SOMERSET, England — It was one thing when deer began roaming
around the grand house for the first time in decades and a family of weasels
appeared on the banks of its moat.
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But when a colony of bats took up residence in the ceilings of
Barrington Court, it was clear that Britain’s coronavirus lockdowns were
causing profound changes at the suddenly quiet Tudor mansion in Somerset
county, about 125 miles southwest of London.
“We were pretty amazed to find bat droppings in the main house,
as it has always been too loud and active for bats to move in,” said Keith
Weston, operations manager of the house and its 569 meters.
The pandemic lockdown has had some surprises for the small team
struggling to protect the 480-year-old house, which was used as a setting for
the “Wolf Hall” TV series, based on books by Hilary Mantel about the court of
Henry VIII.
Normally a bustling estate that attracts more than 120,000
visitors a year, Barrington Court has not been this calm for at least a
century. Even during World War II, the main house, an elegant pile of
honey-colored limestone, remained busy as a refuge for schoolboys evacuated
from a seaside town in Kent for fear of invasion.
The rare absence of humans has opened the way for other visitors
who would have been common in the estate’s early days, when it had a medieval
deer park.
“I have been living and working here more than 40 years, and I
had never seen deer in the east orchard right beside the house,” said Christine
Brain, the head gardener. “It is a family of five who are normally off in the
woods or hedgerows on farmland. All of a sudden, there was no people traffic or
even planes overhead, so very quickly the wildlife just got bolder and bolder
and began coming right to the middle of the estate.”
When the estate was first shut down last March, the moles,
badgers and occasional foxes that are normally seen on the grounds became more
active, and they were soon joined by stoats, ferrets, polecats and new bird
life.
The house is still closed, as are the various smaller buildings,
parkland and fields, leaving human visits restricted to weekend walks in the 190
meters of elaborate gardens, where there are plenty of other changes.
“We have got Jersey moths I had never seen here, and wild
orchids suddenly coming up on stretches of grass that we haven’t been able to
mow,” said Brain, who has been head gardener since 1978 but has never had as
tough a time as during lockdown, when most of the approximately 20 staff
members were furloughed. Weston, the operations manager, had to move with his
family from their home in nearby Yeovil into one of the smaller homes on the
estate to help with the workload.
“Money had dried up, and we could only do what was essential,
like trying to keep the weeds down and stop plants and hedges from getting out
of control,” Brain said.
The loss of staff and funding meant a lot of replanting rather
than buying new plants, and 6:30am starts to avoid the heat of an unusually
warm summer.
Weston cut grass on a tractor and helped to patrol the estate,
evicting jackdaws that had nested in the main house’s chimneys and checking for
fire safety and general security. (Five local churches had their roofs stripped
of lead during the lockdown.)
The skeleton crew also had to place buckets under leaks inside
the closed two-story house and monitor its heat and humidity to help preserve
the priceless wood paneling and interiors. A survey of historic English houses
closed to the public during 2020 found an 11 percent surge in the number of
moths and other insects potentially threatening tapestries and carpets,
prompting staff at one Norfolk estate, Blickling Hall, to experiment by
introducing tiny wasps that prey on moth eggs (in the hope they will keep down
the population).
Among the many visitors to Barrington Court before the pandemic
were scores of US tourists drawn by the estate’s medieval history and links
to the TV adaptation of Mantel’s novels.
Some of the most important scenes were shot here in 2014, with
Cardinal Wolsey’s death played out in a room just inside the house’s main
entrance, and the grounds used to represent the king’s strolls in Windsor Great
Park.
The estate dates back to at least the 11th century, but the
current house was built starting in 1538 by Henry Daubeney, who is believed to
have spent time as a child with the young Henry VIII. Daubeney was appointed as
an earl by King Henry but fell from favor after being implicated in the
disgrace of the king’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard, in 1541.
The enormous cost of running the estate helped to bankrupt
Daubeney and has been a constant problem for subsequent owners. By the start of
the 20th century, it was almost derelict, with a tenant farmer living in one
wing and his chickens and livestock in another.
It was rescued in 1907 by the newly formed National Trust, which
bought Barrington Court as its first country house and garden in its mission to
protect British heritage sites. The trust’s portfolio now includes 200 such
estates, but early on, the crippling costs of maintaining Barrington Court
almost convinced the organization to stay away from grand houses.
Salvation came in 1920 in the form of Col. Arthur Lyle of the
sugar-refining company Tate & Lyle, who had the unusual hobby of collecting
ancient wood paneling and interiors of castles and grand houses. Lyle was
looking for a family home that could absorb his treasures, and the almost
gutted Barrington Court was ideal.
“We’re fortunate that he didn’t collect stamps instead of wood
panels,” Weston said.
The Lyles signed a 99-year lease and poured a fortune into the
property, filling the main house with relics such as an ornately carved
monastery door, a sweeping staircase from a Scottish castle and room after room
of medieval paneling. His touches include an orchard, a kitchen garden and
three walled gardens planted in 1925 with advice from designer Gertrude Jekyll,
a legendary influence on gardening in both Britain and the United States.
(Jekyll’s surname is familiar even to many nongardeners because her younger
brother Walter was a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, who borrowed it for “The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”)
For Brain, bunkering down to get the estate through the pandemic
has been a battle but also a lot of fun. “The wildlife has obviously enjoyed
it, but so have we,” she said. “None of us will forget this time.”