Erddig.

Erddig’s story is all about relationships – those of the family, the servants and the wider community. It is unpretentious, unconventional and unexpected, always offering a friendly welcome.

It was home to a family that took an almost curatorial attitude to their possessions. Many are recorded in verse, as are generations of servants whose portraits were commissioned by the family. With their working areas almost unchanged, Erddig is a place where servants and their lives are not forgotten.

Heritage On the day before the EU referendum or "let's not be Werner Herzog's penguin" I decided to visit a nearby country and so hello Wales, hello Wrexham and hello Erddig, the next National Trust property on my trail.

Some necessary route talk first.  Train to Chester from Lime Street, train to Wrexham General from Chester, the Cardiff train in fact.  Short walk across town to the bus station, to Stand One where the number 2 bus leaves from as directed by the National Trust website.  Twenty minutes early, I wander around town and buy a chicken salad sandwich from the Co-op.  Eventually the bus leaves with the driver promising to shout when we reach the road to the house.  On reaching here, I ask him for times of the bus back assuming it would be the 2 again which runs hourly.  "Every ten minutes" he tells me, "All the buses come this way."  Ok.

A brown sign points towards Erddig.  One mile it says, and I follow.  A little way in I reach a cross roads with another couple of signs.  One points towards the house and garden, the other towards "Felin Puleston" whatever that is.  So I quite logically follow the house and garden sign.  I walk, I walk, and I walk some more. I walk past this view:



I walk past this sassy sign:



But there's no real indication I'm going in the right direction other than the cars I'm persistently dodging. At one point I panic and try to phone the house but there's just answering machines at the end of the line. Eventually I reach another Erddig sign. I follow this. Which leads to more walking.

About half an hour later I reached Erddig. My first reaction is to explain my troubles to the volunteers in reception. They know, oh, they know. Also it turns out that I'd gone the long way around. I should have walked the other way towards "Felin Puleston" which would have halved the journey and they drew over a site map to point me in the correct direction out.

I didn't need it in the end. After my visit, just as I was starting to follow the directions (after first walking the wrong way due to having the map upside down), one of the volunteers from inside the house pulled up in her car and offered me a lift and took my all the way back to the outskirts of Chester where she lived. Which meant I got to do some bonus charity shopping in Chester at the end of the day (the BBC series How We Build Britain with David Dimbleby on dvd and a t-shirt for a Malaysian Four Seasons Resort are now mine) and I was home much earlier than I would have been.

Erddig then.  The quick version.  The house was originally built in the 1680s for Joshua Edisbury the High Sheriff of Denbighshire.  It was so expensive it bankrupted him, but as a volunteer explained during a tour of the gardens which began my visit, not before he asked his brother who was in government to pull money from the general exchequer to help clear his debts.  They both ended up in jail.

Erddig was then bought in 1716 by the London lawyer John Mellor for reasons which have never been explained since he'd never even been to Wales.  In any case with the help of his nephew Simon Yorke, he extended the house on either side, filled it with all mod cons including a chapel and then unfortunately died in 1733 before he'd really had a chance to make use of it.

Simon picked it up in the will and so began just under two hundred and fifty years of ownership by the Yorke family which eventually ended in 1973 when it became too much of responsibility for the final owner Philip Yorke III thanks to general decrepitude and the local colliery having mined underneath the house creating subsidence.  He gave the house to the National Trust who thanks to a public appeal and compensation from the coal industry were able to renovate the place and buttress the foundations and opened it to the public in 1977.

As they indicate in the leaflet, what it lacks for in architectural distinctiveness, it makes up for in possessions and social history.  The current cataloguing and recording project indicates that when Philip III passed the house on (with the understanding that nothing be added or removed) there were over 30,000 objects in the collection.

But the key point of interest is how across the centuries, the various owners of the house kept records of all the servants they employed with paintings and photographed portraits, each commemorated by lengthy rhyming verse biographies, endless stanzas extolling the virtues of cooks, stable lads, gardeners and footmen.  They all still on display in rooms and corridors just as they were when the house was passed on in the 70s and they really are a curiosity, notably a painting of the coach boy who stands out by being a person of colour.

It's for this reason that visitors enter the house through the servants areas in reverse to as usually occurs in stately homes.  In renovating the house, the chosen period was early in the 20th century when Philip II became a father and Erddig became a family home.

None of the family were really art collectors.  Although the house is filled with paintings, they're mainly portraits by minor artists and reproductions of other works lots of "after" designations and "British School".  To bury the headline, their two star items are this portrait of Philip Yorke I MP (1743–1804) by Gainsborough and of John Mellor the second owner of the house in which Gainsborough overpainted everything but the face in an attempt to improve on original artist Charles Jervas's work.  Both are a cut above anything else on display.  The collection is available to view on the ArtUK website.  Plenty of them are attempts by members of the family including this rather nice image of a kingfisher in the frost.

My favourite room in the house is undoubtedly "the state bedroom" which was latterly joked as being  so named because of the state it was in due to rain water damage, messing up the bed and walls.  A photo in the guide book shows it to have indeed been in a horrendous state, certainly worse than most of the rest of the house.

The key item is the bed, which was purchased by John Mellor in the 1720s from a London furniture maker and then travelled up country to the house.  After the damage it incurred in the 60s, the V&A, who judged it to be one of the most important examples of that type of furniture in the county agreed to restore it on the understanding that when it turned the room would be protected by a glass walk through rather like a quarantine room in a research facility.

This gorgeous room, decorated with 18th century hand painted wallpaper, containing a coromandel lacquer screen is only viewable through this protective glass which just adds to the feeling of standing in some kind of time capsule viewing a moment in the past.  You could image Dave Bowman from 2001: A Space Odyssey shuffling in wandering of the monolith has changed the breakfast order.

The house is in a constant state of renovation.  Some rooms are barely accessible, the Tapesty and Chinese Rooms require a volunteer to unlock a rope for entry and they stand watching as you look around although there's more than enough time to gawp at the orientalist fixtures, tapestries illustrating aspects of the empire actually produced in the Soho Factories for Mellor in the 1920s.  The Music Room is mostly under wraps and other locations, such as the library, are being used for storage, all of which is necessary but breaks the illusion a bit for visitors.



But for all that it's probably at least worth a visit for the gardens, which after being left to overgrow for years have recently been redesigned by the Trust's head gardener to resemble an earlier period and now resemble something you might find in a French chateau.  To look out of the window is to imagine yourself in Versaille or Marienbad.  How do you grow topiary like that?

Beatles Childhood Homes.

Book your tour online now and enjoy the unique experience of a visit to the childhood homes of John Lennon and Sir Paul McCartney. This is your only opportunity to see inside the places where the Beatles met, composed and rehearsed many of their earliest songs.

