Just over a week ago, that's last Friday, we left our cottage at Coombe Florey and headed back to Southampton via three sites we had planned to visit. We hadn't been overly busy while there in Somerset. My grandmother used to travel to the UK in the 50s and 60s and always said that Somerset was her favourite county. I'd be hard pressed to choose between Somerset, Dorset or Devon. I mean, where does one end and the other begin? The countryside and cottages, villages and towns bleed from one to the other. They will all call us back time and again.

As usual, I do my research after I leave a village. We'd stayed in Coombe Florey for four nights (three days). Had we explored it? NO WE HADN'T. Guess what,

"In his Guardian article (2016), Ian Jack mentions Combe Florey and Nikolaus Pevsner on the occasion of completion of the work "Buildings of England" he began in the 1950s. This was Evelyn Waugh's home from 1956 until his death in 1966, and his wife and later his son Auberon lived there afterwards. Jack's article discusses Pevsner's entry for the house:

Not everywhere welcomed his curiosity; [Pevsner] sometimes got on poorly with the owners of country houses. "Nice staircase of c1753," was his only comment on the interior of Combe Florey, Auberon Waugh's house in Somerset. "One can't very well take offence at that," Waugh countered later, "but I feel my staircase has been violated whenever I reflect that his bleary socialist eyes have appraised it."

Combe Florey is covered by the guide entitled South and West Somerset, no 14 in the Penguin series and written by Pevsner. The entry starts with a long and detailed paragraph about the church and then continues with the "manor house." After a description of the Medieval gatehouse, which predates the manor house and still belongs to Alexander Waugh, Evelyn's grandson, the entry continues:

The present house is up the hillside. It was built c. 1675 and received a new front in 1730. Five bays and two stories, with pedimented doorway and ground floor windows with Gibbs surrounds. (Nice staircase c. 1735.)"

We do have an excuse for not exploring Combe Florey more. It is just one lane strung out from the main road up into the hills and fairly heavily timbered. Barely enough room for two cars to pass and no path to walk. We will return in the future, not only because there is still so much to see but also to visit both Evelyn and Auberon in the church yard. I reread much of Evelyn's work only in the last ten years.

What's the best route to take when driving to Southampton in the distant southeast? Well, begin going southwest. What's southwest? Knightshayes. It's a Gothic Revival manor house. What a disaster. I don't know that Sheila is entirely to blame, however as I've said before, she doesn't show much initiative. If we are going in the wrong direction, she takes us the long way round, and on this occasion, didn't offer any advice other than saying "you have reached your destination". No ,we hadn't.

The National Trust doesn't allow for the fact that people might approach from several directions. On this occasion Sheila took us around the base of the hill on which Nightshayes is hidden behind a forest. She took us to an entrance road marked "Staff entry only". There was a NOT very helpful sign advising "go back to the T intersection and the entrance is on the left". We went back to where we had seen a path leading up through the forest to the house. Parking was against a high hedge which scared our car into verbally telling me "Switch off the engine, battery connection failure". She said it more than once, so I did. Ches was alarmed, however I said we'd deal with it later. Off we set, up around a looping rough track. As it turns out, the people who advised us, could have mentioned that there was a more direct track. Steeper but less rough. It took us over 25 minutes and pretty much spelled the end of Ches's hip.

What did we find at the end of our climb? A BLOODY CAR PARK. Ches was never going to make it back down, so I asked for directions to walk back down. The fastest route back down. It was steep enough, that fast walking became a slow jog, and I was back at the car in 10 minutes. Instead of driving anticlockwise around the hill, drive clockwise and there's the grand entrance, if we'd come in from the west.

Car parked, and Ches having phoned to say she was waiting in the Tea rooms, we reunited and set about turning an ugly start around. It did mean that we couldn't visit the walled kitchen garden and the staff buildings on that side of the estate. Just too much walking. We'd also wasted so much time and given that we had another village to visit and I'd booked us in for a 2:20 tour at Thomas Hardy's Cottage, there wasn't enough time to do anything more than go see the house itself.

Knightshays is special to me because it's the second example of a remarkable decor hidden away for decades and then revealed accidentally. We always visit La Fermette Marbeuf restaurant in the Champs-Élysées quarter in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, France. Its Belle Époque Art Nouveau "1900 room" was hidden behind panelling for decades and forgotten. Now it is a "Historical Monument".

