with Charles I. This final move would prove his undoing and in 1649 he was sent to meet with a man with a large axe. The house remained in the Rich family, but the member subsequently decided to let it out.

It was said that William III, who suffered terribly from asthma, considered purchasing the country mansion before settling instead for the property we now know as Kensington Palace. Towards the end of his life, the writer, MP and Spectator co-founder Joseph Addison, by fortune of marriage, resided in the fashionable house. It was reported that while in the process of composing his latest tome, Addison would furiously pace the long gallery, a bottle of wine conveniently positioned at either end for refreshment.

In the middle of the 18th century, the Fox family, of Whig political fame, first leased and then purchased the estate from the Rich family — and turned it into one of the most fashionable addresses in the capital. It was the childhood home of the fantastically indulged and flamboyant politician Charles James Fox (his father was said to have ordered a demolished wall in the grounds to be rebuilt so a young Charles, who had missed its first demolition, could observe its demise the second time round). Throughout the Fox family’s tenure, the property was a hotbed of British social and political action. According to Country Life's 1905 articles, there were 'wits and authors, statesmen and travellers, who elbowed for places at uncomfortable dinners.' Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Lord Byron jockeyed for position at the table alongside Lord Melbourne and Benjamin Disraeli. Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott were guests, too.

Towards the end of the 19th and into the 20th centuries, Fox descendants began to sell off their profitable land in order to keep the grand old house in the manner to which it was accustomed. It did, however, unlike so many others, continue to thrive. In 1939, George VI and Queen Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother) attended a grand debutante ball in the property. It was to be it’s last.

On September 27, 1940, in the throes of the Blitz, an oil bomb started a fire in one of the towers. It was closely followed by a 'Molotov bread basket' — a Soviet-made droppable bomb dispenser that combined a large high-explosive charge with a cluster of incendiary bombs. Firefighters works for more than 12 hours and managed to save parts of the east wing from total destruction, but the rest of the building was raised to the ground.

The remains of the house were Grade I Listed in 1947 and sold, along with 52 acres, to London County Council for £250,000 (more than £6 million). The land is now known to use as Holland Park and the remains of the house a backdrop for the open-to-all, open air Holland Park Theatre.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. An additional 50,000 assets from the historic archive are scheduled to be added this year — with completion expected in Summer 2025. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

In 1787, a successful young poet travelled to the capital to mark the publication of the second edition of his works. To celebrate this feat, and presumably to gain further inspiration for his writings, the 28-year-old Robert Burns then set off from Edinburgh on May 5 of the same year on a horseback tour of the Scottish Borders. The adventure, which one could leisurely undertake in under a week utilising 21st-century car power, would take the young poet almost two months on his trusty steed.

During his epic adventure, Burns’s company was sought out by Sir James Hall — an eminent and exceedingly well travelled Scottish geologist and geophysicist — who relieved him of a day in the company of a Mr Sherrif ('a talkative, conceited idiot,' according to Burns). Hall showed Burns his land at Dunglass — his East Lothian estate overlooking the Firth of Forth. Burns described the estate as the 'most romantic sweet place I ever saw'.

Hall inherited the estate in 1776 from his father, another Sir James, who had the dubious pleasure of being the first 'Englishman' that Napoleon said he ever met (he was most definitely Scottish). Hall's (the younger) sizeable new estate included a pre-Reformation collegiate church, and a rather dilapidated castle. The latter was constructed on the site of Thomas Cromwell's headquarters — which was said to have also been the last resting place in Scotland of James VI, before he crossed to border in order to claim the English crown.

Over time, Hall — clearly something of a romantic — took it upon himself to commission a new, Picturesque property on the land — one that his new acquaintance. Burns, would sadly never return to see.

The new Dunglass was built on the edge of Dunglass Dean, a dramatic, deep ravine, home to a mesmerising, tumbling torrent of water — the Dunglass Burn. The design of the new structure followed the Picturesque principles of Sir Uvedale Price whose architectural beliefs were the polar opposite of Capability Brown’s landscaping ones. Price believed that the well-worn path, the inconveniently-placed old tree and the rustic rock formation were an integral part of the land and should all be retained and incorporated into new designs, to add value and interest.

Hall commissioned the landscape artist and engineer Alexander Nasmyth — coincidentally more famous today for his portrait of Burns — to draw up the plans for his new home not in the form of technical drawings, but on canvas. The painting was then entrusted to architect Richard Crichton.