"Imagine walking through the back door into the kitchen where John's Aunt Mimi would have cooked him his tea, or standing in the spot where Lennon and McCartney composed 'I Saw Her Standing There'.

"Join our custodians on a fascinating trip down memory lane, and take a moment to reflect on these incredible individuals. Visiting the Beatles' childhood homes in Liverpool is an absolute must for fans of any ages. The tours provide a real insight into Lennon and McCartney's humble beginnings.

Music  Hello John.  Hello Paul.  As we've already discussed on many an occasions, if you're from Liverpool, you're either a born fan, become a fan, or have fandom thrust upon you and I'm in the far latter group.  Very far.  Rather like football, the local music scene is just the sort of thing I rejected from a young age, or at least the rock and roll end, committed as I've been for all these years in not being stereotyped.  The football was purposeful.  The Beatles was not.  It's just that having discovered girly pop and film soundtracks, guitar bands fell down the priority list.  Availability was an issue too.  When in possession of my own disposable income at just the moment when I was presumably supposed to be listening to the music of head bobbers and foot tappers, I'd be in Penny Lane Records buying the new Wilson Phillips album.

Which is why it's taken all these years to finally visit the childhood homes of Lennon and McCartney.  It's also true that because they lived in my patch, the curiosity value is rather less than it might be at a medieval castle or Tudor home.  My parents and I all went to the same school as Paul and I'd get the bus home from there opposite where George used to live.  Perhaps the people of Stratford have a similar attitude to Shakespeare's birthplace.  It's just sort of their and although it's not in their living memory in the same way, the whole notion of spending too much time their beyond school visits entirely ludicrous.  But I understand the impulse to see where genius flourished.  I wonder if they have the same feeling I did, that in the end it's just a house and that it's the experience a person has there, impossible to recreate in a heritage sense which made the person.

The National Trust tour begins at Jury's Inn which is the giant hotel next door to the Echo Arena and not as I initially thought on Castle Street necessitating a panicky walk up the Dock Road.  You're picked up by the above minibus outside and the whole tour lasts about two and half hours.  The member price is £10.50, nine-fifty plus booking fee (£24.00 to non-members).  This is doubtless to cover the cost of transportation which in and of itself was quite the surprise.  I'd expected some kind of generic vehicle but here it is advertising the tour in the Trust font should anyone notice it passing by.  There were around fifteen people in the group, the capacity of the bus,  including some Canadians, Mexicans and one bloke whose house actually backs on to Mendips.  His house has an identical interior.  He still has the same bath.



When Yoko bought Mendips in 2002 and donated it to the Trust, it was on the understanding that it would not be used as a Beatles tourist attraction per se, but to give visitors an idea of what it was like inside John's home in the 1950s.  As the present custodian explained, a kind of pre-Beatles tour.  So although there is some description of how John became a musician and met Paul, it's all through the prism of Aunt Mimi's pride in the house and keeping the house together through Lennon's teenage years.  As portrayed in the film Nowhere Boy, she had a love/hate relationship with his musical interest, unable to ban him from pursuing his guitar playing but desperate for him to get an education.  Luckily for the two of them, even though he failed his O-Levels a grade below requirement across the board, the School of Art saw that he had some talent which gave him a springboard.

She was well-to-do.  Groups enter through the back door into the kitchen because Mimi kept the front door for special visitors, holy men and the like, mostly to keep the carpet from becoming worn.  There's an odd moment in the tour when he implies that the way that she with her Woolton house looked down on Paul and George from the estate was a thing of the fifties when my school experience, where I was the only child from Speke at school full of people from the area around Mather Avenue was not dissimilar.  In order to keep the house, she eventually turned it into a hostel for students, converting the upstairs rooms into bedrooms, the back dining room into a study.  But it worked and she stayed there, despite some hardship, right up until John became famous and bought her a new place for her to live in Surrey.

Most of the tour is conducted in the kitchen and living room, with the custodian explaining all of this history, with the group then given ten or fifteen minutes the wander through the rest.  It's more than enough.  As with the Hardman House, much of my visit both here and at Forthlin Road, was spent noticing which items myself or a family member owned as a child and in some cases still do.  I'd entirely forgotten about the wooden clothes maiden which dangled from the ceiling at my Grans house which features in both kitchens.  A wooden board with grooves which used to have a planter on in our back garden I now realise was originally a draining board.  The Canadians and Mexicans will have found this much more fascinating thanks to cultural disparities.  You can imagine the blank faces when the guide tried to explain the concept of the eleven-plus to them.




The Beatles history end of the tour is held over to 20 Forthlin Road where Paul flourished.  The house is filled with photographs donated by his brother Michael which shows them and their family growing up in the property, even obliquely indicating historical inaccuracies in relation to decor and wallpaper some of which was unique enough to be impossible to recreate now.  It's in this house that Lennon & McCartney really forged their friendship, where they practiced the majority of their music and where they wrote some of the songs on their first album including Please, Please, Me.  Although Paul hasn't visited since 1964, he's recorded a message welcoming visitors which is rather lovely.  It feels more like a home than Mendips with visitors even allowed to sit on the furniture.  Until recently a custodian actually lived in the house.  He was always out whenever Paul happened by.

But what I wanted more on both tours was the sense, much clearer at other properties, of talking about them in terms of what they were architecturally within and out, how they fitted into that piece of social history.  Although there's some talk of why post-war council estates exist and the class system, there's little about the design features of the property, why they should differ.  But I acknowledge that's more to do with my personal taste and that the bulk of visitors will be more interested in the Beatles connection and so that's what's being emphasised in the limited time allotted.  Whereas in other Trust properties it is the architectural features which are of most importance, although both of these houses are now Grade II* listed, it's The Beatles connection which makes them remarkable.  Perhaps it's my own fault for not asking.

Nevertheless I'm pleased to have finally taken the trip.  As we left the house, a group on the Magical Mystery Tour were receiving their version of the history which must have included the same explanation I received back in 2004 when I originally took that tour (coincidentally the same week I visited Carnforth Station - see Sunday!) as to why we'd been allowed inside but they were stuck outside in the cold.  The irony that this fairweather fan had bought an opportunity which they were still waiting for wasn't lost on me.  Perhaps I should take that tour again to see what's changed.  Not much probably.  As I write I'm listening to their music on Spotify and just as in 2004, I'm listening to it with new ears.  Please Please Me sounds as fresh now as it must have done in 1963.  It hasn't dated.  Like Shakespeare, it's timeless.

Speke Hall.

Speke Hall is a rare Tudor timber-framed manor house in a most unusual setting on the banks of the River Mersey. Restored and brought back to life in the 19th century, it is a unique and beautiful mixture of Tudor simplicity and Victorian Arts and Crafts' aesthetics.

