Cornflower

Reflections

    On at Edinburgh's City Art Centre just now is an excellent exhibition of the work of John Henry Lorimer (who deserves to be much better known). Brother of the architect Robert Lorimer, his family restored the derelict Kellie Castle in Fife, a location which featured in many of his paintings including The Flight of the Swallows shown here.

    If you can't see the show in person, there's a virtual tour on ArtUK.

Home sweet home

    You may have seen Kate Mears' book A Year Around Our House featured on the Persephone Post a few months ago*. If not, do visit Kate's website to see some of the beautiful watercolours she used for her portrait/history of her Somerset house - they are so full of warmth and light and gentle colour and speak to the comfortable atmosphere of what is clearly a much-loved, welcoming family home and a charming garden.

*March 11th. - 15th.

The steps to the right ...

    "... led up to a small gate, painted green, that led into the wood, those to the left to another small gate, painted blue, leading into the garden of the inn. This garden, merging gradually into the orchard upon the landward side, had old-fashioned box-bordered flower-beds that were a tangled mass of scented red wallflowers growing round rose-bushes, gooseberry bushes, rosemary bushes and currant bushes, all incongruously but gloriously mixed together upon either side of the stone-paved path that led to the inn door. The inn itself was a fair-sized old house, with bulging, white-washed, buttressed walls and a steep, uneven roof of amber tiles patched with golden lichen. Windows looked out of the white walls and the wavy roof at the most unexpected levels. There did not seem a straight line anywhere, and yet the old place gave no impression of decay. On the contrary, it looked immensely strong - as strong as a fortress - glowing and safe, friendly and warm, and most deeply alive. The front door was of very old oak, and looked as though it had once been a ship's door. Over it a painted sign was fastened to the wall of the house. It was dim and weather-worn, and from where they sat in the car they could not see anything of it except a soft blur of blue and green. Yet they none of them seemed able to move. The beauty of this place had laid a spell upon them. It seemed too good to be true. They were afraid that if they moved it would all vanish."

Elizabeth Goudge, The Herb of Grace

A summer's day at Kelmscott

    James Lees-Milne is on the books blog today so let's have him here as well, recalling a visit to Kelmscott Manor in July 1942. I was there in July 2018 - in the extreme heat - and posted only this but last year's pictures will do well enough for today (see also this).

    "After tea, we bicycled over the fields and across the river to Kelmscott. The old, grey stone gables are first seen through the trees. The house is surrounded by a dovecote and farm buildings which are still used by a farmer. The romantic group must look exactly as it did when William Morris found it lying in the low water meadows, quiet and dreaming. It is like an etching by F.L. Griggs. 

The garden is divine, crammed with flowers wild and tangled, an enchanted orchard garden for there are fruit trees and a mulberry planted by Morris. All the flowers are as Pre-Raphaelite as the house, being rosemary, orange-smelling lilies, lemon-scented verbena. [...]

I leant out of the casement window, unlike the Lady of Shalott, and gazed across the flat, meadowy landscape and the winding river which looked so comfortable and serene. I do not remember experiencing such sweet peace and happiness as during these two hours."

James Lees-Milne, Diaries, 1942-1954

William Morris was the subject of an edition of Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time last summer.

High walls and large windows

    Lutyens designed Greywalls - or High Walls as it was then called - for politician Alfred Lyttelton and his wife DD in 1901. As Jane Ridley (Lutyens's great-granddaughter) tells us in Edwin Lutyens: His Life, His Wife, His Work, "DD Lyttelton wanted a holiday house where her husband could both entertain and exercise his passion for golf; a house suited to golfers in wet tweeds and nailed boots at tea-time who transformed into dinner-party guests in white ties at 8.30. [...]

    She wanted a house with large windows; she also wanted something solid that looked as if it could withstand a siege. To which Ned replied, with sketches illustrating the point, 'Mrs. Lyttelton can't have large windows and a fortress too.'

    Mrs. Lyttelton did get large windows and a fortress too. Ned's solution was to surround the house with high, curved grey screen walls recalling the seventeenth-century fortifications by Vauban or perhaps the baroque fortifications at Berwick-on-Tweed. He made a formal entrance off the road which created an expectation of a grand axial approach, then deflected visitors sharp left up a diagonal drive, and gave the house an extraordinary curving front sliced between screen walls. Visitors couldn't enter the garden without going through the house. The garden, divided into courts with grey stone walls capped with Dutch grey pantiles, was really a series of rooms, and the climax of the design was not the house but the astonishing view over the dunes to the North Sea. Ned succeeded brilliantly in funnelling people through the house, but DD Lyttelton found the constant stream of visitors overwhelming and the lack of privacy unbearable. Exhausted by her six weeks' holiday she sold the house in 1906."