The house was built between 1807 and 1813, inspired by both Robert Adam — with whom Crichton had trained — and Hall's favourite architect, Sir John Vanbrugh. And it remained in his family until 1919 when, like so many large properties in the wake of the First World War, it was put on the market. However, unlike many other properties, it was not left to fall into a state of disrepair.

Dunglass Castle was purchased by Frank James Usher — who carried out a series of renovation works on the then 100-year-old building and contacted Country Life to enquire a possible article.

The pictures accompanying this piece are from a piece published in the magazine in 1925 — and they show the castle towering above the Dunglass Burn, as if hewn from the rock beneath it. Though rooms were decorated in restrained Georgian style, the renovations had clearly been extensive, bringing electric light and bathrooms to the 19th Century structure. Sadly, it's future beyond this point was not particularly bright.

During the Second World War, the Castle was requisitioned for use as a boarding school for more 300 students who left it in a state of disrepair. The building, now roofless, was left to rot.

Usher's grandson inherited what was left in 1954 and rather than paying the monumental costs required to restore it to its former glory, had the whole thing blown up with gelignite (a powerful, gel-like explosive). Thankfully, the 15th century church escaped the quarrymen’s explosives.

The estate is still owned by the Usher family who, in 1961, had a new property built. Today, it is primarily used as a wedding venue.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. An additional 50,000 assets from the historic archive are scheduled to be added this year — with completion expected in Summer 2025. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

2026 marks the tercentenary of the death of Sir John Vanbrugh, the architectural genius behind national treasures such as North Yorkshire’s Castle Howard, Oxfordshire’s Blenheim Palace and Lincolnshire’s Grimsthorpe Castle. However, there is one Vanbrugh creation that won’t be receiving coach parties of inquisitive visitors during this year’s celebration of his life: Dorset’s Eastbury Park.

Country Life’s former Architectural Editor Christopher Hussey and principal photographer Alfred E. Henson recorded the property as it stood in 1927. While the vast kitchen wing and court still remained in the form of a standalone mansion, the rest of the building — the scale of which was only exceeded by Blenheim, Castle Howard and Seaton Delaval in Vanbrugh’s works — had been surrendered to the reclamation companies and explosives experts decades before, a mere 57 years after the first brick was laid.

Vanbrugh had been engaged by George Dodington, a Lord of the Admiralty under William III and Queen Anne, to design a palace to replace the farm he had purchased in 1708 or 1709 (accounts vary) on the edge of Cranbourne Chase. For years the plans went back and forth between Dodington and Vanbrugh until, in 1718, work finally began on the vast complex. The farm was to be replaced with a mammoth edifice that was to be 570ft in length (173.7 metres or a little less than two football pitches) and contain within it five courts in a singular, most impressive alignment. All was going well, with the office courts that were to flank the central block completed, when, in 1720, Dodington died. However, he didn’t pass without extensive and complicated plans for his legacy to be realised. He left a sum of £100,000 (more than £18 million in today’s money) in trust to be invested in land, the profits from which were to be used to continue the building of his and Vanbrugh’s monumental vision. Entrusted to see through his plan was his nephew, one George Bubb.

Bubb, who presumably under instruction of his uncle had officially changed his surname to Dodington in 1717, appears to have been a caricature of the excesses of the Georgian gentleman. Brought up by his late uncle, he mixed in high circles from a young age and advanced himself to the status of close friend and confidant of Frederick, the Prince of Wales. Bubb, like his mentor, was a political animal who for much of his life worked as a MP; he also served as Treasurer of the Navy, Lord of the Treasury and Treasurer to the Chamber of the Prince of Wales. Unlike his mentor, he was a political turncoat, swapping sides and backstabbing to his own perceived advantage on numerous occasions — much to the chagrin of his contemporaries. Lord Roseberry called him ‘the most avid of political harlots’. Alexander Pope was equally scathing: ‘He is too much a half-wit to love a true wit, and too much half-honest to esteem any entire merit’. Hogarth (admittedly, not known for flattering anyone) sketched Bubb as a bewigged, corpulent buffoon in a fancy brocade frock coat, straining to contain his vast, protruding belly. He was a prominent member of the infamous all eating, all drinking (we won’t talk about the rest of it) Hell Fire Club — so prominent that after his death, the founder, Sir Francis Dashwood, constructed (with Bubb’s funds) a vast, open air mausoleum to him on top of the hill in West Wycombe that hides the infamous caves below.