Built by the devout Catholic Norris family - keen to impress visitors with the grandeur of their home and in particular the magnificent Great Hall - this beautiful building has witnessed more than 400 years of turbulent history. From the Tudor period when a secret priest hole was an essential feature, to years of neglect and decay in the 18th and 19th centuries (including a spell when it was used as a cow shed) and then being dragged into the Victorian era of improvement and technology, the Hall has seen it all.

In the 21st century, Speke Hall and its surrounding estate now provide a real oasis from the hurly burly of modern life. As you come through the gates, relax, take a breath and enjoy all that this wonderful place has to offer. The Hall is surrounded by beautiful restored gardens and protected by a collar of woodland.

Heritage My accent is confusing. Despite having been born in Liverpool, I haven't ever really developed a very strong local accent, the scouse accent. More often than not is settles somewhere in generic Northern but not enough so when strangers often ask were I'm from, or are completely baffled to the point of making random guesses. A taxi driver asked if I was from Oxford the other night and didn't seem very convinced when I told him the truth.  There's no particular reason why.  About ten years ago, a linguistic expert from the University told me that it was because I didn't really see myself as being from Liverpool but the world, which is partially true, but after forty years of living, breathing and working in this city you'd think I would have picked up some inflections, especially since sixteen of those years were spent in Speke which has one of the strongest Liverpool accents of them all.

Attending Speke Hall in that case should be something of a homecoming, but the surrounding area has changed a lot in the meantime.  Over the intervening decades, the fields in which I used to play and on one occasion hosted the final 1FM roadshow at the Mersey front have been replaced with the Estuary Industrial Park, a conglomeration of massive warehouses, an area which resembles the industrial zone glimpsed in the opening sequences of the film Blade Runner.  Most are anonymous, although discount chain B&M seems to have built their own country within its borders.  Construction continues and as the 80A bus winds through its streets, its almost impossible to believe that one of the National Trusts Tudor properties could be found anywhere between this maze of grey boxes and the John Lennon Airport.  As the vehicle stopped outside one of these boxes, if couple of retirees hadn't asked the driver if this was the right place for Speke Hall, I might missed it completely.

It's this couple I walked to the Hall with, up to the roundabout as directed by the driver and left into the reassuringly named Speke Hall Road.  A little further and we were in the Hall's grounds and the contrast couldn't be greater, industrialisation giving way to a long pathway framed on either side by rows and rows of daffodils, the sounds of vehicles falling into the distance replaced by birdsong.  Yesterday must have been the hottest this year and for a few moments I simply looked to the sky with its single shade of light blue in awe.  No clouds.  Even in Sefton Park, you're constantly aware that you're on the edge of the city, and although Speke certainly isn't that, more like the outskirts, if it wasn't for the jumbo jets flying overhead, you could almost imagine that you've stepped through a magic portal into part of the Lake District or the Cotswolds.

No wonder my parents brought me to the grounds so often as a child.  At least once a month we'd visit the gardens of Speke Hall when the grounds were still free to visit.  I would have been very young so my memory isn't that strong, but there were picnics, many picnics, in Tupperware pots on gingham blankets.  Philadelphia cheese and tomato baps.  Barrs Cream Soda.  Only once did I ever visit the house, as part of a school trip although again the memories aren't strong enough for me to remember anything now, a marble table is familiar.  Much of everything which happened to me as a pre-teen has dislodged itself, which is probably why I tend to feel more like a child of the 80s even though I was born in 1974.  The evening in the late 90s when the school choir visited to sing for visitors at is much clearer, stood in the front of one of the cafes amid Christmas trees, candles and mince pies.

The house itself hasn't been able to retain its own memories well either due to its many changes of ownership.  Permission to build a mansion in this spot was originally granted to the Norris family as early as 1314, and through a series of, as the guild book alliterates, "additions, adaptations and accompanying losses" the house was constructed across ensuing decades until it largely reached its present form by the late 1500s.  The Norris's kept ownership until the 1730s when Mary Norris entered a contracted marriage with Lord Sidney Beauclerk, the grandson of the actor Nell Gwyn.  He did not live at Speke Hall much and which is when the house fell into dereliction and related papers were lost so everything known about the house before then is through local research and comparative study.  Ask the volunteers about many of the earliest features and they simply don't know or have to resort to conjecture.

That's when the most damage was done to the earlier state of the house with the grounds keepers using the ground floor of the house as a place to store livestock and it's the Watt family to whom the Hall was sold in 1795, although it remained empty until 1856, when Richard Watt V took possession and it him we have to thank for renovating the property and largely putting it in the state it is now.  As part of the renovation process he purchased a large amount of heavy oak furniture in a Tudor style which were designated as heirlooms which is why they remain in the house now.  On his death Speke Hall passed to Watt's daughter Adelaide who leased the house to Frederick Leyland, the shipping line owner and art collector, with J.A.M. Whistler and  D.G. Rossetti being notable visitors.  He made further adjustments to the shape of the house, knocking a few walls through, which must have been quite strange for Adelaide when she later decided to move back in after the lease expired in 1877.

She remained there until her death in 1921.  During the ensuing Trusteeship, the connected surrounding farmland became an aerodrome, with old buildings turned into hangars and the farmhouse becoming the terminal.  The Hall itself passed to the National Trust in 1943, but due to a lack of finances it was then leased to Liverpool City Council who opened it to the public.  The guide book says, that between 1976 and 1986 it fell under the Merseyside Corporation which will have been when I originally visited.  They fixed the roof and so forth.  When the Corporation closed, the National Trust began full time management and although it is a full Trust property (despite continued funding from National Museums Liverpool), there is a sense that they're still dealing with decision taken during the intervening custody including parts of the art collection which the volunteers indicated are now within the collections of the art galleries which should still be within the house.

Despite having visited before, my lack of memory meant I could treat is as a new destination which was unsettling and not helped by being greeted on entry by one of the volunteers from The Hardman House last week, who remembered me.  But "unsettling" is the best description of the place in general.  Walking around you're very aware that although the house has a Tudor shell, the interiors are very much a mix of Victorian tastes and a Victorian attempt to fill the house with furniture from the earlier period so nothing looks quite right.  In one section, the Great Hall, the oldest part of the house gives way to The Blue Dining Room, the newest addition filled with Louis XV style furniture which was likened by Leyland when he saw to "a French plum box".  Between that and the billiard room, you're forever on your toes and surprised by what you might see next.  But I think the Trust have been right to keep the house in the state it is, rather like an old book filled with marginal notes, unlinings and crossings out.

