The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [258]
But pleased as he was by the drawing she had just shown him, this was nothing to the excitement he felt when, having put it away, she stared meditatively out of the window for a moment or two and then enquired: ‘Have you ever considered whether we should build a ruin at Albion House?’
For if there was one thing in the whole of God’s creation that Mr Gilpin loved above even the countryside it was a ruin.
England had plenty of ruins. There were the castles, of course; but better still, thanks to the break with Rome of which Mr Gilpin’s Church of England was the heir, there were all the ruined monasteries and priories. Near the New Forest were Christchurch and Romsey; across Southampton water a small Cistercian house called Netley, whose waterside ruins certainly qualified as picturesque. And then, of course, there was Beaulieu Abbey itself, whose ruins, despite two centuries of being plundered for stone, were still extensive.
Ruins were part of the natural landscape: they seemed to grow out of the soil. They were places of quiet reflection, mysterious yet safe. They were utterly picturesque. A man who owned a ruin owned its antiquity. For if the hand of time had reduced the buildings of these invisible ancestors, nature had joined in and he was the inheritor of the product. Lost ancestors were appeased; time, death, dissolution – even these former enemies became part of his estate. Often as not, he would build his own mansion close beside it. Thus, for the gentle English classes in the late Age of Enlightenment, even chaos and old night could be set, like a sundial, in a garden.
And if, by chance, no ruin stood nearby, then, in an age when good fortune could accomplish anything, you built one!
Some people favoured classical ruins, as if their classical houses were really built upon the site of some Roman imperial palace. Others favoured the Gothic, as the mock medieval was called, which charmingly echoed the taste for Gothic horror novels that were one of the fashionable amusements just then. There was only one problem.
‘To build a ruin, Fanny,’ the vicar cautioned her seriously, ‘is a great expense.’ One needed stone in large quantities, expert masons to carve it, a good antiquarian to design it, a landscape artist. Then the stone needed treating to give it a mouldering appearance; then time, for mosses and ivy and lichens to grow in appropriate places. ‘Don’t attempt the thing, Fanny,’ he warned, ‘if you haven’t thirty thousand pounds to spend.’ It was cheaper to build a fine new house. ‘But there is something else I have often thought you could do, to the house itself when it becomes yours,’ he added cheerfully; for it could properly be admitted that, since old Mr Albion was now nearing his ninetieth year, the time of Fanny becoming mistress of the estate could not be far off.
‘What’s that?’
‘Why, you could make it into a Gothic house. You should turn it into Albion Castle. The situation’, he added persuasively, ‘is perfect.’
It was certainly a very pretty idea. In a journey over to Bristol the previous year, Fanny had seen the thing admirably done. An essentially Georgian house could be remodelled, adding a few embellishments here and there, placing mock battlements round its roof, inserting Gothic tracery in the windows and plaster moulding like fan vaulting in the ceilings of some of the rooms. The result was highly agreeable – a picturesque blend of the Roman and Gothic, which especially appealed to families who wished their house to suggest both medieval ancestry and classical taste, or to echo the atmosphere of some of the grandest aristocratic families whose houses were built around the remains of the abbeys they had acquired in Tudor times. These mock fortresses, however small, were often called castles – which also sounded rather grand. Albion House, with its intimate setting in a clearing among the oaks in the middle of the ancient Forest, would make a charming little castle.
‘It could be done,’ Fanny agreed. ‘Indeed, I really think it should.’ She looked thoughtful. ‘I do not