A Georgian House and An Ancient Chapel
Croome Court
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| Worcestershire |
Setting out for Cheltenham at 9.30 on a Sunday morning, we missed any serious hold-up in the everlasting road works at the top of the M5 and left the motorway at J7 south of Worcester. Diving into the countryside we reached Croome Court around 11, the time the house opens.
A sunny summer weekend brings out the crowds and even at opening time we had to search for a parking space.
The original Jacobean Croome Court, was built around 1640 for the 1st Baron Coventry. The foundations and chimney stack of that building remain within the current house, designed by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown and Sanderson Miller and built 1751/2 for George, the 6th Earl Coventry (the 5th Baron had been upgraded to 1st Earl in 1697). Better known for his landscapes, this was Capability Brown’s first attempt at architecture and I feel the building is not as good as its setting (also Brown’s work).
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| Croome Court, Worcestershire |
Capability Brown’s landscapes have flickered in and out of fashion over the years. On one level I understand their attraction, but it feels odd, or maybe presumptuous to design an artificial landscape intended to be more ‘natural’ than the one provided by nature. Or maybe not, after several millennia of inhabitation, tree felling, grazing and crop growing there is little truly ‘natural’ about the English landscape.
The Church of St Mary Magdalene, Croome
Croome’s 13th century church was deemed too close to the house, so Brown was instructed to demolish it, build a new one on the nearby low hill and provide ‘an eyecatcher’. The demolition might have been vandalism and the new church looks nothing special (in my amateur opinion). Completed in 1763, it was dedicated to St Mary Magdalene.
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| St Mary Magdalene, Croome |
Being one of the super-rich, George the 6th Earl employed Robert Adam to design the interior, and Adam used the finest craftsmen available.
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| Inside St Mary Magdalene, Croome |
For all their efforts, the eye is caught by a series of marble monuments to the assorted Earls and Barons Coventry, presumably transferred from the original church. The 1st Earl’s is missing because the 2nd Earl objected to his elderly father’s marriage to a servant girl (it now graces St Mary’s, Elmley Castle, 5km away). Most are run-of-the-mill but the 1st Baron’s monument stands out. It is reputedly by Nicholas Stone, master mason to James I and Charles I and a prolific carver of funerary monuments. He is highly regarded, but surely this plumbs depths best left unplumbed.
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| Memorial to the 1st Baron Coventry - and what is he about to do with that hand? |
The Rotunda, Croome Court
We walked along the ridge, past the walled garden to the Rotunda, Capability Brown’s ‘relaxing garden room’. It was in poor condition when the Croome Trust acquired the estate and has been stabilized rather than restored, but I am unconvinced we 21st century softees would ever have thought the interior comfortable.
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| Rotunda and cedars, Croome Court |
The 360ยบ visibility permits a view of the shrubbery and impressive cedars, while to the west there is a fine vista of the Malvern Hills, at least there is on a clear day, but today was far too hazy.
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| The hazy Malvern Hills from the Rotunda, Croome Court |
Croome Court, The Exterior
From here we descended to the south entrance. Fashions come and go, and many come round again, but I hope the fashion for these monstrosities never returns. They look like sphinxes designed by somebody who has never seen a sphinx.
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| The South Entrance, Croome Court |
And maybe that is true, but....
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| Detail from the library mural, Stowe House |
...we visited Stowe in Buckinghamshire in 2014. The mural in the library has something similar, though even more alarming as the figures there also have wings and a bouquet of flowers sprouting from their heads. Why?
Croome Court remained in the hands of the Coventry Family until the middle of the 20th century. The 10th Earl was killed in 1940 in the retreat to Dunkirk leaving his 6 year-old son to inherit the title. The estate provided insufficient income to support the house, so both were sold in 1948.
For thirty years Croome was St Nicholas' Roman Catholic boarding school and from 1979-84 the UK Centre of the Hari Krishna movement. Subsequently, a succession of failed developments saw Croome not becoming a hotel, country club or golf course. By 2007 the house was in a poor state. It was bought by the Croome Heritage Trust and leased to the National Trust on a 999-year lease (which will probably see me out, not to mention the National Trust and possibly our entire ‘civilisation’.)
Croome Court, The Interior
After the introductory film in the Billiards Room, we walked through to the Long Gallery. The room is largely empty, but the fireplace is work of Robert Wilton, a founder member of the Royal Academy and responsible for the sculptures on the rarely used Gold State Coach.
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| Joseph Wilton Fireplace, Long Gallery, Croome Court |
Capability Brown aimed to create a vista through every window. Most neo-Palladian houses were perched on high ground, but Croome, built on older foundations, is in a hollow making his job more difficult.
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| Vista through the Long Gallery Window, Croome Court |
Anthony Bridge Paintings and Grayson Perry Tapestries
With no furniture or ‘collection’ to display, Croome is largely an exhibition space. For me the highlight was the Drawing Room exhibition of local landscapes by 18th century artist Richard Wilson and Croome’s artist in resident Antony Bridge. Wilson’s landscapes were often too small for my taste, and too dingy (an effect of time rather than a criticism) while I thought Bridge’s vivid, multiple views of the Malvern Ridge caught the essence of the place. If I had a wall big enough….
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| Antony Bridge landscapes of the Malverns, Croome Court |
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| Walking the Malvern Ridge |
The Malvern ridge featured on Day 6 of the epic South West Odyssey back in 2009. We saw one aspect of it, Antony Bridge offers nine more to contemplate.
The Grayson Perry tapestries in the Tapestry Room and Library illustrated his not entirely original view of modern Britain’s dystopian condition.