William Burgess and his wife employed an architect to design and build their house. They felt it was a little OTT. They employed a second architect to tone it down. I'll post a much more interesting account of the building at the end of this blog. Here I'll just say that the family were most disappointed in the house and had all the ceilings and walls plastered over. It survived like that until left to the National Trust, who had no idea what was hidden away. When restoring, a builder fell through a floor onto a ceiling, and they discovered the gothic revival décor. So, it was many years of stripping off the plaster and restoration to return it to its grandeur. I loved it, Ches didn't mind it, but couldn't live in it. I'd try.

This is what we saw:

Knightshayes is a 19th-century house designed by architect William Burges and designed for former Tiverton MP, Sir John Heathcoat-Amory. There's plenty of detail to enjoy inside the house, from grotesques and gargoyles to the medieval Great Hall with its minstrel's gallery. Look for the stone carvings of the seven deadly sins as well as a portrait of Rembrandt that may be by the Dutch master himself.

Knightshayes, with its elevated and robust Gothic façade, massive gargoyles, stylised leaves and an angel in the centre gable, shows Burges's enthusiasm for 13th-century French architecture.

Eccentric designs. The interior is full of his neo-Gothic and often eccentric designs, including a vaulted hall, gilded ceilings, castellated chimneypieces and extravagantly carved corbels.

The house gives a flavour of a grand Victorian home, featuring impressive rooms for entertaining, relaxing, and indulging in pastimes such as billiards.

Knightshayes's Great Hall. Explore the medieval hall, complete with minstrels' gallery. Look up at the elaborate ceiling patterns and admire the chivalrous banners and shields. See the stone carvings, portraying aspects of medieval life, including the king, farmers and guards.

The Library. From the intricately decorated ceiling to shelves full of books, there's plenty to see in the library. Sitting on bookshelves and hiding in the alcoves are some unusual Martinware ceramics, including some peculiar birds.

The Drawing Room. Admire the elaborate ceiling, now visible in all its colourful glory after being covered for nearly a century. This room features furniture by prominent Victorian designers, including an ornate cabinet housing a rare collection of local ceramics.

The Dining Room Laid out as though for a family meal, the table and sideboard show items from our collection. Up above, the ceiling is inscribed with poetry by Robert Burns, a Scottish poet and lyricist.

Family treasures in the Morning Room. Richly decorated in red velvet and full of collection items, in the alcoves there are examples of Italian renaissance earthenware, which have featured in many international exhibitions over the years. The room is also home to the family's beloved art collection.

I walked back to the car park, retrieved the car, drove back to the house itself to collect Ches, and we set off across country for Evershot.

There are several theories on the origins of the name Evershot. One is that it derives from 'Eafor's Holt', 'eafor' meaning wild boar and 'holt' meaning wood. A similar theory places the origin at 'eafor sceat,' meaning 'wild boar thicket.'

It is a small, neat village, of only 200 inhabitants and has little changed since Thomas Hardy's time. Despite its size, Evershot is a well known village, famous for its inclusion in much of Thomas Hardy's literature, the most recognised being 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles' where the Acorn Inn is said to have been the inspiration for the Sow and Acorn and Tess Cottage (as it is now known) was where Tess stopped for refreshments on her way to Emminster.

And that was the problem. We had a 2:20 booking for a guided tour of Thomas Hardy's cottage and we were running out of time.

It is hard to trace the history of the village before the Norman conquest, but it is believed Evershot began as a boar pen approximately 1,100 years ago. Due to its close proximity to the River Frome, a settlement was built nearby.

The oldest remains to be found in Evershot are three standing stones named the Three Dumb Sisters, now a bench. Local legend says that these are three sisters turned to stone for dancing on the Sabbath. It is believed that they originate from a plot of land close to the village, but it is not known when they were built or moved. They are possibly Bronze Age in origin.

In 1628 Christopher Stickland founded Stickland's School "...for reading, writing and grammar... for the instruction and breeding of men children ... a schoolmaster there for ever to train up, instruct and teach the same child in good learning, true religion and the fear of God."

In the 18th and 19th centuries economic activities in the village included tanning, turnery and coopery. Local timber supplies provided raw materials for these industries, such as oak bark for tanning. Products such as tanned hides, bowls, ladles and cheese vats were sent for sale as far away as Bristol, and subsidiary trades evolved to support the village's population, which reached 600 in 1851.