For years I wondered why Speke Hall wasn't included in the arts collections survey and now I know.  When Leyland was a tenant, the walls were apparently covered with great works, pre-Raphaelites and French Impressionists.  But as it stands what's there is unremarkable.  Art UK (the successor to the BBC's Your Paintings) has just twenty-three oils and they mainly copies, apart from some romanticised images of the the Hall itself.  The bedrooms have a few nice tapestries and they're especially proud of a Mortlake tapestry depicting Diogenes and Alexander from c.1700.  Mainly the houses is lauded for its unusual architectural features, notably corridors, which is very rare for a Tudor house and suggests if Speke Hall wasn't a Trust property it could quite easily work as a hotel with the reception in the Great Hall (although given that it's a Grade I listed building that's unlikely).

Something I have learnt on this occasion is that in some of these properties you really do need a guide book in order to make the most of the visit.  Reading back through the Speke Hall volume, there's plenty which I missed so that's something I'll definitely consider in the future depending on the price.  Having gained the massive discount inherent in just paying a fiver a month for membership, adding £4.95 to the cost of the visit seems counterproductive although obviously not if it makes the visit all the richer.  That's an internal discussion for another time.  None of which is to say I won't be returning to Speke Hall.  After visiting the house, I didn't have time for the gardens, including a maze, which are massive, so I thought, given that this is one my locals, it would be best to leave them for another afternoon.  Even if I don't have the accent, my homeland keeps drawing me back.

The Hardmans' House.

Explore the contrasting sides of this house: the neat, professional, spacious business rooms and the cluttered, cramped living quarters of the renowned portrait photographer Edward Chambré Hardman and his wife Margaret. They lived and worked here for 40 years, keeping everything and changing nothing.

The business focused on professional studio portraits but their real love was for vivid landscape images. Some of their huge collection of photographs is on display in the house, along with the equipment they used to take and develop the iconic images.

Photography Or just as accurately in project terms, the local. The Hardmans' House at 59 Rodney Street is the most local of National Trust properties, within walking distance of home and unlike my previous attempt to visit art collections in North West England were I climaxed with the Walker Art Gallery, it seemed best to begin local for the most part and expand outwards.  Plus this wasn't my first visit to the house, having spent an hour there as part of a flickr meet-up back in 2007 (which you can read about here).

Chambre Hardman is perhaps best known for his photograph The Birth of the Ark Royal which shows the Air Craft Carrier, painted white for its launch by the Queen Mother almost hovering above some typically Northern rows of houses, a small boy on his paper round in the foreground (the house's blog as an essay about the photo).  Although portraits were his business, landscape photography was his passion despite its unfashionability during his peak period.  Now, it is through him that Liverpudlians often view their past and I've had this shot from the Liverpool Museum steps on William Brown Street on my wall for years.

The business was actually called Burrell and Hardman, having met his original business partner Kenneth Burrell during their service in the Indian Army.  The initially set up on Bold Street but after their initial success and expansion into Chester (the appointment book listed six or more sitters a day, eight as Christmas), the war took its toll and so after the lease in the original offices ended they moved to the current position.  By then, his wife Margaret was running the business, whom he met when she joined the staff years earlier.  They had a staff of up to ten assistants, although as a volunteer noted their was a high turnover because of personality clashed with Margaret which usually led to firings.

Visits to the house are as timed tours bookable beforehand.  The house is very small and so these are limited to just seven people at a time, and at 12:30, thanks to a couple of cancellations that was just myself and a couple from Sheffield (were we asked for our place of origin a few times by the volunteers perhaps so that they could gage our local knowledge and adjust their explanations accordingly).  The volunteers stand in various sections of the house and we were passed in between, from waiting rooms through studio, dark rooms to living quarters and all with a minimum of fuss offering something of an impression of what it must have been like for clients.

Hardman retired in 1965.  After a fall which left him unable to climb stairs in 1989, he was befriended by Peter Hagerty, who according to a volunteer was visiting the house one day and found social services "cleaning up the place" or bin bagging his negatives, photographs and various items little knowing of their historic value.  Having reached the legacy in time, Hagerty helped set up a trust to safeguard Hardman's life's work but the house was a much larger undertaking and so it was gifted to the National Trust in 2002 and they went about cataloguing the contents and deciding how best to present them to the public.

Not much has changed since my original visit, the approach by the Trust for this property being to preserve how the house would have been during the peak of the photographer's career in the 40s and 50s.  Each room still retains a particular smell from photographic paper, chemicals, dust or just age.  The furniture and appliance are all from living memory, with a kitchen which looks like my Gran's house as late as the early 80s.  Once again I made the observation to a guide that he didn't hang photographs in his own quarters, preferring the work of local painters like Henry Carr.  Working in dark rooms until after midnight on touching up and developing photographs clearly meant he needed a break.

There's plenty of clutter.  It's not clear how much of this is due to the Trust's intervention or Chambre Hardman's own lifestyle, but every surface in the areas which wouldn't be seen by the public are covered in boxes and tins and papers and cups, lots and lots of cups.  He and his wife hoarded egg boxes, not the supermarket kind, but the rectangular boxes within which the eggs were delivered by post, the service being efficient enough for that to be best practice then.  In the basement too are giant chests filled with photographic paper which originated during the second world war and still have request labels requiring for them to be returned should they be unused.  The remains of the Anderson shelter are still outside.  He didn't throw much away.

That means it's not really a place you want to linger in much and the tour period is probably ample.  I was particularly fascinated by the photography process.  Due to waiting times, a photography session usually too up to ninety minutes (although the assistants were encouraged to flat out lie to potential clients about the duration depending on who they were, high end businessmen entering expecting a half hour appointment) and just eight shots would be taken with five to ten second exposures (on the assumption that one would be salvageable if most of them were ruined by some kind of movement fro the sitter).  Margaret was apparently never happy with the result, sometimes asking assistants to reprint shots on the days clients were due to picking them, often while they were in the building.

The whole visit took about two hours but didn't ever feel like it.  If you are local I'd very much recommend it, even as a way of seeing a recent social history writ large not unlike the viewing Chambre Hardman's own photographs.  Within one of the display cabinets there's a shot of the grounds outside St Luke's Church pointing towards the top of Bold Street on a sunny day taken during the mid-fifties.  Having only ever thought of the building as a war memorial, I was surprised to see it being treated in this way, the grass filled with sunbathers and people having fun something you wouldn't necessarily expect to see in the grounds of a church.  That's the power of this kind of photography, making the familiar, unfamiliar.

Dunham Massey.

During the First World War, this Georgian house, set in a magnificent deer-park, was transformed into a military hospital, becoming a sanctuary from the trenches for almost 300 soldiers.

To mark the centenary we have turned the clock back. Discover what life was like for the patients and how members of the Grey family helped injured soldiers to recuperate. Spend time in the ward, nurses’ station, and operating theatre as you experience the Stamford Hospital as it once was.