At first, it did not look like the junior Dodington had much interest in finishing Eastbury. He’d recently returned to England, following a two year stint as a Spanish envoy. In the ensuing years, he only ventured west of London in the summer — to develop Eastbury’s gardens and party with influential poets and artists. The project only restarted in 1724 and was eventually completed, under the supervision of Roger Morris in 1738 — at an estimated cost of £140,000 (about £28.45 million).

Contemporary accounts describe the interiors as excessive as Bubb’s waistline. Think crimson satins, gilded leathers and floral velvets covering the walls; ceilings painted in elaborate styles; gold and silver lace carpets. Marble tables were sourced from Italian palaces and vast statues adorned the entrance hall.

Somewhat inevitably, Bubb’s extravagant excesses soon started to catch up with him. In 1749, on the first page of his infamous diary, Bubb complained about being ‘...Grievously afflicted with the first fit of the gout’. His political career continued and he ventured into opposition journalism, but he decided to dispose of his inheritance — perhaps the long carriage ride from Dorset to London was becoming too much to bear — in 1760. A piece published on August 31 of that year in the Sherborne Journal advertised the sale of Portland Purbeck and ‘other valuable stone and marble, brick, slate, lead, iron, glass sashes, timber and floors’. A year later, Bubb died — with Eastbury still in his legal possession. As per the wishes of his late uncle, the hulking property was bequeathed to another relative, Earl Temple, who already had his own Vanbrugh in the majestic form of Stowe House. Unwilling to move to Dorset, and unable to afford the upkeep of two vast properties, he put the (by then) unfashionable southern property up for sale. When it failed to attract a buyer he offered an annuity of £200 a year to anyone willing to live in it. Nothing. And so the reclamation and demolition troops moved in — armed with Bubb-like quantities of gunpowder.

The kitchens survived total annihilation and were converted into a mansion of their own — and occupied for some time by Josiah Wedgwood and his family. By the time Country Life turned up in 1927, the Farquarson family had been in situ for more than a century. Hussey’s final words on his visit to the shadow of the property still ring true 99 years on: ‘To-day, though nothing but some uneven ground marks the site of the main block and opposite wing, the place has as much of that romance with which Vanbrugh aimed at enduing his classic masses. It proceeds as much from what has vanished as from what survives. To one standing in the grass where once spread his tawdry enfilades, even George Bubb looms up a Falstaff.’

Eastbury House is still privately owned.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. An additional 50,000 assets from the historic archive are scheduled to be added this year — with completion expected in Summer 2025. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

Christmas is fast approaching. Again. And so our minds — if they haven’t already — must turn to present buying and giving. If you’ve already fallen behind and have no idea what to buy anyone, fear not, because there’s all manner of inspiration hiding in Country Life’s extensive archive.

Read on and we’ll reveal some of the more fantastical, mind boggling and thought-provoking presents discussed inside the pages of Country Life over the last 129 years. We hope that if not inspired, you are at least entertained.

In the December 12, 1908, issue, we carried an advert for Hamley’s Christmas Plum Pudding Novelty. The toy, when inflated with gas, rose up from the candle-lit dining table, all the way to the ceiling. The advert called it ‘very exciting’; local fire stations likely disagreed.

Sanitas Electrical Company Ltd. took out an advert in the very same issue for their Velotrab — an equine precursor to the Peloton (our words, not theirs). The sort of spin machine came with a saddle-style seat and could ‘jump up and down’, simulating the movement of a trotting horse.

A week later, The Utilift! — ‘exceedingly practical and pleasant in appearance’ — appeared in the pages of the magazine. The false bookcase with a dumbwaiter hidden inside promised to eliminate the ‘drudgery of domestic work’.

An infinitely more practical product made its Country Life debut in 1927 — the vacuum cleaner. First introduced in bulky form in the mid-Victorian era, by the late 1920s the device had become so compact that it could be carried around the home with comparable ease. In an article titled ‘Christmas Present Notes’, the writer highlighted The Electrolux model: ‘There is nothing likely to prove more valuable or to recall more gratefully the memory of the donor by adding to the ease and comfort of home life.’ A word to the wise: a century later, you, the donor, might also be recalled to memory, but not gratefully so. And while we’re dishing out advice, can we please suggest that you do not use the vacuum on your dog — as the article’s accompanying photograph seemed to suggest that you do.

