STATELY HOMOS IN ENGLAND - Dalemain House

Positioned a few miles out from Penrith, Dalemain has the cliche circuitous driveway that ensures you get 'the surprise' of the house coming into view. The house, looked at from the front is a nicely proportioned classical 18th century facade. Unlike Sizbergh which had all its later developments honestly laid out in a row in front of you, Dalemain's classical facade is actually only one one room deep, behind which it conceals a much more ramshackle drab building. Including another 14th century Peel Tower, and numerous period add ons from all the centuries subsequent. Dalemain is hence Grade 1 listed, because similar to Sizbergh, it's that rare survival of a building that contain all these periods intact within it. This listing extends to include the extensive cobbled courtyard at the back of the house, which is also unique.

Dalemain has its splendid wrought iron gates, which would once have allowed access to only the right sort of people. Servants and tradesmen and women, would have all gone round the back, which is where we drive and where we park our car. The Reception, where we booked our place on the guided house tour, is also situated in the cafe, which is in a large airy barn or old stable, with a trip hazard of an uneven floor. It has the genial air of the improvised. The staff though friendly and approachable seemed a bit flustered. Quickly overwhelmed by actual people arriving wanting refreshments. One got the impression that perhaps the organisation here is understaffed and a tad shambolic, as if its not entirely settled on how it wants to operate as a visitor destination. This maybe a result of it fundamentally being a privately owned stately home, that opens to the public as a side hustle. We may, of course, have simply arrived on a really bad day.

We booked our house tour for an hour after we arrived. Leaving us time to unwind, have a coffee and cake, to wander around Dalemain's gardens, which are extensive and actually rather splendid. With their beautiful constructed landscape vistas, walled gardens, arched walkways, seated grottos, shell paths and a staggering piece of topiary formed into the shape of a Dragon. The gardens have an informal casualness that though subtle, are frequently quite enchanting.

The guided 'house tour', so we were told, was three quarters of an hour to an hour in length, which seemed worryingly more than we required. That this ended up being near an hour and a half, proved interminable. Being trapped with a guide who couldn't stop babbling about portraiture, eventually became an unwanted imposition. The owners of the house still live here, and understandably don't want you wandering unguided around their home taking your selfies for Instagram in their front room. After all you could be people casing the joint. The 'house tour' just went into far too much detail for even the most nosey and enquiring of antiquarian. 

The rooms at the front of the house look elegant and distinguished, they certainly appear well cared for, because, one must assume, they are regularly lived in. The older elements of the house, the medieval through to 17th century, that exist behind, seem maintained to a poorer level. Having once lived in a 16th century manor house, such rooms can be draughty, lack effective insulation, and can be cold at any time of the year. Basically, really old houses eat money simply through day after day efforts to keep them warm and intact. I bet they don't spend time living in parts of this house. Hence its slightly frayed around the edges state. None of this part of the house appeared to me to be particularly notable, and you really couldn't get any real sense of its overall layout.

However, what Dalemain has become known for in recent years, since Covid and lockdown, is now The World Marmalade Festival, which has become literally huge, particularly with the Japanese. There is a slightly shambolic exhibition of marmalades in jars, shelved in a room the size of a broom closet, of previous distinguished entrants in the competition. And there is also a slowly fading around the edges photo board of past winners and royal visitors in the cafe. It also seems proud of its ancient orchard of apples and bee hives, and hosts its own celebratory Apple Day in September.

Because of the poor organisation it generally appears hamfisted, Dalemain tends to fail in showing off its most attractive selling points. I guess, because its primarily a working house and estate. Developing it's visitor offering further, can come well down your list. Though if you look at Holkham Hall in North Norfolk, they've really fully embraced themselves as a visitor destination. Now, admittedly, they are a much larger wealthier estate with perhaps greater resources to call upon. But it can be done smaller scale. and they probably didn't arrive where they are today overnight.

Anyway, after escaping the over informative clutches of our energy vampire of a 'guide' I needed retail therapy. So I bought myself a jar of Dalemain's Apple and Brandy Marmalade, as a personal treat, then quickly exited before I was drained of all my will to live. The marmalade turned out to have a light taste of apple with only a background suggestion of alcohol, but it's recipe was based essentially on grapefruit and lemon, without which, this would've be one very small step away from being a jam.

