Brideshead Visited
Convoluted inspiration for today's trip. A 2 mile jaunt across the plains below the Malvern Hills can hardly be described as a walk.
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| Today's Walking |
The inspiration? I thought the Pevsner Guide to Worcestershire would help with my understanding of the county. As Jonathan Meades stated in an associated BBC documentary - Pevsner is really just a book of lists.
Madresfield Court piqued my interest. I have walked on the footpaths surrounding it many times but never visited. The documentary told me the house, and the family, was the inspiration for the Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited. I've unsuccessfully read Waugh before but gave the 1980s TV show and the 2008 film a watch. 10 hours vs. 2 hours but both entertaining enough.
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| Madresfield Court |
The house is in private ownership - and has been for centuries - but they do have open days in the summer. £17 invested and a further £6 in takeaway cake. I am signed up for my latest early-retirement attempt at entertainment. Visiting Stately Homes.
Who would have predicted it?
It's a 90 minute tour of a house packed to the rafters with better quality tat than I have amassed over the years. They have gorilla skeletons, skinned tigers and tortoiseshell sideboards. I have the world's finest collection of walking books and Windows 6.1 Mobile phones.
Of all the rooms, it is the chapel that is most impressive. Access via the library (smelled wonderful), it is quite the spectacle of art and god's glory.
We can compare Waugh's description, delivered as Charles Ryder is shown around by the dipsomaniac, doomed homosexual, teddy-bear-carrying Sebastian Flyte, with Pevsner's characteristically matter-of-fact inventory;
One of these was the chapel. We entered it by the public porch (another door led direct to the house); Sebastian dipped his fingers in the water stoup, crossed himself, and genuflected; I copied him. ‘Why do you do that?’ he asked crossly.
‘Just good manners.’
‘Well, you needn’t on my account. You wanted to do sightseeing; how about this?’
The whole interior had been gutted, elaborately refurnished and redecorated in the arts-and-crafts style of the last decade of the nineteenth century. Angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler-roses, flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts in Celtic script, saints in armour, covered the walls in an intricate pattern of clear, bright colours. There was a triptych of pale oak, carved so as to give it the peculiar property of seeming to have been moulded in Plasticine. The sanctuary lamp and all the metal furniture were of bronze, hand-beaten to the patina of a pock-marked skin; the altar steps had a carpet of grass-green, strewn with white and gold daisies.
‘Golly,’ I said.
Pevsner;
"An exceptionally complete piece of Arts and Crafts decoration of 1902.
The paintings are by A. Payne. The stained glass is by him and others. The triptych is by Charles Gere. The small crucifix and the candlesticks are by A. J. Gaskin... C. R. Ashbee's guild also did woodwork."
Sebastian was based on Hugo Lygon, represented as a child in the chapel. All that money and opportunity and he died at 36, falling off a kerb in Germany. The Lygons seem fully aware of the chance that fate plays in life. There is a huge portrait of the distant commoner from the Black Country, William Jennens. He died in his nineties, with a will that left all his money to his mother. The Lygons, after a court trial recorded by Charles Dickens, were the recipients of a third of his money due one married-in family member being a distant cousin. £800m in today's money.
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| Hugo, pulling the heads off flowers. |
Since retirement, I have been posting a daily tweet of what I have enjoyed that day. Day 712 announced my upcoming visit and the watching of the film.
I think my followers want me to get back to documenting the rough pubs of Cannock.
— Cooking Lager is feeling divisive (@CarpeZytha) June 9, 2026