In 1939, presents understandably took on a practical and multipurpose tone. This offering, from Gieves, is thought-provoking… At first glance, it looks like a tailored waistcoat, at second you realise that it is in fact a life jacket. The copy stated that numerous men at sea had been saved by the self-inflating waistcoat in the previous war.

What’s not to like about a genius invention that wakes you up, lights up the room and then makes you a cup of tea? Well, as someone whose home was terrorised by one for much of their childhood, there’s plenty. The screeching sound of the alarm clock, the vat of boiling water balanced next to your head and a light so bright your eyelids are basically redundant. Somehow, despite all of this, the Goblin Teasmade — advertised in Country Life in 1955 — was a hugely-popular Christmas (and wedding) present up until the 1970s. And, if the internet is to be believed, it is currently having a retro resurgence. You have been warned.

Festive fare has always been a feature of Country Life, though there are some seasonal ‘delights’ from the magazine’s formative years that have fallen out of favour.

Terrapin soup, I’m looking at you.

Plenty of the recipes I discovered as I trawled through Country Life’s extensive archive made me wince in sympathy with the poor cook. They were all authored by ‘Charlotte Russe’ — presumably a nom-de-plume because this was the name of a popular pudding in the early 19th century. Charlotte's recipes were always accompanied by an illustration of a world-weary chef presenting a dish to an apparently gout-ridden gentleman, by renowned pre-Raphaelite artist Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale.

Without further ado, here are some of Charlotte’s ideas for the Christmas table. I suggest you read and do not try (unless you’re skilled in the art of de-prickling cardoons) — and be thankful that you are only cooking a turkey with all the trimmings this year.

Cardoons à la Poulette, December 2, 1899

Select six heads of white cardoons which are perfectly sound, and cut them into pieces from three to five inches in length and remove prickles.

Put the cardoons into a saucepan containing plenty of salted boiled water that has been slightly acidulated by the addition of a small quantity of white wine vinegar, and let them boil for a quarter of an hour, or until the skin can be removed, and place them in a basin of cold water.

When they are cool, scrape off the skin, tie the cardoons into bundles and put them into a stew pan with a slice of fat bacon, cover them with a vegetable broth made according to the following directions, and let them cook gently until they are done.

Put four ounces of the fat (it must be white) which has been taken from some meat stock into a stew pan, and when it has melted stir in an ounce of flour, then add three pints of water; let the latter boil up and put in six ounces of minced onions, a bouquet garni, half a lemon cut into thin slices, a teaspoonful of salt, and half the quantity of powdered sugar.

Let the broth simmer for half an hour, then strain it, and serve it with a poulette sauce made thus: Cook an ounce of butter and an ounce of flour together for a few minutes without letting them acquire any colour, then moisten them with a gill of chicken or veal stock and boiling cream; when the sauce is smooth and thick season it with pepper and salt, and a very little nutmeg, and add the yolks of two raw eggs that have been beaten up with a dessert-spoonful of lemon juice, and stir it quickly for a few second before removing from the pan from the stove.

Sweetbread Cream, December 6, 1902

Line a plain Charlotte mould with pale aspic jelly, and decorate it all over with diamond-shaped pieces of red, yellow and green chicken farce (forcemeat), placed point to point, with a tiny round slice of truffle between each.

Blanche and braise two large sweetbreads, and when they are cold pound them with an ounce of butter and pass them through a fine wire sieve.

Put half a pint of milk in a saucepan with a small shallot, a few pieces of celery, a blade of mace, a few thin strips of lemon-peel, and a slice of fat bacon. When the milk has boiled, draw the pan to the side of the stove and let it simmer for 20 minutes.

Melt an ounce of butter in a small saucepan and stir into it one ounce of flour, then strain the milk into the pan and stir it until it has boiled and thickened: season the sauce with salt, and mix it with the sieved sweetbread, and leave in a basin to cool.

Whip half a pint of cream, season it with celery salt and white pepper, and add by degrees half a pint of cool but liquid aspic jelly: then add the sweetbread mixture, and whisk all the ingredients together for a few minutes, and fill the prepared mould with the ‘cream’.

When set, turn the sweetbread out onto a socle (plinth) of rice ornamented with piped green butter, and garnish the dish with chervil.

