Swashbuckling owner sought for frontier fort
A fine Northumberland castle, once home to the naval captain who killed Black Bart, has been put up for sale by its latest daring resident, writes Melissa Lawford
At one New Year’s Eve party at Coupland Castle, the late Robin Jell, then the man of the manor, decided to fetch his thoroughbred chestnut mare from the stables and ride around the dining room.
Fortunately, the Turkish carpet had been pushed back earlier to make a dance floor, says his widow, Fiona Jell, for “the horse did lift her tail”.
Today, all is calm at this old border defence point near Wooler in Northumberland. The River Glen can be heard flowing below the Cheviot Hills. The arboretum is still cloaked in dew though it is nearly lunchtime, the peach-painted porch is bright and the stone lions flanking the entrance to the courtyard look serene. But Coupland is a castle that has long been a magnet for daredevil types.
Standing on the castellated battlements of the main square tower, Jell is unruffled by the freezing January wind whistling through the hexagonal chimney pots. She often pops up to check everything is in order, she says. The lawn is a dizzying distance below. In spring, she says cheerfully, “you wouldn’t be able to see the grass for the wild crocuses”.
The main living quarters of the house are Georgian, but the large square tower was built in the 1580s and a smaller adjacent tower went up soon after the 1603 Union of England and Scotland Act. It was made especially for defence by a left-handed swordsman. Jell demonstrates this deftly as we descend the spiral staircase. “If I’m coming down this way, it is easier for me to parry you to the wall,” she says. My imaginary rapier is indeed neatly foiled.
The space underneath the tower is now a billiards room, but was originally designed as a space to store horses if the castle were ever under siege. “The border was very much like the Wild West,” says Jell. Attackers would steal the castle’s livestock; after a fight the defenders would have to head out on horseback to reclaim their cattle.
Today, there are no steeds. Instead, sitting smiling on a stove, are several taxidermy alligators, one with a pine cone in its mouth. “They’re just from the local river,” says Jell with a grin.
The house is a maze filled with curios and anecdotes. In 1713, the property was bought by Sir Chaloner Ogle. The naval captain would soon become famous in 1722 for killing the notorious Black Bart, a Welshman considered to be the most successful pirate of all time. His death would signal the end of the Golden Age of Piracy.
But for all its history of dashing heroics, Coupland’s most gutsy resident is undeniably Jell herself. In the hall, there are photographs of her flying in a very small, glass-doored plane over mountains in Nepal, wing-walking on an even smaller aeroplane with the Flying Circus in Cirencester (alas, “these days with health and safety you are actually strapped to a pole,” says Jell) and doing the Olympic bobsleigh run in Lillehammer, Norway, in 1999. In fact, she did that 14 times.
“I’d always wanted to do the Cresta Run,” she says, “but they banned women from doing it because there were some very horrific facial injuries.” Eventually, she read about an army unit that did bobsleigh training at Lillehammer, “I got the name of the gentleman who organised it and kept badgering him,” she says. “I managed to do 1,365m with 16 bends in 60 seconds.”
On the main stairs, we pass a marble bust wearing a stetson hat, which was from her stint doing rodeo in Texas in 1998. She reasons: “It was on my list! Doesn’t everyone have a list?” It was not all plain-sailing, reflects Jell over shepherd’s pie in the kitchen. “I came off the wrong way and ended up under the bull getting kicked and bounced around the arena,” she says. “I came home on underarm crutches.”
Was she working at a rate of one hair-raising adventure per year? “Of course!” says Jell. So what came next? “Then I married Robin and lived here! Is that not hairraising enough?”
Jell grew up in Alnwick and Berwick. Her father was a carpenter and her mother sometimes did housework “just to get us holidays and Christmas presents”. Jell went on to work in the civil service. “Until I married Robin, I lived in a very normal house on a housing estate in Newcastle, so this was a total change for me,” she says.
Robin Jell came from landed gentry stock, though he always worked. His childhood home was Broome Park in Kent, which was formerly owned by Lord Kitchener and which his parents ran as a hotel.
He bought Coupland in 1979 with his first wife, Jane, after he’d taken a job locally. He got to work on an extensive renovation project.
It was a large task. In the main bedroom in the tower, which now functions as a self-sufficient holiday let, there is a Victorian mock-Tudor four-poster bed, which was winched up through what is now the bathroom ceiling, says Jell. The elaborately carved oak posts are at some points wider than a tree trunk, but Jell points to some well-placed bolts. “It is the equivalent of a flat pack.”
The bathroom is papered with wallpaper depicting an exciting series of Persian battle scenes, feasts, musicians, horsemen, fruit trees and palaces. “Robin’s first wife had a great eye for picking interesting paper,” says Jell. “You don’t need a book if you’re going to be a while.”
Robin also filled the castle with his family’s art collection. His mother was the watercolourist Pauline Konody and her paintings of flowers line the spiral stairs. His grandmother was the oil painter Isabel Codrington and 60 or so of her works are hung through the house, including a grand but macabre canvas above the main stairs that “depicts a mugging or a murder, depending on how you feel”, says Jell.
Jell met Robin, by then a widower, through horse-riding. “He was pretty handsome,” she says, “and very dashing.” They got married in 2003 and had the reception at Coupland. “We had tea and cake in the tower, and then we made the ping-pong room into a disco.” It’s a good house for a party, she adds. “We have turned the library into a casino twice for a fundraiser.”
Moving into the castle, which has 11 bedrooms, 25 acres, two courtyards and a wine cellar, was a major adjustment. “I was very lucky that I still had a full-time job,” says Jell. Her husband worked, too, restoring antique mirrors and mantelpieces in the workshops outside the house.
Robin died last year and now Jell lives alone in the main house with her two dogs, Patches, a collie-cross, and Kendo, a terrier. “He was called Kendal, like the mint cake, but he is a bit feisty. Kendo is a martial art where you hit each other with sticks, and it suited him,” she explains.
There are people around – the property has a cottage and a lodge that are leased to long-term tenants – but Jell is looking to downsize and has put the castle on the market.
Is there anything else left on her bucket list? “Well, there is one thing,” she says, “I’m not sure if I’d like it, as it involves camping, but it would be a week’s tour in the Grand Canyon when you’re on a raft.”
Coupland Castle is for sale jointly with Strutt & Parker and Galbraith for £1.9 million (01670 516123; struttandparker.com)