STATELY HOMOS IN ENGLAND - Sizergh House

Now, I don't know about you, but we love a good romp around a stately home. Yes, it may have been obscene they had so much money, but just look what they did with it. Mainly we visit National Trust properties, but we are not averse to a privately owned one, if it's well set up. Whilst in the Westmoreland border country of the North West ,Sizergh was one of only a few National Trust managed stately homes in the area. It is a great example of a particular style of stately house - The Rambling Old Pile. Sizergh is situated outside Kendal. Though once idyllically placed in the rolling countryside, today it's just off an extremely busy 'A' road. But as you enter up its winding drive it is as though you are slowly being drawn into another place and time entirely. And though the 'A' road thunders away less than a mile away, Sizergh is remarkably muffled from it by the dense woodland that envelopes it. 

The problem you immediately encounter as you approach the house, is the insufficient amount of car parking space. They are currently in the process of repairing one section of the car park that has been badly affected by flooding. But even when this is returned to use, in busy periods parking spaces can be quite scarce here. So your time of arrival might be crucial. Best avoid the peak periods. Your smart phone, if you have one, should tell you when the less busy times are. But, rest assured, dear hungry aesthete's, Sizergh is certainly worth all your efforts to get there.

Sizergh is built around a Peel or Pele tower. These were once stand alone towers which you could retreat to when marauding Scots were in the vicinity. Over the years this crenellated tower has had further developments phases, extending along the raised ground the original tower was built upon. The outside of this higgledy piggledy house, though uniformly rendered in a grey stone, is surrounded by a colourfully rich assortment of lush trees and shrubs that wrap around and embrace the house like a stole. The wide expanse of a stone staircase cascades down the slope from the house to a semi circular platform, were you can view the 'mirror' lake beneath. This is just one of the garden's beautifully contrived aspects. The gardens at Sizergh are that classic English style of an informal appearance disguising a tightly structured formality. They are one of its chief delights anytime of the year, and they are endlessly receptive to a improvised wander through is topiary arcades, convoluted winding pathways and moss bedraggled rock gardens.

One of the qualities that strike you about the interiors of Sizergh, is that so many of its rooms are lined in gorgeous 16th century panelling,. Each with their own detailed fire surrounds and mantles richly carved in the darkest of dark wood. It is remarkable that they have remained untouched by later flourishes of fashion. There are also some exquisite plasterwork ceilings too. It appears that in the Westmorland borders of the Lake District,  money was never that flush to stretch to completely demolishing and rebuilding a stately home in a more contemporary style. This has hence preserved  rooms pretty much as they were originally conceived. Sizergh's uniqueness, is a veritable treasure trove of the odd and the gob smacking, which is one of the things I really loved about it. As you venture through it's tumble of rooms, just tucked on a side table in a quiet corner or upon it's many shelves and mantelpieces, you'll find really examples from Sizergh's fine collection of ceramics, and other truly expensive object d'art.

Towards the end of touring the house, you progress ever upwards inside the Tower block. Eventually finding yourself at the top of the tower where you're faced with another astonishing Sizergh survival, a medieval hall with it's gallery intact. Sizergh is simply one of those houses packed with the unexpected. 

As a National Trust run property, there are all the obligatory supporting infrastructure you expect them to provide, cafe, loos, gift shop etc. It also had, on this visit an installation. Now National Trust installations, can often be truly naff, or terminally underwhelming. But Sizergh, given its own superlative ceramic collection, actually had a rather interesting and relevant installation on a long entrance table. It was a series of place settings, with ceramic plate designs and freestanding candelabra, using the forms of worms, insects and soil microbiome. This thematically also linked it with another imaginative exhibition in a barn close by, about soil and conservation in a time of climate change. So on this visit there was lots here to explore, to leave us clapping our hands like delighted barking seals.

FINISHED READING -Akenfield by Ronald Blythe

During the last war, there was a drive to document the lives of ordinary folk in the conditions of war. Home Front Diaries created for the Oral History unit, paint a less mythical and more truthful picture of what the war was actually like in the UK.  In the sixties the work of Studs Terkel in the US, and Tony Parker in the UK captured in book form the day to day experiences of working folk, living quite ordinary working lives. These were often edited down from hours of interviews. Painting a personal and affecting portrait of lives and experiences, different to those that more mainstream history books document.  

Akenfield, published at the end of the sixties, certainly chimes with the spirit of oral history, though Blythe has chosen to adopt a noticeably more literary form. Oral history testimonies, tend to let the person being interviewed communicate with a reduced editorial role given to any authorial presence. Akenfield, however, is undoubtedly based on people Blythe knew quite well and interviews he must have conducted.  All of it lovingly sewn together with Blythe's own livid experience and remembrance of how Suffolk village life had changed even during his own lifetime, over the twentieth century. Sometimes the changes in rural life were for the good. Though Blythe is unafraid to lament also what has been lost, the sense of cohesion, of a shared understanding and lifestyle. Akenfield is an evocation of how the structure of rural life changed and how that much romanticised bucolic and picturesque unity fractured and vanished.