A Christmas Pie, December 23, 1899

Take the meat from a pheasant, two partridges, and the back and thighs of a hare, and cut it up into neat pieces. Put a quarter of a pound of butter into a sauté pan with a minced shallot, and when the butter is hot add the meat, season it with black pepper, salt, and a dust of powdered mace, stir continuously to prevent burning, and at the end of twelve minutes remove from the pan, and put it aside until it is cold.

Pass one pound of lean fresh pork, half a pound of fat bacon, and the livers of the birds and that of the hare twice through the mincing machine; add salt, black pepper, cayenne, a little grated nutmeg and lemon peel, a tablespoonful of chopped parsley, and six truffles, minced.

Mix the farce thoroughly, and moisten it with a glass of Marsala and a beaten egg. Butter an ornament earthenware pie case, line it evenly with a coating of the farce, then put in a layer of hare, scatter over it some little pieces of tongue (or ham), some pate de foie gras cut into dice, and some button mushrooms: then add a layer of pheasant and cover with the forcemeat.

Over this, please some more pieces of hare, with tongue etc., as before, then a layer of partridge, and so on until the dish is closely packed. Butter a large piece of paper and place it over the pie, then put on the cover of the dish and let the contents cook in a moderate oven for three hours.

Have ready some meat jelly which has been boiled with the bones of the birds and the hare, melt it by a gentle heat, without making it hot, and add to it a glass of sherry and a small quantity of mushroom ketchup.

On taking the pie from the oven, remove the lid and the paper, and pour the liquid jelly into it gradually until the dish will contain no more; then put it in a cool place and leave until the following day.

Cover the pie with golden aspic jelly, and garnish it at the edge with clear red cranberry jelly cut into leaves.

Chartreuse of Apricots à la Cambridge, December 23, 1899

Dissolve a pint of Chivers (other brands are available) lemon-jelly in Chablis, and when it is cool, line a mould evenly with it. As soon as the jelly has set, decorate the mould with split apricots which have been preserved in syrup, and place a crystallised violet with a little leaf-shaped piece of Angelica here and there, setting the garnish with a little of the jelly.

Put a pint of cream into a stew pan with six ounces of caster sugar, and when it is hot, stir in two ounces of gelatine — previously soaked in a little cream — and when the latter has melted pour the cream into a basin and leave to cool.

Have ready eight ounces of pistachio nuts which have been blanched and pounded to a smooth paste with a small quantity of orange flower water; mix them with a pint of whipped cream, then stir the cool cream and colour it with a delicate green, add a small glass of sherry, and whisk the mixture until it shows signs of setting.

Then fill the lined mould with it, and put it in a cool larder until the pistachio cream is sufficiently firm to turn out. The cream is nicer if not too firm, therefore it is advisable not to place the chartreuse on ice.

The remainder of the jelly should be coloured red, and chopped and used as a garnish round the chartreuse.

Let’s say they’re not quite in-laws yet because these aren’t the Victorian times. But perhaps you’ve been dating for a few months and the moment has arrived. You’re meeting the people who could, maybe one day, be your in-laws. Hopefully you won’t do as badly as one of my friends, who was caught, ahem, at it in the garden with their daughter during his weekend there. That didn’t make much of an impression.

Meanwhile, I once spent an entire weekend, the first time I met the parents, having my leg rogered by their dog. ‘He only does this to people he really likes,’ the mother kept saying gaily, dragging the labrador off again as I dusted down my tidy trousers.

Ultimately, of course, the thing to be is charming and to join in. If it’s simply lunch or dinner, you can do this by asking plenty of questions. Not deeply personal questions. ‘Have you ever thought of having that mole removed, Mrs Smith?’ No, not that sort of thing. But quiz your other half about them beforehand so you have some questions up your sleeve, and then you could try something like ‘Apparently you’re into Morris dancing, Mr Smith. That sounds fascinating. Do tell me more.’

If you’re going to stay with them, joining in means being helpful — offering to unload the dishwasher, offering to help chop vegetables, offering to lay the table. And offer to strip your bed when you leave. Compliment the house, compliment the comfortable bedding, compliment the garden. You won’t always have to be such an ingratiating creep, but if you really like this person, then first impressions on his or her family matter.

