2 June 2016 - Choller Farm, Barnsham, near Arundel, West Sussex

It was still windy when we rose, but there was no sign of rain. We set off early, heading north up the A29 through Pullborough, Billingshurst, soon reaching the small and delightful village of Christ’s Hospital, an outlying village of Horsham, that a market town of over 55,500 people, situated on the upper reaches of the River Arun. The village is made up mainly of a co-educational independent day and boarding school with a Royal Charter. It was here our son, Kit, and his wife lived and commuted to work outside the village, and while I had seen photos of the place when they were here, there is nothing like seeing the place for yourself. We also managed to find Kit’s place of work in a village further out from Horsham, one that seems to be mainly all about light industry. That too was good to see; we drove about the open sheds; I am sure the working folk wondered who these weird snoopers were.

Still south of Horsham, we saw little point in heading up into the city to explore, so we headed south west to Petworth, another planned destination. Petworth House is one of the south-east’s most impressive stately homes. Built in the late seventeenth century, the house contains an outstanding art collection including paintings by Van Dyck, Titian, Gainsborough, Bosch, Reynolds, Blake and Turner, the latter a regular visitor to the house in the early nineteenth century. 

The property was gifted to the National Trust in 1947 for the most common reason, to side step death duties. It was one of the very early such gifts, when the whole practice was still new. The arrangement between the Trust and the donor family allowed for the family to remain in residence in a good half of the house along with an adjacent 17 acres or so in perpetuity, unlike later arrangements that allowed only for the surviving donor to remain in residence. Ickworth House, just out of Bury St Edmund, has a similar set up; very convenient for the resident family but not so good for the Trust.

The house is a late 17^th century Grade I listed country house, rebuilt in 1688 by Charles Seymour, 6^th Duke of Somerset. It remained in the Percy family line, albeit slipping across through the female lines of marriage, to the current resident Max Wyndam, Lord Egremont. The original grounds were very formal until the famous Capability Brown was commissioned to remodel the gardens and the deer park.

A good part of the house was never actually lived in, but used as a show piece to impress guests. The  collection of art and other treasures was housed, as it is today, in massive galley type rooms. The Grand Staircase is covered in wall and ceiling paintings by Louis Laguerre, and the North Gallery is littered with statues, everything quite amazing and all a bit much.

We spent time wandering through the Servant’s Quarters and kitchens, the latter set up with all the equipment that would have been used in the 1870s, and then after lunch we walked over part of the seven hundred acre park, up and down hills, through pockets of wood, and along the side of the two manmade lakes. Petworth really is fabulous!  

This year is the three hundredth anniversary of Capability Brown’s birth; this pops up in our Caravan Club magazines and those pertaining to stately homes. We will visit other places he has placed his mark, so he is worth explaining.

Lancelot “Capability” Brown (1716 – 1783) was one of the most prolific landscape designers the United Kingdom has ever known, and certainly the most famous. By radically reshaping large country estates, he changed the face of the nation forever. His clients and employers included the rich and famous; six prime ministers, half the House of Lords and even King George III. Working on an immense scale, Brown replaced formal geometric designs with a style that was much more naturalistic; sweeping lawns, serpentine lakes and contoured land dotted with trees.

Though Capability Brown was to become the leading light of British garden design, his beginnings were humble. Born into a relatively poor family in the small village of Kirkharle, Northumberland, he attended school in nearby Cambo and then trained as a gardener. In the 1740s Brown landed the job of Head Gardener at what was then England’s most famous garden, Stowe in Buckinghamshire.

Not everyone approved of his approach, In fact, some saw his uprooting of traditional formal gardens to make what was for “natural” landscapes, as an act of vandalism. But for Brown, designed gardens were only truly beautiful if they mimicked nature. If people saw raw nature in the features he’d engineered, that’s when he’d consider his work a success. His revolutionary style set a trend for eighteenth century gardens throughout Europe and beyond.

Petworth House

With Petworth, Brown went so far as to remove tilled fields and half the medieval village of Tillington. There seems to be no record of what became of the displaced residents, only of the end result that was so admired by the elite who allowed this all to happen.

After five hours exploring the property, we headed south to Arundel, that mentioned yesterday and today fitting into our schedule. We parked on the top of the hill near the Arundel Cathedral, constructed by Henry, 15th Duke of Norfolk and completed in 1873. It is the seat of the Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton and each year celebrates the feast of Corpus Christi with a floral carpet up the central aisle as seen by the Duke in the Italian town of Genzano. A photo board in the church explains and demonstrates how this is done within a narrow time schedule, and records the range of shows over several years.

Arundel Cathedral

We walked down through the town, laid out on the steep slopes, past the massive castle standing like a fairy castle on the hill and down to the River.

We were glad we had come to Arundel, glad to have spent a good part of the day at Petworth, and glad we had driven further north to check out Christ’s Hospital and Slinfold.We headed home to prepare dinner and finish it with an apple pie bought in a supermarket at Billingshurst, where we had also managed to pick up some extra “smalls” to see us through until the next round of laundry, a dictionary and a tube of silicone to do that dent fix.