There is a huge amount of meticulous but hidden research behind its unassuming presentation. These are not just literary ciphers, but real individuals whose lives he has used as the basis for the people he portrays here. Men and women he encountered daily, or are a composite of a particular type of individual. Because he has chosen to fictionalise how he presents these people, one is uncertain quite where verisimilitude ends and artifice begins. Is this more an evocation than a historical document? His feeling and ear for the significant telling detail in a monologue, however, is acute, as they recounts specific jobs and lifestyles and how they've modernised since the war. Everything is pointed and given greater vivacity because it comes through his mind and pen. All sorts of local worthies, midwives, sexton, shepherds, teachers, blacksmith, the old and the young, they are all here. Each presenting their view of life in a late sixties Suffolk village. And how the arrival of the middle class incomers from the towns is changing the village, with their immaculately curated homes and an idealised view of village life.

The war turned out to be the final break in the traditional cohesion. The men who returned damaged psychologically or physically, often did not want to return to the drudgery of their old life and its limited prospects. And so a way of being that had existed for centuries, went into decline. Blythe captures the post war zeitgeist, of being caught between two forms of rural society, the ancient and the modern. The divisive pull between a collective localised unity with its sense of belonging and the individual independence of thought and self motivated action. Blythe scrupulously refuses to rose tint or overly sentimentalise the past.  Though there is undoubtedly a strong vein of melancholy present, over a way of life that has simply slipped away or faded beyond recognition. There is a grief here, a real feeling for loss. Yet, one has to ask, was this not inevitable faced with the changes economic, technological and political that rolled out after the war ended?

However, the end of the unearned social deference to a class based hierarchy, was a good thing. The way farmers once treated their tenant farm workers was reprehensible, coercive and frequently cruel. That they were paid so poorly, did eventually drive young people away to towns and cities where better prospects lay. Education is now seen as opening up opportunities. Previously education had enforced a conformist and particular view of your role in society, administered in a very paternalistic, rigid manner, that depended upon the mindless rote recitation of facts and ideas. Drilling information into young minds, that most found of little use to them in the semi-indentured life that followed. Life may be more humane and self motivated these days. But there was inevitably a cost to that, which ends up being paid in social isolation, increased loneliness and lack of a sense of human connection and belonging to a society that we form together. All the things that we bemoan the loss of today, but know not quite how to recreate. 

If only it was as simple as turning the clock back. Though I doubt we would really want that. I for one, would certainly find myself rebelling against the stifling restrictive nature of the old style of village life  Blythe in Akenfield documents the moment just before the memory of it finally flickered out. Over sixty years later the gentrification of the rural village is pretty much complete, with only a few faint glimmers left of what a tight knit insular working village could actually be like. And whilst I understand, and have resonated to an extent, with the sense of regret and cultural bereavement portrayed, I remain unsure what one could constructively do with that now, other than just hold that knowledge and feel it's contemporary reverberations. Without letting it descend into some nostalgia soaked archetype.

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8

POEM - Alone But Beset

As clocks clocked

and doom loomed

when all around me

felt shrill with fear

little flurries of meaning

trickled like a half forgotten stream

silent yet reproachful

beneath my sockless feet

across the marble contrivance

of linoleum in a bathroom

immaculately conceived

I stepped into the shower

and from that one moment 

could believe it was raining

divinity upon my sleepy lethargy

a body finally awoken

to an unminted morning

before the coffee percolated

perhaps I should stay here

bricked in like an anchorite

behind a crystal clear screen

hermetically sealed

in this damply insufficient realm

that I call home 

alone but beset 

by one niggling question

Did I love them 

enough?

Stephen Lumb

Written October 2026

CHURCH LARKING - Appleby in Westmorland Parish Church

Built in local red sandstone St Lawrence's appears like many churches in this district to be excessively worn. The stone seems not sufficiently durable enough for the weather it encounters. And the finesse of the carving of its porches and window tracery is a little lumpen and solidly executed.  It's not the sort of stone you would normally make a church out of. It is rather poor in quality. But if it's the best you've got available, then here it is. It is not then unexpected that St Lawrence's has had repeated restorations and revamps over it's nine hundred years history.

It sits squat and low in the valley. It has a clerestory and tower, both heavily crenellated. The tower is the oldest part of the church, it's lower level dates back to the late 12th Century. The majority of its nave and chancel were rebuilt in the 14th and 15th Century.  With some late perpendicular window insertions. In 1655 the ubiquitous Lady Anne Clifford, very fond of splashing her wealth around this district, spent money on restoring the church. 

