A scenic situation
In the first of two articles, Clive Aslet examines the creation of an 1830s house in the ‘Old English’ style by a rich clergyman inspired by the Romantic movement
In the first of two articles, Clive Aslet reveals the story behind romantic Glenthorne, clinging to Devon cliffs 150ft above the sea
People may know the road between porlock and Lynmouth, along the wild and beautiful north Devon/somerset coast and yet be quite unaware of the remarkable house that lies below them, perched above one of the rocky coves. This is Glenthorne, reached by what, at first sight, appears to be a farm track, but is really a drive, which loops vertiginously in a steep descent for a heart-stopping three miles.
Its passage takes visitors from the treeless exmoor down into the handsome deciduous woods of the valley bottom, ending in a glen, exotically planted with tree ferns, and a sea view that, with its umbrella pines, can suggest the Amalfi coast (Fig 6).
This is not a site for the faint-hearted; it feels as if it occupies its own world and, although not far from the amenities of civilisation as the crow flies, seems as remote as anywhere in Britain. No light from another habitation can be seen at night, no sound is heard other than sea, owls and weather. This is a place for romantics.
one came in the 1820s, in the shape of the Rev Walter Halliday, who built the house. Subsequent Hallidays lived at Glenthorne without changing it very much, until—as we shall see next week—more came when Sir Christopher and Valda ondaatje, acquired it in 1984.
Halliday’s fortune came from his father, Simon, a Scottish naval surgeon-turned-banker who prospered during the Napoleonic Wars
and invested money in the West Indies. Walter was the second son, which explains why he took holy orders, but his elder brother, George, died in 1820, transforming his prospects.
Simon Halliday chose to begin a ‘marine villa’ on the Isle of Wight (the designs by John Goldicutt are in the Royal Institute of British Architects library) in 1826, but Walter found a site near the fishing village of Lynmouth in Devon: both looked out over the sea, but were in far distant parts of the country.
Lynmouth had associations with the Romantic poets: Coleridge often walked here with the Wordsworths, planning The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner. Shelley, whom Halliday had known well at Eton, had come there with his young wife, Harriet, for a nine-week stay in 1812, causing suspicion from the messages in bottles that they threw into the sea.
Later, Walter would declare his love of these writers by placing an eight-line quotation from Wordsworth over the door to a fishing lodge he built at Watersmeet.
Literature went hand in hand with landscape, which, for Walter, must have been a passion. In 1832, John Britton and E. W. Brayley would extol the valleys of this coast, ‘sunk into narrow, contracted glens, many of which have a gurgling rivulet flashing through their bosoms, whilst their steep
acclivities present an intermingled association of rugged beetling rocks, and mantling foliage’, in Devonshire and Cornwall
Illustrated. In 1839, the anonymously published novel Mandeville: or the Lynmouth
Visitors describes the impression that Lynmouth made on two female cousins: they were so ‘engrossed with the scenery around, the smiling radiance of the sky, the loveliness of the earth, and the serenity of the blue waters, that they could scarcely be prevailed upon to withdraw from the window’.
Not even the smoke rising from the furnaces in Wales, on the far side of the Bristol Channel, could detract from the ravishing scene. Although Walter did build a house on the hill behind Lynmouth, a more extreme, better, site came up for sale in the late 1820s.
This precipitate spot was the location of the future Glenthorne, the invented name being an indication of Walter’s tastes in the Picturesque. He was an early adopter. Leaving —and eventually selling—one Romantic estate to build on what some would have thought was a hopelessly inaccessible one required some strength of purpose.
A reflection of this is the Decision Stone he subsequently erected on the spot where his mind was made up; several date stones and inscriptions exist on the estate.
Clearly, this way of carrying on did not impress his father. Simon’s first will left his estate unreservedly to George; in a memorandum for a new will that was drawn up after George’s death, he stipulated that his fortune should be ‘invested either in land or Government securities, so that my son, Walter, cannot inter-meddle with anything but the interest’. Another states that Walter would be left £30,000 for his sole use, ‘but, having worked very hard all my life and wishing my name to be handed down to posterity’, other dispositions would be made. Ursula Halliday, whose Glenthorne: A Most
Romantic Place, published posthumously in 1995, contains an invaluable analysis of family documents, writes that ‘there is no suggestion that Walter was hurt by the terms of his father’s will’. This, however, must be to put a favourable gloss on what appears to have been a family ruction.
Simon objected both to his son’s extravagance and his unmarried state; although Walter eventually took the hint and married Katharine Gardiner in 1830, his father never knew of it: he had died in 1829. An Edinburgh girl, Katharine was an orphan who had lived with the Hallidays for many years and may have been first engaged to George Halliday. Walter and Katharine had no children.
This is not a site for the faint-hearted. This is a place for Romantics
A happy image of the honeymoon, several months in Rome, is given in letters written by Katharine to her friend Bessey Hilliard. ‘My dear husband is in all his glory…’ she reported, ‘he is, as you know, quite an enthusiast—and is feasting here amid the ruins and recollections of the glory and splendour of former days.’ They kept apart from English society, preferring to see the sights and spend ‘our evenings by our own fireside’.
