Overlooked Britain
Oak Lodge, Buckinghamshire, is a heavenly mishmash of Victorian timbers, a medieval Prussian church – and inspired restoration
Oak Lodge was created as a fanciful Victorian addition to the mid-17thcentury Hall Barn – the house designed and built on the edge of Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, by poet and politician Edmund Waller.
Today, despite the park’s having been most cruelly slashed through by the M40 in 1961 – albeit that the road is sunken out of sight at this picturesque point, leaving a pleasing view of Beaconsfield Church – the sheer fancifulness of this brilliant little building, with its confection of carvings of all ages, most gratifyingly holds its own.
Waller rebuilt the house in 1651. He was a big noise, having entered Parliament when he was only 16 and afterwards having been in the poetic and political public eye throughout the English Civil War, the Protectorate and the Restoration.
Famed for his panegyrics, he eased his oleaginous way through kings and Commonwealth, navigating both political climates with poetic ease.
He praised Cromwell – in fact a distant cousin – in 1655: ‘To my Lord Protector, of the present Greatness, and joint Interest, of his Highness, and this Nation.’ He followed this in 1660 with his celebrated paean to Charles II: ‘To the King upon his Majesty’s Happy Return.’
Waller was acknowledged as having been at the forefront of poetry’s Augustan Age, with the younger John Dryden delighting in the sweetness of his words: ‘Unless he had written, none of us could write.’ Dryden also said that Waller ‘first made writing easily an art’. Nevertheless, this literary hero was to reveal shamefully corrupted sensibilities. He devised ‘Waller’s Plot’ to restore royal prerogatives, for which his coconspirators, including his brother-inlaw, were put to death, while he bribed himself out of blame.
He was imprisoned in the Tower of London for a year but again was to bribe himself out, for a hefty £10,000. He was exiled to France for seven years, where, as a bumper bonus, he befriended such fellow philosophising greats as René Descartes, as well as Thomas Hobbes, who later became his children’s tutor.
Waller’s grandson, also Edmund, laid out great gardens, with advice from his brother-in-law John Aislabie, who was later to create the stupendous Studley Royal estate in Yorkshire.
They planned a host of enticements for Hall Barn, with the great Colen Campbell being employed to design various garden buildings. His Temple of Venus boasts a dome emblazoned with vine trails and dancing cherubs, their arms and legs in deep relief, all holding garlands of flowers.
Here indeed was, and still is, a glimpse of paradise, hard by a motorway, in one of England’s home counties. Of huge charm, standing by a great sweep of a lake, is the vastly bulging topiary known as the Elephant Hedge. Some 25 feet high, it has always been trimmed to follow the forms decreed by nature, resulting in the exhilarating sense of its having run rampant.
Most engaging of all is a stone obelisk carved with gardening implements. Three Roman statues, dating from the first century AD, continue to this day to grace the place: Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine and health, known locally as Tom Treddle, stands eight feet tall.
The gardens at Hall Barn were a triumph. Lord Perceval, the 1st Earl of Egmont, described their beauty in 1824, writing that ‘A woman in full health cannot walk them all, for which reason my wife was carry’d in a Windsor chair like those at Versailles, by which means she lost nothing worth seeing.’ Sadly she was there too early to see the Victorian Oak Lodge.
No entrance could be more engaging, with its wealth of timber decoration, dating from the Renaissance to the late-19th century. Fragments of fourposter-beds stand proud, with the top rails and backs of Carolean chairs showing off their holes into which the cane was woven. Parts of a 15th-century Prussian church vie with parts of a late-19th-century church from France. There are relief panels of garlands and acanthus leaves, as well as scrolls, medallions and fruit. Grapes writhe about the barley-sugar twisted columns. Bargeboards elegantly flourish.
Cherubs prance on urns. There is a 14th-century Father Time with a sickle and Edmund Waller is also there, with laurel leaves in his hair.
Over the years, much of this rotted and was restored, with the carvings constantly evolving, culminating in the 1980s with a triumphant restoration by Lord Burnham, whose family had bought Hall Barn in 1880. Lord Burnham had also, by great good fortune, met the woodcarver Colin Mantripp.
Newly established and yearning to do
work on the building, Colin ‘fell into conversation with a gentleman who had stopped my car’. It was Lord Burnham, who had been searching for someone who could tackle Oak Lodge.
Work started within days and, within weeks, it was discovered that Colin’s great-great-great uncle had done much of the carving on the little building in the early 1900s. He had inherited his tools from his relation; so it was the same ones that were now carving away on the same building some 80 years later.
When Colin started the work, the lodge was covered with thick black bitumen. Some of the carvings were only half there; others were powdered wood in
a shell of tar; often there was nothing left at all.
Thirty years later, because – as it turned out – an inferior preservative was used, history has more or less repeated itself. Once again, Colin Mantripp is at the restorative helm. There is a magnificent twisted column of limewood – ‘Nice and crisp for feathers,’ he says – with birds perching on the twisting vines, all from Colin’s imagination.
Bulging plums and pears hang either side of the front window. The two eagle friezes perfectly sum up the excellence of Colin’s work on the building. The top row of decoration is ‘original’, put together from what could be salvaged from both friezes. The
bottom row is totally new, incorporating laurel wreaths, to signify Edmund Waller. Then there is the ram from the Burnham coat of arms. Lord Burnham himself is carved here, too, with his spectacles on (pictured).
The house is owned and lived in today by his daughter, the excellent Jenefer Farncombe, who is restoring every aspect of the place.
Today, as we are led, lemming-like, to our political doom, a final word from a contemporary of Waller’s might ring a familiar bell: ‘His popularity in Parliament was great but he did not take pains to understand its business, but only sought to gain applause, being vain and empty, though a witty man.’