Oh, and compliment the cooking. But mind how you go, because an ex-girlfriend of one of my brothers took it upon herself to compliment my father on a barbecued sausage one summer. ‘Mmm,’ she said, shooting a very deliberate look at my brother across the table, ‘this is the second-best thing I’ve had in my mouth all day.’ I probably wouldn’t go that far, but ‘mmm, delicious chicken,’ or ‘what a sensational crumble’ is about right.

And if they’ve picked up the tab for lunch or dinner, or you’ve been to stay with them, send a thank you card. I’ve had to prod various ex-boyfriends to send a note to my parents after certain events, which is excruciating and unsexy, like reminding a child they need to send thank you letters after Christmas, and quite possibly why I haven’t ended up with any of them. A proper thank you, in this situation, goes a long way. Particularly if you made a bawdy and inappropriate joke over lunch.

The Country Life archives are mostly dedicated to the architecture and gardens of the great houses of the United Kingdom and Ireland, it also holds some unusual, but delightful, collections from overseas.

One such, and somewhat surprising, set of negatives and prints are those commissioned in the early 20th Century from the world renowned architectural photographer Frederick H. Evans. Evans was a perfectionist. After years of practice, the diminutive, bespectacled, former bookseller, who counted George Bernard Shaw and Aubrey Beardsley among his friends, decided in 1899 to become a photographer.

Obsessed with obtaining a true, honest image that projected the integrity, size and majesty of his architectural subjects, his atmospheric images were always printed direct from his perfect negatives (any imperfect ones were immediately stamped on by their exacting creator) without any darkroom manipulation. And he always developed his prints using the costly, but ethereal, platinum process.

Edward Hudson, the founder and editor-in-chief of Country Life — himself a deeply fastidious man — was so impressed by Evans’s work that he granted him a roving commission for the magazine in early 1905 to photograph architecture, ‘when and how I like, so long as I give ‘em of my artistic best’. The following year, Evans convinced Hudson he should document the châteaux of France for the magazine.

In July 1906, armed with his sizeable, just post-Victorian camera equipment, mobile darkroom and his modern-day wildlife photographer ability to sit for hours or even days (so long as the owner was willing), to ensure the right angle and, most importantly, the right light, Evans set off to our European neighbours. He returned again in 1907 to continue his work. He travelled first by boat, and then, unbelievably, by bicycle, around France, photographing some of the country’s grandest buildings for Country Life.

Below are just a few examples of his work from this remarkable assignment.

Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey, Normandy

Château de Boursault, Marne

A view along the steep drive to the exterior of Château de Boursault in Marne. The château was built by Madame Clicquot Ponsardin (the Veuve Cliquot) between 1843 and 1850.

Royal Château of Blois, Loire-et-Cher

Gargoyles keep a watch over the town from the facade of the Francis I part of the château.

Château de Beaumesnil, Normandy

The drawbridge was firmly up when Evans turns up to photograph Beaumesnil.

Château Chambord, Val de Loire

The largest château in the Loire Valley. Here, an interior view of the mind-boggling, Escher-esque staircase.

Château de Pierrefonds, Oise

The Upper Hall with the Nine Valiant Ladies gracing the magnificent chimney-piece.

Château de Saint-Aignan, Val de Loire

Evans used long exposure to perfectly show off the ceiling — an effect that also created the ghostly wisps of light emanating from the window.

Château de Montrésor, Indre-et-Loire

Château Josselin, Brittany

This medieval castle’s dining room contains an equestrian statue of its 14th century, Breton soldier owner, Olivier V de Clisson.

Château de Châteaudun, Eure-et-Loir

An intricately carved staircase hidden inside the castle’s walls.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. An additional 50,000 assets from the historic archive are scheduled to be added this year — with completion expected in Summer 2025. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

It’s the time of year when the air sharpens and the nights draw in. Fires are lit, their light flickering over hearths and illuminating forgotten corners of familiar rooms. The scent of smoke drifts into the crisp evening, a comforting signal of warmth inside. As the flames crackle and shadows dance, our gaze turns upward — to the chimneys that crown our buildings, those quiet sentinels of the season. Here are some of our favourites from the Country Life Image Archive, from grand architectural statements to modest brick stacks.

Burghley House, Lincolnshire

Burghley’s roof was built as a sort of promenade, so that people without a fear of heights could walk underneath some of its 76 chimneys — all while taking in the spectacular views of the surrounding parkland.