In 1857 the Wilts, Sommerset and Weymouth Railway (later the Great Western Railway) opened a line through the parish with a station for the village at Holywell, though difficulties were encountered in constructing a tunnel through the area's greensand.

A fire in the village in 1865 destroyed eighteen buildings and left more than a hundred people homeless. Three fire engines were required to extinguish the blaze. It is likely that, had there not been the river nearby, the entire village would have been destroyed. Not a single person was killed during the 'Great Fire of Evershot,' and a considerable amount was raised to help the homeless (£70 in two days, the equivalent of over £3000 today).

We arrived to find that the carpark is again no where near the cottage. Signage is also as absent as anywhere else we visit. We set off through the forest, unaware that there was a road leading up to the gate. That's the problem. The residents along this lane complained about the traffic so a carpark is located well away and we and another couple, who didn't have a booking, set off through the forest. I surged ahead to try to hold our booking while Ches came behind with the others. Actually, it made the entrance to the cottage even more special. This thatched cottage with stunning flower gardens appears out of the forest, which suggests the isolation at the time that the three generations of Hardy's lived there.

Too late. We would have to wait till 3:00pm for a tour, which meant a late drive home to Southampton. The other couple lived in the village beside Highclere Castle (Downton Abbey). A family home passed down for the last five generations and he was the postman, often delivering to Highclere and playing there in the town brass band. When we described Drew's "Waves Of …" and how the musician played while moving around the stage and in pairs etc., he immediately identified with it … waves of sound.

We had a great guide who told us the history of the family and the cottage. If we have it correct, he said that Thomas's father was reluctant to marry his mother despite the fact that she was four months pregnant. This may explain why his mother was adamant than none of her four children should marry. Thomas was the only one who did, and he didn't have any children. Mum also moved back into the cottage when Thomas's father built an extension on. It began as a two up two down and became a two up two down attached to a one up one down under the same thatched room. It was only after her death that the additions had doorways cut to open it up as one cottage.

It really is a magical place, cottage and garden. Thomas studied architecture, practiced in both Dorchester and London and I'll need to read the full biography to understand how he came to be a full-time author. I suspect that he was writing at the same time as he was working and when he had success as an author, gave architecture away. I do know that the first novel he wrote was withdrawn almost as soon as he wrote it. A friend read the manuscript and advised him that is was so socialist that his reputation would be destroyed before he could even begin. He used parts of it in later novels and eventually destroyed the manuscript. What a read that might have been. As the piece I have added at the end of this blog suggests, he was exposed to literature from birth, so it's likely that he was always writing even when working as an architect.

Despite become estranged from his wife Emma, when she died he spent years writing poetry inspired by her. He then married his secretary Florence, who was 39 years younger, and yet pined for Emma to such an extent that his relationship with Florence was so soured that I have been advised that reading her biography of Hardy would contribute much to my knowledge of him.

He wanted to be buried with Emma, however there had to be a compromise. His heart was buried in Poets Corner, Westminster Abbey and his ashes with Emma in Cornwall.

Hardy's estate at death was valued at £95,418 (equivalent to £6,100,000 in 2021)

Back to Southampton for the weekend.

Victorian Gothic at Knightshayes

On the way back from holiday, we stopped at Knightshayes, a National Trust-owned house which appeals to me in every way. It's a wonderful example of Gothic Revival architecture,designed by William Burges. The house has a complex history of design which makes it particularly interesting: Burges was commissioned to design the house in 1869 by Sir John Heathcoat Amory, and completed the exterior by 1874. Burges, inspired by Pugin's work and writing, and eccentric friend of the Pre-Raphaelites, was deeply immersed in the medieval aesthetic, which manifested itself in a European-influenced form of Gothic in his Burgesbuildings. (As you can see from the photographs, he was so medievalised he even had the costume). He was friends with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who wrote of him:

There's a babyish party named Burges,

Who from infancy scarcely emerges.

If you had not been told,

He's disgracefully old,

You would offer a bull's eye to Burges.