The Victorians had two further goes at improving it's interior. In the 1830's when the unusual, and very fine plasterwork ceiling was installed in the nave by Christopher Hodgson. Further restorations were made in the 1860's that included the insertions of some rather splendid stained glass windows by Heaton, Butler & Bayne or William Wailes, both Gothic revival specialists. There was extensive restoration work done in the 1960's and again in 2015 after severe flooding from the River Eden that snakes around the back of the land the church rests on.

The interior is largely decorated in style, It has a quiet and humble appearance with little sense of architectural loftiness to its nave. The most notable object in the nave is the beautifully carved organ with its cherub heads and dramatic three turrets for its pipes. This is sited against the west wall and seems enormous and far too dominating for a church of this size. It was originally a gift to the church from Carlisle Cathedral by its dean in the 17th century.

The chapel in the north east is dedicated to the Clifford family, and you'll find there funeral monuments to Lady Anne Clifford. A black marble plaque with an extensive display of her lineage displayed in heraldry shields. For someone whose inheritance was seriously curtailed by this lineage You can't help thinking that even in death she was not above labouring the point. Her monument is accompanied by the effigy in alabaster of her mother Lady Margaret.

Generally St Lawrence's is architecturally modest, but is nevertheless a warmly welcoming medieval church, worth a visit.

FINISHED READING - Handmade by Anna Ploszajski

Subtitled - A Scientist's Search for Meaning through Making, I don't know what I thought this book would be like when Hubby thrust it towards me in the Library, as a possible book to read on holiday. As it turned out, I chose not to take it with me, something about it made me think it wasn't a good fit for holiday reading. So I've only started reading it on my return. It is quite an easy approachable read, so I've zipped through it. It's not quite what I expected it to be. But quite what I expected I don't know, but it's probably covered by the words -  more of a philosophically deep enquiry into the creative process of making objects. Whilst it touches on this in the concluding paragraphs of a chapter, I could have done with more reflections. It seemed frequently to get caught up in the inadequacies of being a novice at a skill, and learning from one's mistakes. All of which is fair enough.  It took me a little while to adjust to this being what this book actually is. 

Anna Ploszajski is a material scientist, and during the book you do get glimpses into her own personal and family history, and how it is relates to specific materials. She sort of stumbled into material science and the Institute of Making. And literally grapples in trying to understand and actually utilise the properties of materials with her own hands, which all the information in her head cannot really help her with the actual dexterity of the doing.

"Even though the process of softening both plastic and glass with heat and shaping them by hand were similar, the lack of material personality of plastic was enough to leave me artistically stumped. Is the neutrality of plastic, though, not a characteristic of sorts? ......Perhaps all materials embody inherent characters, some more strongly than others, gifted by a combination of how they look, feel, smell. Sound and move. It might be the skill of the craftsperson is to notice and tap into these inherent material personalities, to make the best of them when they transform materials into objects.'*

Each chapter takes a particular material starting with glass, then plastic, steel, brass ,clay sugar,wool, wood, paper, and ending with stone. Some of these materials humanity has had a long and very fruitful relationship with. She explains a bit about the qualities of the material and how this is related to it's structure on a microscopic level. So we learn what makes glass transparent, so fragile, and yet so useful, for instance. But Ploszajski is also wanting to get more hands on with these materials and move her experience from the theoretical towards the practical and experiential. So she meets up with various crafts people, attends workshops and receives one on one teaching, which demonstrates to her how when you are dealing with a material on a practical level, knowing why on a theoretical level it's behaving or responding in this particular way, isn't really that useful when your working with it. There is often a hands on technique to be learnt,, a skill, that an experienced crafts person acquires and knows, that controls or gets around a weakness or turns a problematic quality in a material to creative advantage. This can really only be taught hands on, and that is what the handing down of a legacy of centuries of skilled craftsmanship and experiment is. 

' We appear to have started into philosophical questions unanswerable by material science - is an object still and object if it's not made of anything? philosophers of the materialism camp would say that even ideas are material in nature, since they cannot exist without the physical human brain. Idealists would argue the opposite, that material objects are merely collections of ideas, which require the mind in order to exist. ....I wonder whether the physical act of making with materials can be harnessed to influence or change our emotional state.'*

I read all the explanations that material science has for why glass is so pliable when heated, which I thought I'd grasped, in the moment of reading it. Though I find I've retained very little of it in my memory bank. But then I am a hands on learner primarily. I get the jist of the theory, that these qualities are often to do with the nature of the molecular tightness or gaps in a material structure or chemical reactions when under stress or heat, but holding the precise details tends to elude me. I enjoyed reading the book, even though, for me, it never quite set me fully alight with insightful revelations.

