The photographs were taken at Coughton Court in Warwickshire, home of the Throckmortons, a one time Recusant family with connections to the Gunpowder Plot.
The room guide told me the key was left over from a children's treasure hunt (the family still live in a wing of the house and make use of the rest out of hours).
The Throckmortons. Wouldn't sound more exotic had you made it up. That's a great name :-))
ReplyDeleteI really like the entangled rope by the window, the subtle light and the shapes. This one and the branches growing into each other (some of them forced, some not). Nice choice to illustrate a treasure hunt!
These National Trust heritage mansions bring out the Flickr hordes in respectful droves, so it's refreshing to get a micro view wherein the Disno-Commodo-Gentrification retreats into the hoary mould of the mind for a moment.
ReplyDeleteThose Throckmortons over the three Tudor generations would have had to had to toe a fine line certainly, and this would have retarded their Development schemes for the grounds a bit, now and again.
Still the stately pile retains a phantasmagoric display of its rooftop moulds and fungi (aka the Colours of Time) when viewed by kaleidoscopic chromatic enhancement through the eye of Le Dieu de Photoshoppe.)
And now it seems someone has told the Gaffer there's still a priest hole hid hereabouts, so he's out with his camping gear to keep an eye cocked... for Papists perhaps, or any stray bit of the other...?)
Marie,
ReplyDeleteThe window and cord: it's always a pleasure to some across a picture as if it were waiting around the corner from you. "Some of them forced, some not": this approach to gardening catches something of the dialectic of resistance and compliance that must have shaped their lives.
TC,
These places are always chock full of the camera-wielding bourgeoisie. The only thing that sets me apart is the hand-me-down digital job from the old man. That, and I hope, a good eye for detail.
Le Dieu de Photoshoppe offers the milk of divine kindness generously even if almost every pint delivered appears to be homogenized.
The walled garden is pretty impressive. Someone of the current generation has a talent for horticulture.
I wouldn't want to mess with the Gaffer. Looks like he might be handy with that staff of his.
Some strains are meant to run against the grain always, malgré all thought of the potentially inconvenient practical Consequences (e.g. being publicly castrated, disemboweled & c. , with all the relatives watching). But religious persecution after all famously only confirms Faith and Belief in the persecuted, indeed does so still in some quarters -- as is of course obvious to those who would read History as an as yet unfinished Book. (It's rumoured some actually did so read it, before the race turned into a flock of administered Smartphone sheep, anxiously responsive to each fresh totalitarian call for Security, after each successive numerological pretext-slogan -- 9/11, 7/7 & c.) There is an interesting complexity to real human affairs when seen in any light of close historical attention. I think those proud Tudor Catholic families, whether in the ferocity of their courtly striving to retain a power that would have seemed to them their entitlement from "time immemorial", or equally and indeed at the same historical moment from the closeted depths of their priest's holes, would have understood the meaning of Terror -- not to mention Resistance, and Realpolitik -- more intensely and palpably than anyone now living could ever hope to do.
ReplyDeleteSo who knows what secrets those mouldering piles keep, well out of sight of the pleasant rubbernecking tourist hordes...