Dunham Massey has one of the North’s great gardens, with plenty to inspire throughout the year, including a stunning rose garden and one of Britain’s finest winter gardens.

Heritage Let's begin with some route talk. When I last visited Dunham Massey for the other project, I travelled all the way to Altrincham from Liverpool Lime Street, changing in Manchester then took a bus out from there.  This time, having consulted the ever useful Moovit app, I trained-it to Warrington then took a number 5 bus out to the house shaving a whole hour off the journey each way.  Not that it was quite that easy: at the travel office I asked for a train+bus ticket and the clerk busked and just gave me a Warrington rover ticket for the other end which was entirely invalid for the journey so I had to pay the fair to the property again on the bus.  On returning to said office to ask for my money back I was told that refunds due to clerical error required a £10 fee - so we pay them ten pounds even if they're the ones that make the mistake.  Imagine that system in other retail situations.  A complaints form is in the post.

Dunham Massey's the first place I've used my National Trust membership card which arrived in the post on Saturday.  The covering letter is short but still somehow made me weep. It says, "This is the start of something exciting.  Goosebumps, wonderful memories and many stories to share [...] Your membership isn't just the beginning of your journey with the National Trust.  It's the start of finding a a place you love."  Even if that wasn't written by Sharon Pickford, Members and Donors Director despite the letter having her facsimile signature and instead someone in the publicity department, it's still just the sort of poignant Doctorish sentiment which I needed, for various reasons, at the moment I read the words.  This is very much the reverse of "You wouldn't want to be a member of any club that would have you as a member."

As you can see from the above synopsis, the house has changed dramatically since my last visit.  Whereas then it was about displaying the history of the house across the generations, and I urge you to revisit that entry for a potted history of the building and its inhabitants, currently the interior has been changed to reflect a single three year period in its history, when the ground floor rooms were transformed into hospital wards and operating theatres and the then current owners of the house, the Stamfords and Greys aided in the care of soldiers who were broken and ripped apart by the war.  Based on photographs and eye witness accounts, halls have been turned into a replica ward,  recreation room and nurses quarters with an operating theatre set up at the bottom of a stairwell, the upstairs rooms largely changed too to recreate how the living areas would have been like at that time.

Judging by the reproductions of contemporary photographs in the spaces the accuracy is stunning, right down the patterns on the blankets, the playing cards on the bedside tables and the curtains on the modesty blinds.  When the display began, the house administration apparently assumed there wouldn't be much change in visitor numbers but these increased to such an exponential degree, pretty soon timed entry was introduced at ten minute intervals, but from my experience yesterday, the spaces were still very busy for a stately home on a cold October Wednesday afternoon.  Even with these crowds in the spaces, it's impossible not to become swept away into this history, aided by the sounds of patients in pain emanating from the bed clothes and diagnostic boards at the end of each outline the injuries some of these men had to endure.

The ticket to exhibition is a pamphlet filled with facts about the hospital.  It tells us that Dunham Massey was one of 3,244 auxiliary hospitals created to treat the wounded, designated between April 1917 and February 1919.  By the time of its closure, 282 soldiers have been treated.  But the effects of the war continued for both them and the house owners who even after returning the various rooms back to something of their original state won't ever have been able to think of their home in the same way.  Indeed much of the belongings and treasures which went into storage in one of the large hallways stayed there until the house was handed over the National Trust in 1976, subsequent generations losing track of what was there.  That room is partially returned to that state in this recreation, furniture covered in flysheets, the walls covered in many more paintings than usual.

Verisimilitude is aided by a group of actors playing various inhabitants of the hospital who wander through the spaces in costume playing short scenes, about sixteen different in all.  The effect is frankly unnerving, like seeing ghosts stepping through time like an episode of Torchwood.  We're asked not approach them, but we daren't as these fearless players,  offer their short performance pieces in a way which is entirely convincing.  There's the flirtation between patient and nurse, the rivalry between amateur and professional caregivers, the pain of post-traumatic stress and the tragedy of wife visiting the hospital searching for her husband and heading away empty handed.  I've nothing but admiration for these players who can remain in character amid the gaze of visitors with their cameras and noise and disinterested chatter.

The version of me who visited the halls for the paintings would have been disappointed if he'd left Dunham Massey until now.  Although a couple of the rooms have been turned into exhibition spaces to highlight the treasures of national importance, the silver and whatnot, in seeking to bring the atmosphere of war the designers of the display have quite rightly returned luxury items into the shadows, the artworks I venerated last time are barely visible amid the low lighting and any information about them has been removed.  They'll all be back out again next year when the interior changes again with a new emphasis on an even earlier inhabitant, the Booth family of whom there was apparently scandal.  But for at least another month until the current exhibition closes, it's about stepping into the war period.

Stepping outside after a couple of hours, I decided to finally take the ranger tour of the grounds, which was supposed to be an hour's duration but stretched out for an extra forty minutes as ranger Bob, who's apparently been visiting the house and gardens since the 1950s offered thorough, interesting explanations for everything from the hollow trees still charred by the effects of the blitz to the slaughter house used as part of the park's utility for breeding deer during the Georgian period.  Their descendants are still in the park and were always in eyeshot as we walked around, the tour group gasping with excitement every time they hopped past.  My favourite fact was that the house's Mill originally used for grain, later wood, was the model for The Old Mill by Atkinson Grimshaw which is displayed in Leeds Art Gallery and I remember vividly from when I was a student there.

In other words, on the whole this was a happy, contented day and there's little doubt that if I lived in the area, the grounds would be somewhere I'd want to spend a lot of time (they're open 365 anyway due to being a legal right of way).  Even having received my card, part of me's become quite nervous about visiting too many houses, too quickly.  Glancing through the handbook I see that the National Trust owns a variety of different kinds of property but I don't want to become as blase as I did during the art collection project or treat the visits as a chore or box ticking exercise as can sometimes happen.  The trick with this will be to take things slowly, relish each visit for the privilege that it is.  Plus the revisits, oh the revisits.  Dunham Massey changing its interior again during the the closed winter months means I'll be back again next year.

Rufford Old Hall.

A fine Tudor building, the home for stories of romance, wealth and 500 years of Hesketh family history.

Be wowed by the Tudor Great Hall with its fantastic furniture, arms, armour, tapestries and the carved oak screen, a rare survivor from the 1500s. History springs to life in the Hesketh's dining room, its food-laden table, lit candles and 'fire in the hearth' waiting to welcome the family's dinner guests.

And did Shakespeare spend a short time here in his youth? There’s reasonable evidence to suggest that he could once have known Rufford’s Great Hall for a few months whilst still in his teens. Ask us about the evidence and decide for yourself!