In the privately printed Reminiscences and Reflections of an Old West Country Clergyman (1897), W. S. Thornton remembered Halliday as a ‘remarkable man, of shy, retiring habits, very plain, with a marvellous play of countenance, full of wit and anecdote, a great traveller and very hospitable’.
Despite Glenthorne’s secluded position— easier to reach by sea than by land—halliday was not a recluse. He was also rich, due to the considerable income that he received from estates in Scotland and the West Indies and other investments, as well as the £30,000.
Although he and Katharine felt disinclined to leave Glenthorne once they had got home to it, they invited numerous ‘people of distinction’, according to Thornton, including officers from Nelson’s navy. When the Hallidays were visited by their sister-in-law, Lady Cosway, from Cowes, the house would be filled with six girls; pupils of the Selworthy curate, studying for entrance to the universities, would escort them around Exmoor. ‘The supply of rough ponies was apparently inexhaustible.’
As a devotee of the Picturesque, Halliday was not alone on this stretch of the coast. His near neighbour Sir Thomas Acland had built a large cottage ornée at Selworthy in about 1800, followed by a thatched model village in 1828.
No other owner, however, could boast such a spectacular site (Fig 1). Glenthorne sits on a shelf, which falls off precipitously to the sea. Elsewhere, trees cling to the sides of the cliffs, with walks threading their way through the almost vertical woods.
Who designed Glenthorne? Its architecture is similar to a plate in Peter Frederick Robinson’s Designs for Ornamental Villas (1825–27). Robinson published a number of books in the 1820s and 1830s and Ornamental Villas went through several editions, but it was relatively fresh from the press when Glenthorne was started.
Although Robinson had been a pupil of the neo-classicist Henry Holland and could design ‘Grecian’ when required, he was not at his happiest in that style. Generally, he preferred to charm his many clients with other historical and geographical references—from Swiss chalet (studied personally on a visit to the Continent made in 1816) to Castellated and Norman. Glenthorne appears to be modelled on The Querns in Gloucestershire, now part of Cirencester Hospital, published as plate 5 in Villas. This was in the ‘old English style of building’, which Robinson described as ‘peculiarly picturesque’.
A decade later, Old English would be popularised by the four volumes of Joseph Nash’s The Mansions of England in the Olden Time (1839–49), but, in the 1820s, it represented an advanced taste. Like The Querns, Glenthorne has steeply pitched gables, mullioned windows with decorative leads (Fig 5) and corkscrew chimneys—features of Old English that Robinson deemed to ‘harmonize most agreeably in scenic situations’—and the site of Glenthorne was nothing if not scenic. The Glenthorne chimneys were made in London, before being carted to Porlock; the last leg of their journey was by sea.
Glenthorne follows The Querns in its irregular massing, with a stone roof, oriel windows to the first floor and finials above the gables. At both houses, a dim light percolated into servants’ attic bedrooms through slitlike windows, clearly inspired by arrow loops.
The detail may not always have been historically accurate, but Robinson’s apologia: Old English was a national style, whose use would, in some way, compensate for the ‘Vandalism’ that the ‘modern spirit
of improvement’ had inflicted on ancient buildings. Through the mists of Robinson’s eclecticism, it is possible to glimpse an aesthetic that prefigures Pugin.
Presumably, Halliday borrowed Robinson’s design and made his own modifications. This could explain why, internally, Glenthorne was something of a hybrid between Tudor and run-of-the-mill Classicism, some details of which may have been bought off the peg. Gothic triumphs in the doors, with their arched panels and carved spandrels, but their frames have standard mouldings.
Next to the entrance hall (Fig 3) is a doubleheight hall (Fig 4), open to the ceiling; the fireplace is set in one of a number of almost barbarous imitations of Jacobean carving, in darkened wood. By contrast, the mahogany staircase opposite the front door has barleysugar balusters of early-georgian form; it rises beneath a skylight set with coloured glass, beloved of the William IV period.
A similar lack of consistency could be seen in the furniture. Satinwood and chinoiserie pieces, presumably inherited from his father, Fig 5 left: The first-floor study, with triangles of coloured glass in the window. Fig 6 below: On a fine day, the umbrella pines and rocky coastline suggest Amalfi sat uncomfortably beside the carved oak, antiquities and armour favoured by Walter. As yet, there were no antlers, fox masks or deer’s feet—they came in the Victorian era.
Grand Tour landscapes dominated the paintings and they were complemented, in the dining room, by Classical statuary, with white-marble figures of Venus and Cupid in either bay window.
In 1839, the house was extended to the south; the hillside was blasted to provide a new kitchen and servants’ quarters. Seven years later, another addition made space for a library (Fig 2). Books were important to Halliday: in 1829, he had bought half of Edward Gibbon’s library from Gibbon’s doctor in Switzerland (he installed it in the tower of a château he owned in the Jura).
At some point, some charming paths were made beside the burn that tumbles down the hillside: known as the Molesmead, it marks the boundary between Devon and Somerset.
Halliday died in 1872. He seems to have done nothing to Glenthorne for the preceding two decades. Alas, his fortune had already diminished and would dwindle further, for the Hallidays at Glenthorne, after his death. It was left to another literary-minded collector to revive it in the late 20th century, as will be seen next week.