Gadding about

    I've been hither and yon lately, as close to home as East Lothian for a couple of days at Greywalls, then a flying visit to Devon to see family, train to London - and full marks to GWR whose staff on the Exeter to Paddington Friday evening service were the nicest people you could hope to meet (the food was very good, too), an overnight stay at the eccentrically decorated but very fun Zetter Townhouse Marylebone, then a day at Lord's for the India Test with excellent companions and the excitement of Woakes's century. 

    While I catch my breath, here are a few pictures of Greywalls to be going on with.

Life and art

    Dunrobin Castle

    The General's castle.

Cair Paravel

    "The castle of Cair Paravel on its little hill towered up above them; before them were the sands, with rocks, and little pools of salt water, and seaweed, and the smell of the sea and long miles of bluish-green waves, breaking for ever and ever on the beach. And oh, the cry of the seagulls! Have you ever heard it? Can you remember?"

    C.S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.

    The above came to mind while visiting Dunrobin Castle in Sutherland today; it's not as magical as Lewis's creation, but is nonetheless a striking building in a romantic setting.

                                    ~~~~~

    For more on Lewis, this post may be of interest.

Stepping out in style

    More Robert Lorimer: the garden staircase at Hill of Tarvit.

A grave matter

    Reading Roger Lancelyn Green's Tellers of Tales* a few months ago piqued a latent interest in Andrew Lang, and discovering that he was buried in the grounds of St. Andrews Cathedral set me on a hunt for his grave.

    I'd drawn a blank in previous wanderings round the cathedral precincts, but this afternoon I asked the gentleman in charge of the visitor centre if he could help. He had no knowledge of the grave, but with reference to a registry pertaining to the main cemetery we concluded that what I sought was in the Eastern cemetery, though beyond that there was no clue to its whereabouts.

    Suffice to say I searched systematically and eventually came upon it. While this may be of scant interest to Cornflower readers, I thought I'd publish my findings here by way of public service posting, so for anyone who shares my fascination for such things or who has, like me, fruitlessly scoured the internet for pictures and information, I can tell you that the grave is on the right hand side of the path which runs down by the wall on the sea side, and it's the fifth plot from the bottom of the hill.

    Click on the pictures to enlarge.

 

*There are short extracts here and here.

Church going

    St. Michael, Framlingham

    St. Michael, Framlingham

    St. Andrew and St. Eustachius, Hoo

    St. Edmund, Southwold

    Holy Trinity, Blythburgh

    Holy Trinity, Blythburgh

    St. Andrew, Bramfield

    Betjeman's Best British Churches was too big to take to Suffolk with us, but happily it comes in app form, too, and that did the job, telling us what to look out for as we toured as many wonderful churches as we could.

    Here are a few glimpses for you, but click on the names beneath the pictures to see the churches' extensive entries on the excellent Suffolk Churches website.

    To finish, Philip Larkin reading his poem Church Going.

Looking up in Suffolk

    We'd never been to East Anglia until last week when we greatly enjoyed a few days in Suffolk. Above is a taste of famous Aldeburgh and Southwold: Maggi Hambling's controversial tribute to Benjamin Britten, sundial on Aldeburgh's Moot Hall, and Southwold's lighthouse-in-the-middle-of-the-street.

    We stayed in a 15th. century house, had an excellent, very rainy walk along the heath at Dunwich, visited as many churches as we could (pictures to come), and went to Sutton Hoo - of which more here, but we only scratched the surface and very much hope to go back and explore further before long.

Looking up ...

... in Oxford.

    While viewing Magdalen's newest building at the weekend, I also snapped one of its quaint, older facilities:

Out of town

    In glorious Devon yesterday.

Looking up ... and into a wardrobe

    The Palace of Holyroodhouse - the Queen's Edinburgh residence - and the adjacent ruined Holyrood Abbey.

    Hard to believe this is in the middle of the city, but it lies quietly at the bottom of the Royal Mile while the Castle* dominates the city from the top.

    For the next few months the tour of the palace includes the exhibition Fashioning A Reign: 90 Years of Style from the Queen's Wardrobe. I have no pictures of that, unfortunately, as interior photography is not permitted, but it was great to see up close a selection of the Queen's clothes including day dresses, magnificent evening gowns (the Hardy Amies dark red velvet is particularly elegant), and the mantle, hat, and insignia of the Order of the Thistle (click here and scroll down).

    The exhibition is spread over three locations, so visitors to Buckingham Palace can see a different range of outfits, including the Queen's wedding and coronation dresses, while Windsor Castle gets another selection.

 

*Seeing today's pictures and those taken at the Castle last June, you might think that the sun always shines in Edinburgh in the summer ...