Then relax as you stroll through Rufford's Victorian and Edwardian gardens - and remember you're only a few feet (or metres) above sea level - making Rufford one of the lowest lying National Trust gardens in England. [source]

Heritage  Sitting on my desk right now, next to this laptop, is a small brown cardboard box with the words My National Trust embossed into the lid with a logo containing the silhouette of an oak leaf above.  Everything about it is making me smile.  Becoming a member of the National Trust wasn't something I set out to do today.  But after surprising myself with a visit to Rufford Old Hall having only discovered its existence yesterday, and realising at the entrance gate that the fiver per month membership fee by direct debit was wholly affordable and cheaper than the average entrance fee (having previously looked at the lump sum approach of old and shivered), I handed over my Visa Debit details and was given in return a copy of the 2015 handbook.  The membership card will be in the post by the end of next month.

After completing the North West Art Collections project, I've been a bit of a loose end wanting to try something else.  Various ideas have been researched and rejected.  After watching the funeral of Richard III, I considered seeing the tombs of all the British monarchs.  But that's messy geographically, plus it felt like more of a box ticking exercise and the only proper way to do it would be chronologically and frankly, yes but no.  Another was to work through the remaining art collections in Your Paintings but many of them are in official buildings ill equipped for visits by members of the public so there'd never be a case of simply just turning up.  I almost decided to try and see everything by a particular artist but then there was the process of choosing the artist and it was inevitably going to be someone with lots of work in private collections.

The National Trust, in the end, was inevitable.  For one thing I've already visited a couple of the properties for the purposes of the other project as you'll see if you click the new tag at the bottom of this post.  Plus there's a decent iProduct app with a structure that shows properties closest to you so there's a fairly logical approach to fanning out from home into the country.  But there's also the fact that although there's a relatively finite amount of destinations, there are enough that I'm unlikely to run out ever.  So it's a project which feels like it has the potential for completion but really doesn't and also has the added bonus of forcing me to visit properties even further afield in places I wouldn't otherwise have a reason to visit, just like the other project (although just like the other project everything is public transport and cost permitting).

Rufford Old Hall, then. The origins of the house are messy. A property has stood on the land since the 14th century, but a version of the current building was erected in 1530 (of which great hall (pictured) is the only surviving element), possibly by Thomas Hesketh after a series of inheritances of the kind which tended to happen then because women weren't allowed to keep hold of the money which we'd now deem quite rightly as being theirs. The house then stayed in the family for centuries who made a series of changes including the current extensions, although the main family subsequently moved to a Rufford New Hall which led to this building getting its name. As well as the family, it also attracted numerous tennants including a school who used the main hall during one of the periods of building work.

The entry on Your Paintings, the Wikipedia and this old local guide book transcript have versions of the story which somewhat contradict one another and even having also heard it described by one of the volunteer guides in the house, I'm still unclear as to the chronology and who these people were.  Perhaps I should have bought a guide book.  Perhaps the National Trust's own website should be more detailed.  Ultimately the house itself has resolved itself into two periods, the Tudor section of the great hall and the rest of the house which since being gifted to the Trust in 1936 has largely been regressed back to how it would have looked in the Victorian era when the majority of the fixtures and fittings were originally installed.  A lot of these had been moved to the family's eventual regular home at Easton Neston but then bought back when the contents of that property were sold in 2004.

It's at time like this I remember wistfully the more linear philanthropic development of regional art collections.  On entering the house my first question, just to make sure, was whether there was any particularly distinguished paintings and the first answer was no but after exploring and chatting to the various volunteers this turned out to be not quite right.  The majority of the collection is production line family portraits and in some of these you can actually see how the body and background had been prepared by one artist ready for another to paint in the face of the given subject.  But in the dressing room upstairs there's a massive collection of flower watercolours by Ellen Stevens which had been bought by the Trust who decided they'd be best presented at Rufford.  Minutely detailed and observed, they're almost worth the visit to the house by themselves.

The best oil painting in the house is the utterly thrilling An Extensive Landscape with Exotic Flowers, Fruit and Vegetables and a 'Noli me Tangere' in the Garden Beyond by the obscure Flemish painter Gommaert van der Gracht.  Glancing towards the surrealism four hundred odd years before Dali and Magritte, Gracht combines a landscape, still life, animal painting with a religious scene.  Superbly detailed fruit fill almost half the composition, with a goat representing Adam eating fruit from a tree on which vines represent a serpent.  Meanwhile in the background, a resurrected Jesus visits Mary Magdalene, the allegorical message being that we're seeing the original sin being forgiven.  Here's an image though the postage stamp you're looking at fails the capture the grandeur of this canvas which fills half a wall in the dining room.

As you can see from the above quote from the Trust website, Rufford's other claim to fame is a Shakespeare connection, the idea being that the playwright spent part of the missing years here both as a player in a tour company and assistant teacher in around 1585.  The only potential documentary evidence appears to be a will by Alexander Houghton of Lea Hall near Preston which states:

"Item. It is my mind and will that the said Thomas Hoghton of Brynescoules my brother shall have all my instruments belonging to music, and all manner of play clothes if he be minded to keep and do keep players.

"And if he will not keep and maintain players then it is my mind and will that Sir Thomas Hesketh knight shall have the same instruments and play clothes.

"And I most heartily require the said Sir Thomas to be friendly unto Fluke Gyllome and William Shakeshafte now dwelling with me and either to take them into his service or else to help them to some good master as my trust is he will."

Shakeshafte being Shakespeare in this instance. The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare is cynical, noting that Shakespeare has to be back in Stratford two years later to marry Anne Hathaway and that although Shakeshaft was a common name in the area at the time, there's no evidence of it having been used interchangeably in Shakespeare's family.  In other words, as is so often the case with the man, we simply don't know.  But there are some related books, including the RSC Complete Works in the gift shop just in case.

Although it's only a relatively small house, the visit filled about three and a half hours including a Lancashire cheese sandwich in the cafe which has been set up in the house's original kitchens.  The rest of the visitors were of retirement age and plenty of them seemed to buzz around within about half an hour (apart from one gentleman who was admirably thorough with his questions of the volunteers, right down to how the cutlery was arranged in the dining room).  But I tended to sit in each of the rooms flicking through the large visitor guides provided and enjoying being in the space mostly because I know what 2015 is like and something you just want to get away from it as much as possible.  Becoming a National Trust member genuinely feels like the next best thing to being handed the keys to a TARDIS.

Tatton Park.