CARROT REVIEW - 4/8

* Extracts from Handmade by Anna Ploszajski, Published by Bloomsbury Sigma 2021.

THE PAST IN RUINS - Brougham Castle

Brougham Castle was one of five castles that spanned in a close series the Western Marches. One of the border areas of England which were for centuries contested land. Cumbria had been under Scottish fiefdom until 1157. But opportunistic raiding parties, mainly issuing from the direction of Scotland into England continued to be commonplace in medieval times - stealing cattle, burning villages, rape, pillage, capturing castles in order to destroy them, were just some of the things that were got up to. So the maintenance of this line of fortresses running from Penrith Castle in the North, through Appleby Castle, Brough Castle, Brougham Castle, Pendragon Castle, down to Skipton Castle in the South, was a vital line to hold. Until of course it wasn't. Once James VI of Scotland also became James 1st of England, raids no longer had royal approval, and so the whole raison d'etre for them fell away.

All but one of these six fortresses ( Penrith Castle ) were in the hands of the wealthy and well connected Clifford Family. At various points all these castles had been attacked, elements burnt or destroyed.  Five castles all in close proximity to one another could not have all been fully inhabited or adequately maintained and defended simultaneously. And by the succession of James 1st their viability as a defensive deterrent was also diminishing. In the coming age of peace, the elegant stately home and estate, rarely fitted a castle's lofty prominence, cold stone walls, floors, and draughty castle towers. One by one they'd fallen into disuse and bad repair. They faced the future as a romantic ruin.

Brougham Castle guards a strategic river crossing. Built in red sandstone,and partially broaching onto the previous site of a Roman fort. It was constructed in the early 13th century by Robert de Vieuxpont, acting on behalf of King John. The solid massive keep he built still stands and can be climbed up to near its original height. From there you can see the River Eamont beneath and for miles in any direction you look. The Clifford's, as Lords of Cumberland and Wardens of the Marches, further developed the castle's defenses. The double gatehouse that runs along the entire length of one side of the keep is one unique survival of its medieval fortifications. By the late sixteenth century these castles were already becoming militarily semi-redundant edifices, more easily captured and damaged by powerful cannons and explosives. They began not to be well maintained and were considered more of a drain on the Clifford finances.

And this was how it had remained until Lady Anne Clifford. At her father's death in 1607, though only fifteen, she should have inherited his whole estate. Instead her father passed it to his brother Francis, and he to his only son Henry. Though she continued to fight for her inheritance. It was only after Henry's death in 1643 that she was finally able to fully claim her rightful inheritance. At this point she went on a spending spree, executing philanthropic good works in the local towns. Renovating churches and more importantly repairing and redeveloping each of the castles she owned. Brougham being just one. 

Afterward, once these restorations were completed, she was on a constant circular progress, visiting each castle in turn, three months here, six months there. This proved to be the last flowering of Brougham Castle, as one of Lady Anne's favourite places to live. She seemed a very determined person, with her own particular eccentricities. A woman who appeared to prefer living outside the fashions and trends of her own era. After her death in 1676 at the age of eighty six, the previous neglect and slow decline of the castles simply resumed. Two and a half centuries later the remaining ruins were passed into the hands of the governments Ministry of Works & Monuments in 1928, the predecessor of English Heritage which now manages and maintains the site.

PLAYLIST 2026 - No 21 - The Moon & Stars by Radie Peat

The Moon & Stars by Radie Peat

Whilst Lankum have been in a bit of a hiatus since the world wide success of False Lankum in 2023. Radie Peat has since become the totemic folk voice of her generation, and together with John 'Spud'Murphy partnered up on the dark majesty of the  OXYN album and are together again here on a pre- release track from her upcoming solo album No Human Tongue Can Tell.

'For your favours like a feather that's blown on every wind.
 You promised me the moon and stars.
 Just to leave me now behind.'

The Moon and Stars, fully embraces all that is good and slightly unsettling in the raw soft keening tone of her vocals.  The atmospheric music, the doom- ladened military drum rat tat tatting in the background, draw out of the folk tradition, to combine it with an apocalyptic drone of dread and mournful portent. Over which we have Radie's torn uneasy vocal, with it's final lyrical lament of resignation at being abandoned:- 

' the moon and stars were screeching, roaring in the sky.
  I laid my head upon a stone and then I closed my eyes.'

Absolutely terrific stuff.