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Post by davidjp on Nov 10, 2020 12:13:47 GMT -5
What a wonderful house/mansion that must have been in it's day! If walls could talk.... It is quite a place, yours for only 4.5 million a few years ago with about 300 acres of farmland, a farmhouse and a bunch of stable buildings that had all been converted into flats. The interesting bit that whilst that building is very beautiful and I love that style its the new house, built in early 1700's. The house before that had been on that site since 1100. So its a Georgian makeover sort of like the TV show "stay or list it" circa 18th century. At that time they employed a very famous landscape gardener called capability brown, known for large landscapes and placing of trees etc. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_BrownI bet actually now is when that landscape is probably at its full potential as most of the trees nearby, which are beech and other hardwoods are just about now reaching their full maturity. They also do some pretty fabulous open air concerts there in the summer The other poignant bit about that house is if you go down into the kitchen/ servants areas they are all linked by stone stairs and the stone staircase is all worn away in the middle after countless generations of servants shoes were busily going up and down, wearing down the stairs. Often wonder if one of my ancestors was one of them.
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Post by emmsmommy on Nov 11, 2020 13:27:43 GMT -5
Often wonder if one of my ancestors was one of them. davidjp, I recently found out I descend from a well-to-do English family that was described as having noble blood, but not royalty, yet they appeared to have a castle-like dwelling. The ironic thing is that generations of that side of the family have lived here in absolute poverty during from the late 1700s to the early 1900s, with many children not making it to adulthood. I wonder what my noble ancestors would have thought, knowing that some of their descendants would indeed end up as servants. My great-grandmother "went into service" as she put it at sixteen years old. One of her older sisters was employed as a housekeeper and died of what we would now refer to as food poisoning in 1905, just a few weeks after her sixteenth birthday. I've heard of Capability Brown before. I think there was a BBC mini series of sorts that explored each century of English gardens. Can't remember the name, but I know it was on YouTube at one time as that's where I watched it.
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Post by tom π on Nov 11, 2020 13:49:18 GMT -5
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Post by emmsmommy on Nov 11, 2020 14:28:30 GMT -5
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Post by emmsmommy on Nov 25, 2020 21:29:02 GMT -5
davidjp, Thanks so much for recommending the Heligan documentary. Finally finished watching it today while hubby was in therapy.
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