Overlooked Britain Lucinda Lambton
Thundering west along the M54 motorway in Shropshire, there is no clue that you are unwitttingly benefitting from the annihilation of a most bizarre and beautiful building called Tong Castle. It was built in 1765 in what was then described as the latest ‘Moroccan Manner’ and set down amid landscape designed by Capability Brown. It was demolished in 1954 and in 1997 the motorway most wretchedly smashed through its site.
This is a humdinger of a story with George Durant as its hero. In the 1750s he had been shipped abroad to escape the scandal of an unsuitable love affair and, whilst Deputy Paymaster to the Forces, had amassed a vast fortune from the spoils of the Battles of Guadeloupe and Havana, as well as from the profits of slavery. On the back of such exploits he accrued some £15 million – in today’s money – and, determining to be a grandee, bought the estate and village of Tong in Shropshire, building his marvelous mongrel mansion from which to rule the roost.
He built his ‘castle’ – in fact more like a fairy’s palace, with its ogee-arched windows and towers that supported a
forest of pinnacled domes great and small. Crenellations rose and fell around the roof; it must have made an exotic contribution to Shropshire’s skyline.
When he died in 1772, it was inherited by his son George Durant II, who, relishing his father’s architectural sensibilities, further enhanced the estate by building as curious a collection of buildings as it is possible to imagine. A Pyramid for Poultry? A Pyramid for Pigs? A Castle for Cows? – all created with a child-like joie de vivre and cheered on with humorous inscriptions, and most of which miraculously (given the destruction of everything else) remain intact on farms nearby.
His pyramidal hen house – the 20ft high ‘Egyptian Aviary’ – was built of yellowish bricks with dark-blue vitrified quoins framing openings to allow breezes in for the chickens, as well as delineating the body of the building, tapering up to a stone cap with egg-shaped aerating holes. To one side the top is inscribed with EGYPTIAN AVIARY 1842, while to the other are the letters AB OVO (‘From the beginning, the origin, the egg’), a Latin reference to Helen of Troy being born in an egg from the union between Leda and Zeus, disguised as a swan. After this sole stab at scholarship, the inscriptions are cosier and often funny: SCRATCH BEFORE YOU PECK and TEACH YOUR GRANNY are two of the best.
At nearby Acorn Cottage there is another pyramid, this time for pigs, of rough-hewn brown stone and with the welcoming words TO PLEASE THE PIGS carved over the door; somewhat misleadingly, as the porkers would have been most uncomfortably squashed in its modest proportions. Only a foot away stands a gothic and crow-stepped little castle for cattle inscribed with the word RANZ DES VACHES – the name for the melodies played by Swiss mountaineers on the Alp horn pour ranger des vaches – to drive their herds to pasture and to bring the cows home.
Incidentally, George Durant II’S eccentricity was not confined to his buildings. He fathered upwards of forty children: fourteen by his wife while concurrently having three more by the nursemaid – ‘making a brothel out of his own house’, as his wife’s lawyer thundered at the divorce courts. He was reputed to have fathered a child in every cottage on the estate, calling himself their ‘godfather’ and giving them such befuddling names as Napoleon Wedge and Cinderella Greatback. We, though, must be grateful for his architectural adventures; thankful that a few survive.