I failed to mention
that we are camped immediately next door to a commercial fun fair named
Gulliver’s Land which caters principally for families with children between two
and thirteen years of age. This means that there should not, in principal, be
groups of loud uncouth youths terrorising the public. Certainly from our posse
in the camp, we are able to hear the childish screams of delight or terror on
the roller coaster arrangement that can be glimpsed through a gap above the
trees. It means too that this camping ground must surely be an excellent base
from which to entertain school holiday children, and even more so if the family
come with their bicycles and make the most of the hundreds of kilometres of
cycling trails there are round and about this basically flat city.
For us, more set on
avoiding the exuberance of families and their school age children, we decided
that today would be a good day to spend at Wobern Abbey, the family home of the
15th Duke and Duchess of Bedford on the border between Bedfordshire
and Buckinghamshire which has been open to the public since 1955.
The Abbey and the
surrounding lands was set out and founded as a Cistercian abbey in 1145. It was
taken by Henry VIII during the dissolution and held by the crown until it was
given to John Russel, 1st Earl of Bedford in 1547. The Abbey was
rebuilt roughly on the footprint of the abbey, starting in 1744 for the 4th
Duke.
The Russels have
featured in English history through the decades as Prime Ministers, Ambassadors,
Lord High Admirals and philosophers although not all of these the direct line
through the Earls to the Dukes.
In more recent times,
following the Second World War, dry rot was discovered and half the Abbey was
subsequently demolished. When the 12th Duke died in 1953, his son
the 13th Duke was up for heavy death duties. Instead of handing the
family estates over to the National Trust, assuming the Trust had wanted to
burden itself with the property, he kept ownership and opened the Abbey to the
public for the first time, soon adding other channels of income; the Woburn
Safari Park, a venue for conferences and weddings, and in August 1967 played
host to the “Festival of the Flower Children”, a love-in or music festival,
that my dear husband attended in his tender years and remembered the Abbey for.
There are twenty two
rooms open to view, filled with family portraits celebrating the power and
lineage of aristocrats, as well as the largest private collection of Venetian
views painted by Canaletto, specially commissioned by the Duke of the day. Artists
work include those by Gainsborough, Rembrandt, Reynolds and Van Dyck, and
rather uniquely a collection of pencil works by Queen Victoria and her beloved
Prince Albert.
In the rooms beneath
the ground floor, treasures fill secure cabinets: china dinner sets, silver and
silver-gilt items, glassware, very little of it to my taste, but all of it
warranting kudos for the craftsmanship. And as a final treat for the visitor,
the last room beneath the exit level is a grotto, a rather hideous but fascinating
room built in the early 17th century, designed as an undersea cavern
which originally included a rockwork niche animated with dripping water as if
in a real cave. The walls and curved ceilings are lined with rows of
symmetrical and evenly sized shells; it reminded me of a kitsch shell house
once open to the public in the far south of New Zealand’s South Island. But
tastes are varied and some will surely be mesmerised by this cleverly
constructed eyesore.
Aside from this,
there are twenty eight acres of beautiful and historic gardens which kept our
attention for almost two hours, more an expansive arboretum than formal flower
gardens.
When Francis, the 5th
Duke of Bedford, returned from a Grand Tour of Europe in 1787, he began grand improvements to the forty two acres
around the abbey. The famed Capability Brown, of whom I wrote much in my
postings last year had died in 1783 and a gap was left in the market as far as
guidance to the rich for reshaping their landscapes.
Humphry Repton was
born in 1752 in Bury St Edmunds, our own official address while we are here in
England. By 1783 he was on the bones of his bottom, with a wife and seven
children to feed, and the income from his artworks not balancing the budget. He
decided to earn a living as a professional landscape gardener, and for the next
thirty years he travelled up to six hundred miles a month and submitted over
four hundred designs for different clients. After a serious carriage accident
in 1811, Repton found travelling very hard and carried on working from a bath
chair before finally retiring in 1816. He died in 1818 aged sixty six.
In 1804 Repton was
commissioned by the 6th Duke of Bedford to redevelop the gardens and
parklands of Woburn Abbey, which over the past 260 years had been transformed
from a monastery to a palatial family home. While some of Repton’s ideas proved
too fanciful for the 6th Duke and Duchess, it is Repton who is given
the credit for the gardens and parklands of Woburn.
We had driven through
the property across beautiful tree scattered grassland, populated by great
herds of deer, truly a picturesque introduction to our day. Through the many
generations, the Russels had exhibited a great interest in the natural world
and one of the many interesting stories of the conservation world belongs to
the Dukes of Bedford.
In the middle of the
19th century, the Roman Catholic Church sent missionaries to China
to save souls, which probably did account in part to the large number of
Christians who exist in China today. But more importantly, or interestingly, it
was Pere Armand David who discovered a tiny herd of rare deer, known as
Milu, in
the Emperor’s private game park near Beijing, deer that had not been
seen in the wild for 1,500 years (a claim that seems rather without basis).
Intrigued by their unusual features, antlers like deer, a head like a horse,
hooves of a cow, and tail like a donkey, all of which gave rise to the name
Milu, meaning “the four unlikes”, he returned to France with a hides,
where they were classified by a naturalist at the Natural History Museum and
named after the missionary, Pere David’s Deer. Interestingly during Pere
David’s twelve years in China, he discovered fifty eight species of birds, one
hundred species of insects and several mammals including the Giant Panda and
the Golden Monkey.
In 1895 the walls of
the Emperor’s Royal Hunting Ground were destroyed in a heavy flood, and most of
the deer either escaped and were killed and eaten by starving peasants. Fewer
than thirty remained, but then in 1900, during the Boxer Rebellion, the last of
these were killed and eaten by the troops who occupied the garden.
However there were
still some of these deer elsewhere in the world, having been gifted to heads of
state or illegally transported to Europe for exhibition or breeding. Herbandt
Russell, 11th Duke of Bedford made a concentrated effort to gather
the survivors together on his property at Woburn in an effort to conserve the
species. This was easier said than done, especially during the difficult years
of the 19th century World Wars, however the Russells were
determined, and from the original gene pool of just eighteen, the herd slowly
increased and by 1989 there were 1600
head in the Wobern Deer Park. In 1985, twenty Milu deer were repatriated to
China, released into the Nan Haizi Milu Park in Beijing, and a similar number
again in 1987. Today there are over 5,000 Pere David’s or Milu deer in the
world, thanks to the efforts of the Dukes of Bedford and all those who
facilitated a process not only fraught with natural obstacles, but political
and cultural as well.
Needless to say we enjoyed
our five hours at Woburn Abbey, and found much to interest us, much more than I
have recounted here. Like Chatsworth and Hatfield House, this is a private
attraction and does cost, but the residents of the Abbey, past and
present, have played significant parts in history, some having been beheaded
for their efforts, and most walking hand in hand with the royals of the land. It
is therefore an important part of England’s history and I was very glad we had
set aside a day to visit.
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