It’s no good I can’t help another deviation to share some recently discovered old trees – Lord Byron may well have walked or ridden along this avenue.

Kingston Lacy Avenue

If you’ve read my early blogs I have spoken before of my passion for old trees, which may sound silly, and my daughter definitely thinks is silly, but when I see things like this avenue at Kingston Lacy I cannot help but be drawn into imagining who has walked past these trees before me, over the same soil. It’s funny because I don’t think about it in the same way when I walk through the house. Kingston Hall was completed in 1667 and it looks as though this avenue was planted then.

When these trees were perhaps ten years old, the Duke of Ormonde lived in Kingston Hall. He was close to King Charles II, having shared the King’s years of exile and was given his title on the King’s restoration. He was in his 70’s when he lived at Kingston Hall, and would have possibly arrived along this avenue, having lived a tumultuous life, in and out of favour in a back stabbing court and holding Ireland for the Crown in the Civil War. He must have had a lot to contemplate as he looked down upon the avenue from the windows of Kingston Hall in his last days.

Then there is the history of William John Bankes, a second son, born in 1786 (The gentleman who explored Egypt and brought home the obelisk). He later became heir and formed a lifelong friendship with Lord Byron, beginning in 1804, when they met at Trinity College,Cambridge. William competed with Byron for the attention and the hand of Annabella Millbanke. He had his own proposal rejected in 1812. Byron writes of him ‘He is very clever, very original and has a fund of information; he is also very good-natured, but he is not much of a flatterer…’ Annabella was clearly not interested in anything beyond perhaps encouraging his adulation and continued attention. ‘One of my smiles would encourage him, but I am niggardly in my glances.’

Of course Byron was not so lacking in flattery. All I have read of him and the letters he has written show a very intelligent man who was extremely capable of flirtation, manipulation and seduction. I would say, if he wished to, he knew how to charm people. We certainly know he had a gift with words. He married Annabella in 1815, after she fell for his fame following the publication of Childe Harold – she read a copy Byron gave to William and William loaned to her. Annabella wrote to Byron then, ‘I am afraid he will hear of us with pain, yet he cannot lose hope, for I never allowed it to exist’.

In an earlier post I showed this picture of the pelisse Annabella is believed to have worn on her departure for her honeymoon, following her marriage to Lord Byron, it is in the possession of the Fashion museum inBath.

I can only wonder if either Byron or Annabella travelled along this avenue, on foot, by horse or carriage. I think there are strong odds that Byron did, as his friendship with William Bankes lasted so many years even surviving his failed marriage to Annabella, though Byron had fled England after this.

Stourhead

Then there are my favourite trees from Stourhead, which out date the Georgian house by centuries, it is believed they may be a 1000 years old, which means they have stood along this entrance way since the medieval period. An army of knights may have ridden past here, escorting carts piled high with household belongs perhaps, as the families moved from residence to residence – their tack jangling, the sound of the horses hooves a low thunder and the bright colours of their clothing and heraldry tabards and banners fluttering in the breeze. Yes, I can imagine it. I have spoken of them before, but now I have a picture.

Old Wardour Yew Alley

My last find however was at Old Wardour, last week. This alley of yew trees was planted in 1730, along a surviving terrace from the second era of the ruins as an element of a ‘formal’ pleasure garden. The terraces had railings along their edge when established and steps. This one overlooked a bowling green, with the ruins as its backdrop. My imagination of course pictures the gentlemen who must have climbed the ruins and engraved their names walking along beside these trees, perhaps flattering a woman, Byronic style. And notably the greatest amount of graffiti is in the entrance facing the site of the bowling green which would match the date of this formal garden. Perhaps these were carved as they waited for their turn or watched a game of bowls.

Jane Lark is a writer of authentic, passionate and emotional love stories.

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Prior Park’s Grotto and Graffiti

The best folly in Prior Park has not survived the passage of time well. It is the Grotto. See these links to get a glimpse of the Prior Park Grotto. Prior Park Grotto 1, Picture 2,

As I said last week, Ralph Allen owned and designed Prior Park with his friend, the poet, Alexander Pope, and undoubtedly the grotto was developed with Alexander’s influence due to its similarity to the one in Alexander’s property in Twickenham.

The development of Alexander’s own grotto took a lifetime. He gained permission to tunnel beneath the road in Twickenham, having built a Palladian Villa facing the river so that he might develop a garden on the far side. And here he built his best grotto, which was out of sheer fortune blessed by a spring which he describes in a letter in 1725,

‘I have put the last hand to my works…happily finishing the subterraneous Way and Grotto: I then found a spring of the clearest water, which falls in a perpetual Rill, that echoes thru’ the Cavern day and night. …When you shut the Doors of this Grotto, it becomes on the instant, from a luminous Room, a Camera Obscura, on the walls of which all the objects of the River, Hills, Woods, and Boats, are forming a moving Picture…And when you have a mind to light it up, it affords you a very different Scene: it is finished with Shells interspersed with Pieces of Looking-glass in angular Forms…at which when a Lamp…is hung in the Middle, a thousand pointed Rays glitter and are reflected over the place.’

It was never finished, because of the eclectic nature of the grotto – he was constantly adding things to it.

It became a mixture of two 18^th century gentlemanly pursuits, one to build and design and one to collect precious things.

So much so that Alexander changed the description of his grotto to a museum of mineralogy and mining as he filled it with precious stones from Cornwall, fossils, a stalagmite from Wookey Hole and stone from across the globe, including a section of basalt from the Giant’s Causeway,Ireland.

And as you can see from the links to the pictures of Prior Park’s Grotto above, Ralph Allen’s Grotto mimicked this, with its intact eclectic floor of ammonites, crushed bone and pebbles.

The Grotto at Prior Park was built about 1740 and was Lady Elizabeth Allen’s retreat.

Her beloved dog, a Great Dane named ‘Miss Bounce’, given to her by Alexander Pope in 1739, and named after Alexander’s own Great Dane, is buried beneath the floor. Her epitaph survives;

‘Weep not, Tread lightly my grave, Call me Pet.’

Prior Park’s grotto was described in 1836 by a student of the Seminary Prior Park had become;

‘the roof and sides of this sweet retreat presented to the eye such a dazzling assemblage shells, fossils, minerals etc as perfectly astonished us,… The floor was almost as beautiful as the roof, being composed of a curious kind of stone perforated and inlaid with pie cones, fragments of bone etc, arranged in tasteful forms and the whole place exhibiting such a profusion of ornament and such a combination of taste and skill as I had never before witnessed.’

And so to another of my secret fascinations – historic graffiti.

The best graffiti I have seen is in the Tower of London, and dates from the Tudor times of King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I, when men were locked away for months to years and had numerous hours to carve elaborate graffiti in the tower’s walls.

It inspires my imagination to picture the person seated or standing there carving it, and makes me wonder what their story was – what their history was.

I am sure that Prior Park’s transformation from a family home to a Seminary, and later a Roman Catholic public school, following Ralph Allen’s death in 1764, explains the graffiti at Prior Park, as it crudely defaces the Palladian Bridge.

Yet, despite the fact that it despoils the soft Bath stone façade it is still fascinating to think of the 19^th century students, gossiping, laughing and misbehaving as they carved their marks.

Or perhaps they were alone, silent and contemplative as they carved their name to memory, as previously Pope must have once sat in the garden and silently crafted poetry. Images of the graffiti, spanning centuries.