17 May: Ride the White Horse

UFFINGTONCHASTLETON -- SEZINCOTE

More village names: Nimlet (I have a very vivid image of this place’s inhabitants), Pennsylvania (VERY disorienting to encounter this roadsign), the frank and candid Cold Ashton, Winey, Upper and Lower Oddington, Upper and Lower Slaughter, Upper and Lower Swell (“It’s always Swell in Swell!”), Darlingscott (“I told you not to call me that in public!”) Wimpstone and Studley Green. Only a few peculiar caution signs – but what the hell is an adverse camber? Rising bollards sounds rude, while the Spread Eagle Inn definitely is… I deeply regret not being able to patronize the Hubbly Bubbly Bar.

It was overcast and moderately windy when I got to the Uffington White Horse . It’s the oldest chalk figure in Britain. You scuff out through a pasture of suspicious sheep. The grass is hanging on for dear life, unable to get a deep grip on the chalk. What the overhead shots of the figure don’t show is how sensuously the lines of the horse follow the natural curves of the hillside. It was so beautiful. There was next to no one there – one couple were picnicking much farther up the hill, and there were the faint cries of schoolchildren brought by the wind from the other side, but otherwise completely deserted. At the foot of the hill is a green valley called the Manger, for that is where the White Horse goes down to feed at night. Next to the valley is Dragon Hill – where St. George killed the dragon. There’s a bare patch on top – the story is, the dragon’s blood was so poisonous, nothing will ever grow there again.

I then headed toward Moreton-on-Marsh, where Chastleton House and Sezincote are both close to. Chastleton came into the hands of the Trust in 1991 – until that time, it’s been lived in by the same family for some 400-odd years. The original owners were the Catesbys, who were Catholics or Catholic supporters – the Catesby of that date got unfortunately entangled with the Earl of Essex’s rebellion, for which he was lucky to get off with a substantial fine of four thousand pounds. He managed to borrow five thousand pounds from a Mr. Jones, with the house as security. And what did he do with the leftover one thousand pounds? Invested in a suuurrre thing – the Gunpowder Plot.

At which point, everyone in the room listening to this story fell to the floor laughing. “Some people never learn,” I gasped. So snickety snick – Catesby lost his head (which didn’t seem to be doing him much good anyway), and Mr. Jones found himself minus five thousand pounds, but plus one Jacobean manor house. So to convince people that the Jones family had been at Chastleton since the Conquest, he began to antiquify it. “Like someone building a Victorian mansion today,” I said. “Yes,” said the room steward, “with a Victorian jacuzzi.” Because they didn’t have any cash money left, to create their “antiques” the climbing Joneses bought all sorts of junky old furniture and tried to put bits of it together – I was shown a bedstead where one of the posts has a keyhole in it. The house is not in good shape – every floorboard creaks, and the rooms are full of damp and must. The last Jones was an elderly lady without much funds who tried to hold on as long as she could but had no capital to effect repairs. The Trust folks aren’t sure if they’re going to be able to preserve it or keep it open.

It’s also where the rules of modern croquet were codified.

The fabled Jacobean topiary wasn’t so fantastic, but it was nice to be out in the fresh air a bit. But it would be a near thing if I got to Sezincote on time. So of course I got lost… and the signage was so discreet, I passed it once when I actually did zero in on it. It was getting ready to rain, and my legs were heavy as lead. “This had better be good.”

And it was FABULOUS. The first thing I see from the bridge is the Serpent Pool – a beautiful lake-lette with floating lilies and huge bluegreen hostas and shoals of irises… and a big, iron three-headed snake climbing a pole in the center. That’s what I call Art!

The house was magnificently mad. What the guy wanted was an Indian mansion, and that’s what he got. There were life-sized baby elephants and lovely iron bulls on the bridge… and real cows grazing on the lawns. The gardens were just insanely beautiful, following the stream down to another small lake and back again. Oh, who can describe gardens properly? It’s as much about smell and the sound of wind and how you turn and see a new prospect open up suddenly from behind a tree. Sezincote was wholly satisfying – the garden I most covet for myself.

Then I had a good, long round of getting lost. Eventually fetched up at Ettington Park… which is so posh, it’s kind of ridiculous. Suave young Middle Eastern men in dark suits wrenched my luggage from me as I crossed the threshold. The process of checking in was as elaborate as a pavane. Would Madame require a wake-up call? A drink? Turn-down service? A newspaper in the morning? A tail feather from a phoenix? Non? I was turned over to the ministrations of a porter – Dutch, I think – who stopped at several doors, gestured in and murmured something unintelligibly. I nodded and smiled. For all I knew, we may have gone through some primitive marriage ceremony. We trudged uphill, downhill, across, down and up again, to arrive at Room 32.

Clearly, the Ettington caters mostly to gentlemen – the toiletries in the bathroom smell good, but smell male – like what your dad would smell like on his way to an awards banquet. There are eight channels on the TV, and four of them are cricket. Most of the surfaces in the room are covered with stuff – mineral water, glasses, ice bucket, little dish of caramels wrapped in foil, Country Life magazines, potpourri, tissue – there’s hardly room to put down your keys. And there are no drawers – half the armoire is taken up with tea-making paraphernalia (extra biscuits and two different kinds of non-dairy creamer) and isn’t long enough to accommodate a full-length dress. There are also explanatory cards everywhere, in addition to the Directory of Hotel Services, as if you’re not to be trusted to know how to cope with this relentless barrage of hospitality. I felt like Ellie Mae.

Notwithstanding, I ordered a snack from room service – I was curious to see what they’d make of a hamburger – excuse me, lean Scottish beef burger. It arrived with a little porcelain dish of ketchup. “Gooooolly!” Turn-down service relieved me of my laundry, which is considerable – I tried not to add up the figures on the laundry bill tally. The rich are different from you and me – they get constantly overcharged. You begin to see why celebrity’s exes need $30,000 a month for expenses.

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