Crawfordton House
- Essay in Scottish Baronial
Shaun Castle 27 November 2006
Crawfordton House, Moniaive. Archive sepia postcard.
Crawfordton House, built between 1863 and 1866 for Colonel George Gustavus Walker, is an important essay in Scottish Baronial by prominent Victorian architects Peddie & Kinnear.
As noted by the RCAHMS, “in the mid 19th century, houses by this practice formed part of the new thrust for national romanticism in architecture with references to forms found in the tower houses and castles of the Scottish Renaissance period. The Scottish Baronial style, which was characterised by asymetrical elevations, corbelled turrets and crow-stepped gables, provided the semblance of fortified living on the exterior whilst insisting on the convenience and luxury of Victorian modern living on the interior.”
Crawfordton House is entered via an impressive main staircase - a familiar leitmotif of Peddie & Kinnear - which leads up to the principal rooms on the first floor, and family bedrooms on the second. As common to the period, servants’ quarters and services were set on the ground floor. The garden elevation exudes a Gothic air, with the house originally being the focal point of a picturesque landscape and estate.
Peddie & Kinnear would later develop their signature style at Threave House, and the practice went on to become one of the most prolific in Scottish architectural history, designing hundreds of buildings including churches, banks, offices and hotels, as well as many important public commissions, such as premises for hospitals, schools and town halls.
By World War II, Crawfordton House became a school, establishing an educational tradition at the property which continued until closure this year.
Crawfordton House is for sale through Lakes & Country 01228 516409.
Extracts from the RCAHMS. Full article and details about the Peddie & Kineer Collection available at www.rcahms.gov.uk
Crawfordton House, circa 1960.
From The Francis Frith Collection www.frithphotos.com
Victorian Dream Palaces
Shaun Castle 20 November 2006
Three British Artists: Graham Sutherland, John Piper and Henry Moore
Monday 27 November 2006
Of particular note is the sale of screenprints by John Piper, many drawn from the series ‘Victorian Dream Palaces’.
Though regarded by most as an offical war artist, The British avant-garde artist John Piper (1903-1992) also produced a substantive body of work on the country house which spanned his career.
While even the war was still in progress, Osbert Sitwell had employed Piper to paint views of his family mansion, Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, in the conviction that the end of the country house was inevitable. In visits between 1942-4 Piper painted more than fifty views of the gaunt Georgian house and it desolate temples, lodges and woodland. When the series was exhibited in January 1945, Sitwell introduced the catalogue:
“At the very moment the great English houses, the chief architectural expression of their country, are passing, being wrecked by happy and eager planners, or becoming the sterilised and scionless possessions of the National Trust, a painter has appeared to hand them on to future ages, as Canaletto or Guardi handed on the dying Venice of their day, and with equally immitable art.”
Studying a scene, he chose from its spectrum of colours those which seemed to represent its inner spirit, and intensified them. The pictures are as empty of figures as designs for stage-sets, but he succeeded in projecting a human presence in that intensity of colour.
The artist wrote of Seaton Delaval in 1945: “Ochre and flame-licked, pock-marked and stained in purplish umber and black. .... House and landscape are seared by the the east wind, and riven with fretting industrialism, but they still withstand the noise and neglect, the fires and hauntings of twentieth-century life. Its main block an untenanted stone shell, the Hall is somehow alive, unlike many stately homes”
The Bonhams sale includes Milton Enest Hall, Edttington Park, Flintham Hall, Harlaxton through the gate, Shadwell Park and Wightwick Manor from the ‘Victorian Dream Palaces’ series of 1977, as well as Buckden in a storm (1977), Willington Dovecote (1978), East Barsham Manor (1981), St Helen Hall (1981), Buckden Palace (1982), Carew Castle (1982), and Cannons Asby (1983), and others. Lot estimates are from £300 upwards.
To bid via the internet visit www.bonhams.com
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Lot 183 East Barsham Manor. Screenprint, 1981 | Lot 199 Red House. Screenprint, 1987 | |
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Lot 202 Royal Holloway College. Screenprint, 1981 | Lot 203 Waddeston. Screenprint, 1989 |
Lacy's Lodge
Shaun Castle 14 November 2006
In sightline of the historic monument of Long Meg, Marion Lodge is a fine Georgian farmhouse set in pastoral policies with an exquisite vista of the Eden Valley framed by the Lakeland and Pennine fells beyond.
Formerly part of the Manor of Salkeld and Addingham Parish, it is plausible that the lodge was built during improvements made to the estate by Lieut. Colonel Lacy from 1790, as the property was extant in its current form by the incumbancy of Robert Hodgson at Salkeld Hall in 1836, and clearly titled as Marion Lodge by dissolution of the ancient parish in 1894.
The double pile house has a stairwell running full depth, flanked by symmetrical rooms to front and back in the Georgian manner, and is finished with stone render and projecting bay fenestration to front. Walls of coarse red sandstone, corbelled brick chimney stacks and chamfered jambs to doorways are illustrative of a building built at the vernacular watershed.
Marion Lodge is for sale through Lakes & Country 01228 516409
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Grade II Listed Door
Shaun Castle 13 November 2006
The distinctive ornament found in the former Vicar's study of the Old Vicarage, Edenhall, includes an exquisitely finished door in applied baize, a coarse woolen material something like flannel, dyed red. In addition to its ornamental function, the baize is thought to have been used as a soundproofing device. The listed room also contains finely carved inset bookcasing with red leather shelf curtains and an ornately carved fireplace with surround of Caryatid mouldings.
