Montacute House
Montacute House is a mansion in Somerset , United Kingdom . The building, classified as a Category I cultural monument, is located on the outskirts of the village of Montacute about six kilometers west of Yeovil and is considered a masterpiece of Elizabethan architecture .
history
Montacute originally referred to a Cluniac abbey that was dissolved under Henry VIII and got its name from the location below the conical hill (Latin Mons acutus) St. Michael's Hill . Even before 1466 there was a Phelips family in the village of Montacute. Presumably in 1588 Edward Phelips , who had become wealthy through inheritance and through his position as a legal scholar at the royal court, began building a country estate in his home village. The construction was completed around 1601 and served as the family's country residence until 1911. As a result, the property was rented several times, including from 1915 to 1925 to Lord Curzon . In 1929 the mansion was offered for demolition. Ernest Edward Cook , a grandson of tourism pioneer Thomas Cook, saved the derelict property. He donated the funds for the purchase through the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings , which acquired the building in 1931 for only £ 5,882 and donated it to the National Trust . Montacute House became the first large garden to be taken over by the National Trust. During the Second World War, the house served as military quarters. After the war, the National Trust was able to renovate the house thanks to numerous donations. The house and gardens can be viewed from March to October.
investment
Mansion
The mansion was believed to have been built under the supervision of master bricklayer William Arnold and cost around £ 20,000 at the time. The house was built from large blocks of coarse, gold-colored limestone from the quarries of Ham Hill near Montacute. Material from the buildings of the dissolved abbey in the village was also reused in the construction. The elongated three-story building has an H-shaped floor plan. The east facade was designed as the main facade and is provided with a column-framed portal, ornamental gables, tall chimneys, statues of the Nine Good Heroes and balustrades. The house is very richly windowed for the time, the windows have small, lead-framed panes, most of which date from the time it was built.
From 1785 to 1787, the façade of the demolished Clifton Maybank House in Yeovil was placed in front of the west façade so that the interconnected rooms can be individually accessed through a separate corridor. The main entrance was moved to this side. The facade of the Clifton Maybank House is also made of Ham Hill stone and originally dates from the mid-16th century.
Interior
The main rooms are still furnished with valuable furniture from the time it was built. On the third floor is the Long Gallery , which is 52 meters long and is considered the longest preserved Long Gallery in England. The gallery and the other rooms serve as an exhibition space for more than one hundred portraits from the Tudor and Stuart periods, which are on permanent loan from the National Portrait Gallery in Montacute House and which are considered to be the largest publicly exhibited portrait collection of this era.
garden
Even when it was built, the manor house was surrounded by courtyards, gardens and an orchard. Despite several redesigns and, most recently, considerable damage from military vehicles during billeting in the Second World War, the basic structures of today's 4.8 hectare garden have been preserved.
The former entrance courtyard now forms the eastern garden. The surrounding walls, balustrades crowned by obelisks and two pavilions have been preserved from Elizabethan times . The garden opens onto the avenue of lime trees, which was the original driveway to the manor house. The northern parterre garden was laid out around 1760 at the latest, and it received its current form around 1850. It consists of square beds around a central well and is framed by conical yew trees and leather-leaved hawthorn . The orangery was built in 1848. On the piece of lawn south of the house, known as Cedar Lawn , there are two Arizona cypresses , which are considered the largest in England, and a sweet chestnut . The piece of lawn is surrounded by old, wavy cut yew hedges, which were given their unusual shape after heavy snow damage in the winter of 1947. The main driveway from the west was laid out around 1785 and is lined with 96 yew trees.
Montacute House in the movie
The house and garden formed the backdrops for several films, among others
- Sense and sensuality
- Elizabeth
- The Baskerville Dog
- Wallace & Gromit - On the hunt for the giant rabbit
- and The Libertine with Johnny Depp .
Web links
- National Trust: Montacute House
- National Heritage: Building Specifications
Individual evidence
- ^ The National Heritage List: Montacute House. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on May 2, 2014 ; Retrieved February 29, 2012 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ National Trust: Montacute House. Retrieved February 19, 2014 .
- ^ John Sales: Learning by experience. In: Fiona Reynolds (Ed.): Rooted in History. Studies in Garden Conservation. The National Trust, London 2001, p. 21.
- ↑ Visit Somerset: Montacute. (No longer available online.) Formerly in the original ; Retrieved February 29, 2012 . ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Patrick Taylor: English Gardens: Landscape Parks and Cottage Gardens in Great Britain and Ireland. Dorling Kindersley, Starnberg 1993, ISBN 3-8310-0781-0 , p. 53f.
- ↑ Where did they film that? Montacute House. Retrieved February 19, 2014 .
Coordinates: 50 ° 57 ′ 8.6 " N , 2 ° 42 ′ 57.6" W.