Kings Weston House, Gloucestershire

Sir John Vanbrugh’s dramatic three-sided chimney arcade was typical of the architect’s desire to emphasise the skyline rather than dull it. It was first photographed in 1927, from the roof, and again from ground level in 2008.

Nether Levens Farmhouse, Cumbria

Four giant, funnel-like chimneys dominate Nether Levens Farmhouse. The building, a rare rural survivor of domestic architecture, was photographed for Country Life in the early 20th century.

Kinross House, Kinross-shire

The external symmetry of Kinross House was deemed revolutionary in 17th century Scotland — and the uniformity of the chimneys is still pleasing to the eye.

Stoneywell Cottage, Leicestershire

Stoneywelll Cottage is an excellent example of the Arts-and-Crafts Movement that seemingly grows out of the stoney outcrop underneath it. The vast chimney breast adds to the rural cottage charm of this Ernest Gimson masterpiece.

Hatfield House, Hertfordshire

Hatfield House’s roof is home to a regiment of chimney shafts. This highly-unusual view of some of the total 88 was taken for a 1927 article on the Jacobean mansion.

Pitchford Hall, Shropshire

Some of the chimneystacks at Pitchford Hall — a Grade I-listed Tudor home — are the original 16th century ones; others were added in the Victorian era by George Devey.

Goddards, Abinger Common, Surrey

Dramatic chimneystacks crown this Lutyens-designed home, built towards the tail end of the Victorian period.

Winton Castle, East Lothian, Scotland

A delightful array of exquisitely hand-carved chimneys grace the roof of East Lothian’s Winton Castle — each one roughly 13ft in height. They were photographed for a 1912 article, although how the photographer managed to carry his then-gigantic camera onto the roof remains a mystery.

Gainsborough Old Hall, Lincolnshire

Gainsborough Old Hall is a very rare survivor of a very old manor house, dating back to the 15th century. The imposing chimneystacks were added sometime after 1596. Garderobes — primitive medieval loos — were integrated into the structures.

Old Campden House, Gloucestershire

The east and west banqueting halls are all that remain of Campden House (it was set on fire by retreating Royalist troops in 1645). Fine, spiralling chimney columns stud each corner.

Upton Cresset Hall, Shropshire

The east front of this Grade I listed manor house features towering, ornate chimney stacks built out of traditional red brick.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. An additional 50,000 assets from the historic archive are scheduled to be added this year — with completion expected in Summer 2025. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

In the February 6, 1926 edition of Country Life, an architectural writer was mourning to loss of yet another country home: ‘Manchester has lost Agecroft, just as London is losing Waterloo Bridge, because of the apathy of the great mass of inhabitants, who, in plain words, do not deserve fine buildings’.

The striking traditional timber hall, built in the era of Henry VII, had been photographed for the magazine in 1902 by its original photographer, Charles Latham, himself an aged and somewhat gnarly Lancastrian by all accounts.

His beautiful photographs of the hall — shown here — capture an already-lost era of wood paneling, carved furniture and creaking beams, which, by the 20th century, stood incongruously in the shadow of the rapidly expanding industrial heartland of Manchester.

The accompanying text tries to cover over the inevitable fate of the beautiful black and white house, talking of ‘dead oaks, which have been killed, it is said, by smoke and fumes’, and how fortunate it is that a close by pond has been: ‘formed by the sinking of the ground, owing to coal mines below’. It all sounds rather Monty Python: ‘just a flesh wound’.

The family held on to their ancestral home as long as they could, but by 1925 the writing was firmly on the decaying walls. The house was sold, but for once at least, not completely destroyed. Dismantled piece by piece, Agecroft Hall was shipped to the USA for one Thomas C. Williams, who used the fabric to create his own, scaled down, steel framed version of the property, complete with 20th century conveniences such as garages and bathrooms.

Williams’s re-imagination of Agecroft still stands to this day in Richmond, Virginia, where it serves its new community as a museum and gardens.

Click here to read the full list of 'Britain’s long lost great houses that live on only inside the Country Life archive'.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. An additional 50,000 assets from the historic archive are scheduled to be added this year — with completion expected in Summer 2025. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

Williams’s re-imagination of Agecroft still stands to this day in Richmond, Virginia, where it serves its new community as a museum and gardens.

Click here to read the full list of 'Britain’s long lost great houses that live on only inside the Country Life archive'.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. An additional 50,000 assets from the historic archive are scheduled to be added this year — with completion expected in Summer 2025. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.