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| Grayson Perry Tapestry, Croome Court |
Maria Gunning, Countess of Coventry and Kitty Fisher, Courtesan
Sadly, the Maria Gunning exhibition had ended. In 2016 we visited Hemingford Grey in Cambridgeshire where Maria, later Duchess of Coventry, and her younger sister Elizabeth were born. Their aristocratic but impoverished parents launched the teenage sisters into society to sink or swim on their looks and bedability. Both swam; Elizabeth becoming Duchess of Hamilton and a second marriage made her Duchess of Argyll, while in 1752 Maria married the 6th Earl of Coventry and became mistress of Croome Court. She was 19, he was 30.
Unfortunately, all went wrong for Maria. In the late 1750s, society courtesan Kitty Fisher had a ‘relationship’ with Lord Coventry (she was 17 he was nearly 40) and there was a bitter rivalry between Kitty and Maria*. Maria Gunning died in 1760, poisoned by the lead and arsenic in her make-up; Kitty Fisher died at the same age (26 or 27) 7 years later, possibly from the same cause.
Upstairs an installation tells the not always happy stories of the vulnerable boys who attended St Nicholas’ School and (warning: non-sequitor approaching) next door in the Alcove Bedroom, is a 1766 Robert Adam scroll sofa - I struggle to become excited by sofas.
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| Robert Adam scroll sofa, Croome Court |
RAF Defford, Croome Court
Back at the car park an interesting little museum looks at another aspect of Croome Court’s 20th century history. From 1941 until 1957 part of the estate became RAF Defford.
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| RAF Defford museum, Croome Court |
Land based radar had become widely used after the development of the resonant-cavity magnetron in Birmingham University by John Randall and Harry Boot in 1940. The primary purpose of RAF Defford was to further develop the technology and produce radar that could be carried on a plane. Automatic approach and landing was also researched at Defford and in January 1945 it was the scene of the world’s first "hands off" automatic blind landing.
After the war Defford continued to research into radar until 1957 when its runaways were deemed insufficient for the new generation of military aircraft. They are still there, in an unvisited part of the grounds, cracked, unusable and rotting quietly away.
Deerhurst
Odda’s Chapel
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| Gloucestershire |
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| Borough of Tewkesbury |
Leaving Croome Court we continued south into Gloucestershire, and beyond Tewkesbury turned west along country lanes to the village of Deerhurst.
Here, in 1675, local landowner Sir John Powell, discovered an 11th century stone slab with a Latin inscription...
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| Replica of the slab found by Sir John Powell in 1675, in Odda's Chapel, Deerhurst The original is in the Ashmolean Museum |
...which translates as:
Earl Odda ordered this royal chapel to be built and dedicated in honour of the Holy Trinity for the good of the soul of his brother Aelfric who died in this place. Bishop Ealdred dedicated it on April 12th of the 14th year of the reign of Edward, King of the English.
Edward the Confessor reigned 1042-66, dating the inscription to 1056.
St Mary’s Church in Deerhurst has its origins in the 8th century, so no one looked deeper into the meaning of the slab until 1865 when George Butterworth, vicar of St Mary’s, deduced from the chronicles of Tewkesbury Abbey that the stone referred to a separate chantry chapel (a chapel for saying masses for the dead).
During renovations at Abbot’s Court farmhouse in 1885 a Saxon window was found behind the plaster and George Butterworth realised his chantry chapel had been discovered.
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| Abbot's Court and Odda's Chapel, Deerhurst |
Chantry chapels had been abolished by Henry VIII, and around 1600 Odda’s Chapel had been incorporated into the timber framed farmhouse.
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| A nave and chancel linked by a Romanesque arch, Odda's Chapel, Deerhurst |
The buildings have now been methodically disentangled,....
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| The remains of a bedroom (and is that a fireplace?) above the chancel, Odda's Chapel, Deerhurst |
...and Odda’s chapel is once again a nave and chancel linked by a Romanesque arch. In essence it is a simple stone box, but sitting in the peaceful atmosphere I imagined myself as a small link in a thousand year chain of history.
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| Odda's Chapel and Abbot's Court, Deerhurst |
St Mary’s Priory Church, Deerhurst
On our short walk to St Mary’s we passed through a substantial floodgate; the Severn, only 200m across the water meadows, being notoriously flood prone. Odda’s Chapel, outside the floodgate, is protected by being on higher ground.
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| Floodgate, Deerhurst |
Remarkably Odda’s Chapel is not the oldest building in Deerhurst, St Mary’s Priory Church was built in the 8th century, but had makeovers in the 10th, 14th centuries, and 19th centuries; each contributing to today’s structure. Originally a priory church, St Mary’s became the parish church after the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
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| St Mary's Deerhurt, with the former Priory Farm behind |
The ancient nave has a high ceiling like the Saxon churches of Escomb and Jarrow in County Durham.
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| Nave, St Mary's Deerhurst |
There is an impressive Saxon font,...
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| Saxon font, St Mary's, Deerhurst |
…while the arcade has later Perpendicular Gothic arches.
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| Perpendicular Gothic arcade, St Mary's Deerhurst |
St Mary’s has been in continual use and continually updated, so despite its antiquity it lacks the ancient calm of Odda’s Chapel where rough-hewn simplicity speaks quietly but directly from the far-off age of the Saxons.
We left Deerhurst and set off for Cheltenham, which was, you might remember, or destination for the day, but as this post has gone on for long enough, that comes in the next one.
*250 years later Kitty Fisher has won a small (im)moral victory. The cafรฉ at Croome is named after the mistress of the 6th Earl of Coventry, not the mistress of Croome.
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