The Old Vicarage is for sale through Lakes & Country 01228 516409
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Long Meg
Shaun Castle 12 November 2006
Long Meg - postcard circa. 1958
The monument of Long Meg, thought to date from the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age (2000-600 BC), is the third largest stone circle in the British Isles, and the sixth largest in the world.
Occupying a bucolic setting, the site comprises over 60 stones arranged in a rough circle measuring 357 feet by 305 feet, while the eponymous Long Meg - a 12 foot red sandstone monolith - stands a little way outside.
The monument was popularised through accounts of antiquarian travellers, and later, the poetry of Wordsworth and WH Auden.
A weight of Awe not easy to be borne
Fell suddenly upon my spirit, cast
From the dread bosom of the unknown past,
When first I saw the family forlorn;
Speak Thou, whose massy strength and stuture scorn
The power of years - pre-eminent, and placed
Apart, to overlook the circle vast.
Speak Giant-mother! tell it to the Morn,
While she dispels the cumbrious shades of night;
Let the moon hear, emerging from a cloud,
At whose behest uprose on British ground
That Sisterhood in hieroglythic round
Forth-shadowing, some have deemed the infinate
The inviolable God that tamed the proud.
William Wordsworth, 1822
Location and directions Links to this post
Tallantire Hall - WWII Memories
Shaun Castle 08 November 2006
Tallantire Hall - postcard. circa 1905
Extract from WW2 People's War, an archive of World War Two memories - written by the public, gathered by the BBC. Full story is available at bbc.co.uk.
“In July 1940 we were removed to Tallantire Hall near Cockermouth in Cumberland. This was an enormous Victorian house which belonged to Mrs. Barraclough. We all got up at 4.30 and travelled by train to London. We had to cross London by underground. I remember sitting for what seemed like ages on a London platform and the noise of everything was tremendous. We had our names pinned onto us. I was given a pork pie to eat. It was absolutely delicious and I spent years afterwards trying to find one as nice. Never succeeded. Obviously I was starving. We arrived at Carlisle Station late that evening and travelled to Tallantire in a lorry arriving at midnight.
There were no air raids, no bombs but Italian prisoners of war worked for the local farmers. They wore jackets with patches on the back. They were extremely friendly to us children. We had to walk two miles to school in Dovenby and two miles home and thought nothing of it. At first my mother had to make sandwiches for 26 children to take each day but later school dinners were provided. They were dreadful and we were not allowed to leave anything on the plate. The vegetable was boiled nettles which were very dark green and very strong.
The schoolmaster and his wife Mr and Mrs Haston had previously retired but were brought back. The village school had to cope with the addition of 26 children. Our lessons consisted of arithmetic, war geography and singing. Nothing else at all. The Haston's son was killed. In 1944 we moved once again.”
Judy Robson Links to this post
Tallantire Hall - Coat of Arms
Shaun Castle 07 November 2006
The shield shows the arms of BROWNE. This is the shield with three birds in a vertical line down the shield and a lion on left and right sides. These arms were used by the Browne family, seated in Totteridge, Hertfordshire in the time of Henry VIII. Possibly the family's most illustrious branch were the Earls of Kenmare, a title that became extinct in 1952.
John Allen, Armorial Identification Service Links to this post
Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001)
Shaun Castle 06 November 2006
Xenakis is considered to be the most influential composer of the second half of the 20th century. His music is elemental, primordial, yet thoroughly of the present.
Xenakis’s mass conception, and in turn, stochastic music, was based upon what he called a “principle of indeterminism”. The explanation of the world, and consequently of the sound phenomenon that surrounds us, or sound which may be created, required an enlargement of the causal principle, the basis of which is formed by the law of the great numbers.
Natural events, such as the collision of hail with hard surfaces, or the song of cicadas in a summer field are sonic events made out of thousands of isolated sounds: this multitude of sounds, seen as a totality, is a new event. By using the statistical laws of these events, operating at a zero level of causality, Xenakis believed it was possible to create something entirely new that hadn’t existed before, but as with the familiarity of hail on the hard surface, it has the memory of something ancient, a Markov chain.
As the ancient Greeks used the structure of fugue to inform architectural order, Xenakis engaged in the translatability of stochastic method: “coda used in music and architecture are closely linked and can be substituted for one another”. Such cross-fruition emerged between 1948 and 1960 when Xenakis worked in the studio of Le Corbusier, designing in majority part the Couvent de la Tourette and Philips Pavilion. The undulating glass panes devised for the facade of la Tourette were the result of research into rhythmic patterns, whilst in the Philips Pavilion Xenakis realised the basic ideas of Metastasis, the seminal work which launched his new music to the world in 1954.
“His starting-point is not an artificial note that has detached itself from nature in order to give expression to subjectivity, but in an ‘objective’ world-noise, a ‘sound-mass’, which does not bubble up from the heart but comes upon us from outside, like rain or the voice of the wind. This world of noises in Xenakis’s compositions has become ‘beauty’ for me - a beauty without sentimental barbarism and purged of effective dirt” - Milan Kundera
Selected Discography
Synaphai-Aroura-Antikhthon - New Philharmonia Orchestra (explore)
Music for Strings - Ensemble Resonanz (mode 152)
Works for Piano - Aki Takahashi (mode 80)
Ensemble Music 2 - ST-X Ensemble (mode 56)
Kraanerg - ST-X Ensemble (Asphodel)
Iannissimo! - ST-X Ensemble (Vandenburg)
Anastenaria-Troorkh-Ais - Symphonieorchester Des Bayerischen Rundfunks (WWE) Links to this post