Woodchester Mansion and Our Visitors

After spending a lazy Saturday morning watching the rowing (we got to see the Ever Swindell twins in action - but missed our rowers in Lane 6 as the camera person focussed on Lanes 1-5), swimming and athletics we decided to have a second try at finding Woodchester Mansion. The web gave us directions and it looked after about 30 minutes that it was just around the corner... 2.5 hours later after a few wrong steers from locals we wandered down the reasonably long path to the house only to be told by the volunteers that the National Trust wouldn't let them put up signs as they were expensive and the house wasn't open enough. We were glad we didn't give up - but I have decided that if I read about more interesting things in the newspaper I just might forget what I read quickly. (We did note that the Olympic games commentary the other night had an article on the Chinese number system and 8 means good luck. Our tickets into the mansion was 0888 and 0889 so we figured we were very, very, very, very, very lucky to have found the house). The mansion is situated in a park with 5 dams which we could have walked around if we had not taken so long to find the place. It was built in the 19th century, around the 1860's, and I shouldn't say built as it was never finished. The Leigh family were well off but were generous with their money (they built a few catholic churches around the area, supported poor and poorly people including a monk) and had four children (1 who died young) who studied, enjoyed life and never worked - there were six grandchildren who presumably did similar things but none of them had children so the family tree ended. So, while the house was being built (it had been designed by William Bracknell a young local architect who also designed Tortworth Court where I had my work meeting the other day and Birmingham cathedral) the money ran out, and the house was left as though the stone masons and builders just put their tools down one day and walked away. From the outside the house just looks old, broken glass or no glass in windows, broken tiles and a door with no porch (the porch was removed to a church that was being built as there was not enough money to complete the church). Outside are gargoyles in the shapes of dogs and other animals (they are connected to the gutters and when it rains the water flows through the gargoyles and out of their mouths making a gargling sound - hence their name. It helps to keep the water away from the foundations - in what could be quite a cold and wet valley). The statues at the top which are purely there for decoration are called grotesques. So, I had to look up the definition as some of the statues were of animals and quite nice 'When used in conversation, grotesque commonly means strange, fantastic, ugly or bizarre, and thus is often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as halloween masks or gargoyles on churches. More specifically, the grotesque forms on gothic buildings when not used as drain-spouts, should be called grotesques or chimeras rather than gargoyles'. The abandoned house, complete with unfinished chapel has now become a Grade 1 listed building and is being restored to the point where the builders walked out. From the outside, glass was broken or had never been in place, roof tiles where broken (slate is apparently made by watering limestone, letting ice form in winter and then in summer it is easier to break into thin tiles). We wandered through the lounge and dining room where the ceilings had not been completed and fireplaces on the two upper floors were suspended from the walls, where the library architecture finished mid-air because the shelves had not been put in. A builders ladder stood with only a few rungs, wooden beams were still in place which would have been removed once the concrete and stone work had dried, victorian tools were scattered everywhere, doors led to nowhere. We wandered into the bathroom complete with stone bath, faucets (shaped like gargoyles) and a shower room where cold water would have spurted from the ceiling - one of the few nearly completed rooms. The small kitchen was not complete and the spiral staircase still had wooden banisters with rope around them to stop people falling down and pieces of wood were placed on stone work to prevent them being damaged during construction. Upstairs were uncompleted bedrooms (some with dirt floors, some with no floor at all as the plan was for them to be above the lounge and the dining room) and some with no ceiling, others with incomplete ceilings and one completed where one of the sons used to live (apparently his fiance refused to marry him when she found out he was living in one room and the bathroom). Besides a caretaker that lives in the house (a bit eerie on a stormy night me thinks), greater horse shoe bats and lesser horse shoe bats (I think size determines if you are greater or lesser but not really sure) are residents and with the benefit of remote cameras we could see Mum and babies happily living together above the top floor. The organic farm down the road means that there are plenty of insects for the bats and they enjoy their quiet and secluded accommodation with no intention of leaving. I think it will be a rare occurence to find another house like it and no wonder people consider there might be ghosts (the cellars did feel quite eerie - but perhaps that is because they were cold and wooden cases that long ago held something still sat on the muddy floor). On the way home we followed a truck piled with hay bales and everytime he went passed a low hanging tree, or bush too close to the road it rained hay on us - better than rain I guess.

Saturday night came and at 9.00 we were down at the bus stop to pick up Georg, Jutta, Sarah and Julia. We had been looking forward to these few days for a long time where our house would be home to some friends. Harry had borrowed the work van (well it is a 15 seater bus and we felt quite special riding around on Sunday with our picnic on 3 seats, us on 6 and and the others empty - Harry enjoyed being bus driver for the day). In the morning we went to Berkeley Castle, the old church next door (oldest gravestone was 1665), and the butterfly house before driving to the Slimbridge Wildlife Centre. I won't write much about the places because we had been to them before - but there were a few highlights like managing our lunch at a picnic table rather than in the car, we saw lots of little chicks of varieties of bird species and we learnt a few things...A warm welcome comes from the fact that enemies storming the castle had hot oil poured on them from holes in stairwells and castle walls and o.k. comes from the fact that armed forces would report back 'zero kill' as good news that their teams were returning in tact. Georg, Jutta, Julia and Sarah have spent a couple of days now getting lost in Bristol. We told them all our horror stories and how locals say it is 'dead easy' to find somewhere and they don't feel so bad taking hours to find the house when it should have taken 20 minutes. They have been to Stonehenge, an abbey we haven't been too which was featured in the Harry Potter movies, Bath and we took them to the Suspension Bridge for a walk in the rain and return to London on Thursday morning. It has been lovely having company and we are already looking forward to the next time.