Art Turning out of Knutsford railway station onto the main road yesterday, the last thing I needed to see was one of those brown tourist signs pointing in the opposite direction with the information, “Tatton Park, 4 miles”. Having been here almost this time last year for Tabley House and knowing how long that walk had taken it, hadn’t occurred to me, largely because I’d not bothered to look at the maps (spoilers) that I’d also have to walk some to get to the mansion in the park but there it was. Four miles. Which might not seem very far to the seasoned rambler, but as I discovered the other week in the Lakes, I’m very far from being a seasoned rambler. Not one bit.

Actually, I’m being slightly over dramatic. Amid the scenery, the blue skies and well cared for road, the walk through Tatton Park wasn’t that awful. Cyclists and pedestrians travelling in the opposite direction all greeted me and I greeted them when they didn’t. I even think that I saw Laura Trott passing by on wheels though it could have been my mind filling in the blanks when I caught half of a face in the corner of my eye. Unlike the Lakes, the mammals aren’t fenced but roam freely so I was amid the sheep and deer rather than with them just too far away. I wonder how often they’re actually bothered by tourists or if they’re hopefully just left to be.

Tatton Hall has had a messy history in architectural terms. The estate was acquired by the Egerton family in 1598 and although they lived in the Old Hall which is still on site for the next hundred years, by 1716 they’d moved into the new building which as the official catalogue describes was originally a “three-storied rectangular block of seven bays”, but later augmented into a neo-classical building with sections designed by Samuel Wyatt in 1780 and Lewis William Wyatt in 1813. The Egerton family stayed there, right through to the final owner Maurice Egerton who left it to the National Trust.

In his book, Public Art Collections in North West England, Edward Morris devotes his four text pages to describing who amongst the Egertons were the art collectors. In 1729, Samuel Egerton was an apprentice clerk for the picture collector Joseph Hill and it’s through this connection he acquired the two Canalettos. But the most important collector was apparently Wilbraham Egerton, Samuel’s great nephew whose interest in Dutch painting led to the purchasing of the Van Dyck, Stoning of St Stephen but it’s clear that everyone in the family across the years had a hand in.

All of which said, as art collections go, it’s a bit disappointing. You’d think after all this time, finding two Canalettos and a Van Dyck in the north west under these circumstances would be exciting for me, but they’re disappointing Canalettos, early schematic views of Venice which are interesting from a historical perspective in capturing the city but otherwise flat and uninvolving. The Van Dyck is difficult to appreciate in this setting due to the way the light from the windows hits it so its impossible to see the whole work without some reflections on the canvas.

But throughout I had to keep in mind that this is the National Trust (and Cheshire City Council who provide their funding) presenting the house and grounds as a glimpse into the past and the history of the Egertons, not an art gallery. These walls filled with portraits are the ancient equivalent of an iCloud so shouldn’t really be judged on their artistic merits, even though now and then there also happen to be some fabulous paintings. Similarly, the many “schools of” and “manner of” paintings are the Egertons bringing into the old Masters the only way they could.

Currently in the process of restoration, a process being carried out in public, is The Cheshire Hunt with Wilbraham Egerton of Tatton (1781–1856), and His Son William Tatton Egerton (1806–1883), 1st Baron Egerton of Tatton by Henry Calvert (its space on the wall in the entrance hall currently filled with a pretty convincing from a distance digital reproduction). I’m mentioning it because it seems important to mention it, but it’s really off the edge of my subset of interests, my brain not quite able to divorce its capability as a painting with what it depicts.

Much more in that subset is the oddball anonymous portrait of Elizabeth I, which is frankly easier to link to than describe. My first reaction was quite a dirty laugh, which echoed throughout the hall in which its hung. How did that happen and judging by the dating, during the Queen’s reign? My experience has been that contemporary portraits tended to offer something akin to fantasy in relation to Gloriana especially in her later years, yet here she is unflatteringly in full HD, the skin hanging from her skull. Did the artist survive this? Was this unusual?

Alice Anne Graham-Montgomery (1847–1931), Duchess of Buckingham and Chandos and Countess Egerton of Tatton by Frank Dicksee is currently difficult to see because it’s in the middle of a wall in a dining room which is cordoned off at the very end to create atmosphere, but even from there her golden gown shimmers and the sheer ostentatiousness of the setting with its fir lined chair which I’m sure for years people assumed was how these people lived in these big houses but on reflection must have been an affectation of the artist’s studio.

Across the project Frank Dicksee is a name I’ve seen in a number of the collections and as I remarked to the attendant, because I do that sort of thing, that painting would have had pride of place in one of the regional museums, noting how the women’s portraits by known painters mostly seemed to be in less prominent, inaccessible positions whereas the more unremarkable portraits of men by relatively unknown artists are in full view. She replied that status overshadows artistic merit in these circumstances (which is a reflection I suppose, of our historically patriarchal society).

Which is presumably why one of the collection’s other great portraits Lady Gertrude Lucia Egerton (1861–1943), Countess of Albemarle by the Italian painter Michele Gordigiani is in the middle of a stairwell just before the visitor enters the cellar. There’s a bright, airiness to the image and a sense of freedom, of someone having been caught in a private moment by a photographer who isn’t a total stranger. Gordigiani’s is the image of Elizabeth Barrett Browning which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery and I’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for her work in the future.

But opposite there is my favourite picture in the collection, Hilda Montalba’s Onion Seller, partly because it’s like nothing else in the painting collection. After walls of dull portraits and mediocre Dutch copies, this awoke me from my mid-afternoon torpor with all kinds of questions about why it was acquired, about the artist, about why it was on show, like the Gordigiani, so close to the exit and in a place where it would be easy to overlook as the visitor is leaving. Which of the Egerton’s bought it and where did it originally hang?

Neither the guide book or Edward have any answers. The usual source says that the artist was one of four daughters of the Swedish-born artist Anthony Rubens Montalba and Emeline (née Davies) and that she and her siblings were regular contributors to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition during the 1870s. Perhaps the painting was exhibited there and impressed one of the Egertons enough for a purchase. What impresses me is how it seems to merge the discipline of the still life in the onions with the more formal elements of the portrait with certain aspects of reportage.

The attendants on the whole were pleasingly honest.  The person in the dining room noted that you could see which paintings had been out on loan and by inference are the most important) because they'd been cleaned and restored and it's worth noting that most of the paintings I've mentioned certainly have signs of that.  They are often also asked why some of them are in such murky order (loads of the paintings are dirty with very yellow varnish) and it's usually because the cost of restoration would cost more than the painting is worth.

If all of this has sounded disappointingly cynical it may be because I’ve reached that point of mission creep so many of these projects have had. I look back at my visit to Dunham Massey and it’s certainly true that in comparison on this occasion I wasn’t able to quite simultaneously concentrate on the art and the house, so really didn’t get a sense of the building’s history as I walked through the rooms my eyes darting around looking at the paintings. My reaction on seeing a room without tended to be to move on.

