In An English Country Garden
A version of the following article was translated into Spanish for Mexican travel magazine Revista Travesias, published February 2005.
*
One of the finest preserved Tudor/Elizabethan mansions in Britain, Montacute is the genuine article. Set on the edge of the Quantock hills just outside of Yeovil in east Somerset, this is England as she is meant to be seen.
The grounds seem so extensive, with so many outbuildings, that it’s an effort to remember that this ‘pile’ was not built as a visitor centre. The information board outside the shop/reception building, lists three walks of around an hour each. It’s not unfeasibly large – the gardens are twenty-five acres, plus extensive grounds and an adjoining park.
Montacute House was built at the end of the sixteenth century for Sir Edward Phelps: lawyer, Speaker for the House of Commons, and Master of the Rolls who represented the prosecution in Guy Fawkes’ trial. The inviting, honey-coloured edifice was constructed of the unique local Ham Hill limestone and has many Renaissance features including a permanent loan of Elizabethan and Jacobean paintings from the National Portrait Gallery. The entire Montacute village is built of the same friendly stone.
As an architectural style, the country house gained pace in the relative wealth and stability of the Tudor age. Here is true English grandeur, but now it is for the masses, since the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings purchased the house in 1931 and passed it to the National Trust.
St Michael’s tower, on a hill overlooking the grounds, was built by the family as a folly; a piece of whimsy and a show of wealth which it is possible to visit.
The earliest English gardens that we know of were Roman. After the Saxons, they became prominent again in the Middle Ages. The house, while exquisite, reflects the Tudor belief in order and rank in nature and society, and this is continued in the gardens; in the Cedar Lawn, pollarded yews line up like soldiers at inspection, and the extensive box-hedged yews are made to form the huge walls of these famous knot gardens; I prefer them free-range. Ivy in the orangery is likewise oddly corralled into mini hedges.
Listening to a national radio station on my drive here, the presenter was asking where the day’s forecast sun actually was; well, this region receives the longest hours of sunshine in the land. Here you will find a fig tree fixed to the wall of an outbuilding, bearing small figs, and a pear tree likewise wired to the house.
The roofs of the two banqueting houses perched on the corners of the East Court garden, are exquisite; Elizabethan architecture is as utterly different from anything else – as other, as that century is utterly gone. And yet they are here, in our century, firmly rooted through time – as though to say “I have my relationship to time sorted – how about you?”
Bats appear at dusk. Watch out for bluebells, primroses and violets in spring. Woodpeckers, too.
Montacute caters well for its one hundred thousand visitors annually, with two outdoor picnic areas and a covered seated barn, a tea house and a separate restaurant.