All this suggests that there was something unrestrained and perhaps difficult to work with about Burges, and certainly this seems to have been the case for the Heathcoat Amory family. Though the designs he made for the interior look marvellous to me, the high Victorian Gothic interiors were too much for the more conservative family, who consequently sacked Burges and brought in John Dibblee Crace,whose family worked with royalty (and on the Houses of Parliament) and were thus considered likely to be more respectable interior decorators. They were wrong; what Heathcoat Amory wanted was a solid, respectable, traditional house to establish himself as a country gentleman, and this fashionable, colourful (the less charitable mighP1000865t say garish) form of décor didn't suit. From 1889 onwards, the house was transformed as patterned ceilings were covered up, fireplaces and panelling removed, and so on. Luckily, nothing was thrown away, but it was mostly chucked carelessly into cellars and basements. Eventually, the process of restoration of Gothic design (re-Gothicising?) began, and late in the 20th century was completed.

The house has had an interesting history: it has remarkable 20th century gardens, as well as having housed a family descended from a factory owner (apparently an excellent employer) who, along with his descendants, shaped the area in which they lived. It also served as a military hospital in the First World War and a rest home for servicemen in the Second. But to visit it now, P1000864with its remarkable woodcarvings, its quotations from Chaucer and inscriptions of different kinds, its stylised patterns on wallpaper and furnishings, it seems to echo William Morris's home at Red House, built in 1860 by Philip Webb but with interiors by Morris and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which is perhaps less Gothic but equally medieval and decorative, adhering to similar principals.

Jemima Hardy The Great Author's Mother

Tracy Hayes

Jemima Hardy, nee Hand, (1813-1904) was one of the most important people in Thomas Hardy's life. Fiercely independent and proud, she instilled a love of learning into her eldest child from a very early age. Jemima's own mother Elizabeth Swetman had been familiar with the writings of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, had memorized the writings of Addison and Steele from The Spectator, and praised Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim's Progress as amongst the cornerstones of world literature. She, too, was strong-willed, marrying Hardy's maternal grandfather against her own father's wishes. He never forgave her, cut her from his will, and never saw her again. When Elizabeth's husband died he left her a widow with several children, the youngest of whom was only months old. Though the family lived in poverty, Elizabeth encouraged in Jemima a love of literature, who in turn showed a great aptitude for reading and writing. Like her mother, Jemima read omnivorously, and was also a talented singer. She was a collector of stories and folklore in the oral tradition, Hardy quite often requesting stories from her from which he would place certain details into his own work, such as the 'hag-riding' episode in 'The Withered Arm'.

As Hardy himself once acknowledged, Mrs Yeobright of The Return of the Native (1878) owed many of her characteristics to Jemima as she was in middle-age, able to fly from a gentle mood to raging anger in the blink of an eye. Jemima demanded and received unquestioning devotion from her children, but she could also be quite cold and remote, and rather intolerant in her views. She was also very much given to pessimism, a trait inherited by her famous son. Her desperate and unhappy childhood provided her with a determination to drive her children to success in all endeavours, and she taught them to value their family above and to the detriment of all others. They were to be devoutly loyal to each other, and to present a united front to outsiders. Jemima famously told her children that they were not to marry, but to live in pairs: Thomas with Mary, and Henry with Kate. Thomas was in fact the only one of the Hardy children to marry Emma Lavinia Gifford in 1874 though his mother refused to attend the wedding, and Emma did not get on with any of the Hardy family.

Hardy recalled his childhood dependence on Jemima in his poem 'In Tenebris. III', with the lines 'matchless in might and with measureless scope indued', and again in The Return of the Native with Clym Yeobright and his mother being so joined that their conversations are 'as if carried on by the right and left hands of the same body'. Jemima died on Easter Sunday (3rd April) 1904, her death certificate citing 'senile decay' and 'heart failure'. She had lived to the incredible age of 91, though during her final years she had become increasingly deaf and bedridden. Hardy afterwards wrote to his friend Edward Clodd that she 'did not seem to me to be old, since she was mentally just as she had been since my earliest recollection', and composed a poem entitled 'After the Last Breath', the last stanza of which reads:

We see by littles now the deft achievement Whereby she has escaped the Wrongers all, In view of which our momentary bereavement Outshapes but small.

Hardy never fully recovered from his mother's death, writing a week later that 'the gap...is wide, and not to be filled. I suppose if one had a family of children one would be less sensible of it'.