Plus in concentrating on the kinds of works within the field of interest of Edward’s book, I certainly didn’t spend enough time looking at the large collection of lithographs in the servants work spaces or the display dedicated to final house owner Maurice Egerton’s ethnographic collection. An old school adventurer, as well as being a pioneer aviator, automobilist and radio enthusiast, he fought in both wars and travelled the world. There’s a page here featuring commentary from people who work at house and studied his life about his reputation.

As I began the long walk back I decided to try and thumb a lift, something I haven't done in years and as I sheepishly put out limb as a car passed it stopped and was given a pleasant ride back to gate by someone I gathered was a staff member.  He'd noticed how long I'd been there, though I didn't ask if that was unusual, though given the speed with which I'd seen other visitors walking around I suspect that it might.  So it wasn't as much of a long walk as it could be and I was back in Knutsford quicker than I expected but not quick enough to properly look around what looks like a very nice place.

Perhaps I’ll visit again. Perhaps I will. But with a historians eye, to look at the house and grounds as a glimpse into the past and the history of the Egertons, not an art gallery, not itching to pull out my moleskin book every five minutes and make notes in preparation for this ensuing blog post, review thing. Just two venues left, Manchester and the Walker, both art galleries and I’ve no idea how I’m going to react to those with all of their paintings. It took me three hours to get around Tatton Hall and I know that I didn’t see everything.

Dunham Massey.

Art I was told off by one of the attendants when I described Dunham Massey Hall as a stately home. “Not so stately” she whispered to me mischievously. I’m still not sure how else to describe it, given that it’s a rather large house in the middle of an estate. The National Trust website calls it mansion so we'll go with that. Of all the venues I've visited from Edward Morris’s Public Art Collections In North-West England book, it’s the first so-far that I’ve actually wanted to live in, with room after room filled with gorgeous furniture and a genuine sense of lost time. Except I’m not sure where I’d put the telly and there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to plug in a computer.

The mansion was built in 1616 by Sir George Booth, one of James I’s baronettes and across the years has been occupied by various Lords and Earls of Stamford and Warrington before falling into the hands of the National Trust on the death of the 10th Earl Roger Grey in 1976. Since then the house has hardly been changed which means that as you stroll past wood paneling and wallpaper, across wooden floors and worn carpets you can see the modification and developments added by many of owners, all attempting to make it their home.

In many cases the original furniture was kept in state and later generations have simply filled other rooms with their life with areas such as The Great Hall, the Library and the Billiard Room all seeming like separate time zones, the visitor stepping through portals between. At first it’s quite disorientating and there’s certainly too much for the eye to take in, every detail suggesting the tastes and decency of the people who lived here. It’s probably best to concentrate on a particular aspect and focus, which is why it’s helpful that I particular wanted to see the fine art collection.

To an extent it’s a building-shaped family album, with every wall featuring at least one portrait of somebody or other. With the exception of the Romney and the Reynolds, most of these are head and shoulders 'shots' and actually a bit samey and of the kind which would be dashed off quickly by a painter living off the commissions. Since we are seeing generations of the same family though, you can see how painting methods have developed over the centuries, techniques becoming more sophisticated with the passage of time, from rather sombre ladies in black from the Jacobian era to the bright face of the turn of the last century.

You’ll need a good pair of binoculars though, since the best of these portraits tend to be at the opposite ends of large rooms, a frustration of stately homes were security is paramount. There’s an amazing picture of Dorothy Wrighte, the wife of the 3rd Earl of Stamford attributed to Jon Richardson in the Dining Room, with vivid reds in her dress but you can only see it from a small mezzanine leading in from the Stone Parlour. Similarly you need some determination to have decent look at the canvas that dominates the summer parlour, a full length by J. Ernest Breum of Penelope Theobald, Countess of Stamford and her children.

In general though, I think the finest pictures are fairly unheralded and you’d miss most of them if you weren’t looking. On ducking into the entrance hall, the staff are determined to herald you on, but I managed to stop in the doorway of the adjoining courtyard and noticed on either side two paintings by J Boultbee, Denham Oak. These appear to be mirror images of each other, broken trees moodily gathered in dark wood. Look more closely and you’ll notice that actually the artist has painted the same scene from two different directions and if you were to lean the two canvases back to back, you’d have a three hundred and sixty degree view within a two dimensional plain. A.L.R. Ducros’s Temple of Minerva Medici, Rome uses much the same trick showing a ruined dome within a landscape from opposite angles as nature in the form of vines and trees claims this ancient architecture for its own.

Roped off nearby in the parlour you can just about glimpse J Nelson Drummond’s Where Heroes Rest, a poignantly misty view of St. Paul’s Cathedral created in coloured crayon, greens and blues blended to underscore the sense of doom in the title. Along the corridors, don’t miss Le Champ Du Drop D’or, a 1774 engraving at the bottom of a stairwell showing the procession of Henry VIII to meet the French King Francis I, which as well as featuring some wonderfully Hogarthian characterisation amongst hundreds of faces has a dragon, yes, a dragon flying through the sky, something Shakespeare omitted when he got around to writing the King’s stage biography. Further into the house, the weirdest picture by far is the one Edward highlights in his book by Jan Wyck of A Dutch Mastiff with Dunham Massey in the Background. He calls it ‘sensitive and touching’ but it's also scary, a kind of forced perspective suggesting that the dog’s grown to Digby proportions and is preparing to stamp all over the town which also lies in the background, giant paw prints in its wake.

Most of these curiosities aren’t even mentioned in their guide book, which prefers to spend much of its time detailing the silver, jewelery and furniture, the history of the house and its gardens. It does take time though to include John Harris’s birds-eye views of the hall painted in 1751. Predating the game show Treasure Hunt and Google Earth by around two hundred and fifty years these are fascinating descriptions of the grounds of the house and how the 2nd Earl of Warrington very much saw them as an extension of the property, avenues fanning out into his plantations. I presume they’re extrapolations of the plans, that century’s equivalent of the artist impression as seen whenever a new building project is being proposed (see the soon to be opened Liverpool One).

This one of the most idyll places I’ve ever visited. In the gardens alone, despite having spent most of life near Sefton Park I still wasn’t prepared for the freshness of the air and fragrances, the colours and the silences. Or the wildlife; deer walk freely around the estate and I couldn’t help pointing and exclaiming ‘It’s a deer!’ to the staff member I’d luckily got off the bus with and was showing me the way to the house. Ironically, even if much of the collection is slightly obscured from view, it’s relatively expensive to get in and it wasn’t the easiest venue to reach (it took three and a half hours to get home) I think this might well come close to being my favourite of these visits, if only because it far exceeded my expectations.