Overlooked Britain: Auckland Castle Deer House
The splendid 18th-century Deer House at Auckland Castle is as elegant as it was practical
The dancingly delicate Gothic Deer House – castellated and as charming as can be – was built in 1760 in the demesne of Auckland Castle in Bishop Auckland, Country Durham.
It was the creation of Richard Trevor, Bishop of Durham between 1752 and 1771, as he added to and altered his grand castle. His was one of the schemes of the innumerable Prince Bishops who were to enhance the place from the late-12th to the late-18th century, all of them adding layers of would-be ‘ancient’ contributions to its genuinely medieval core.
Bishop Trevor chose the 18th-century ‘Gothick Revival’ at its most picturesque, with such additions as the castle’s arched gatehouse, which lifts your spirits with its festive architectural air. Its obelisks, with fancy finials in lieu of pinnacles, pierce the sky. Quatrefoils vie with ogee-arched niches and castellations galore.
The perfect architectural dancing partner to the Deer House nearby, this gatehouse was designed by Sir Thomas Robinson, amateur architect par excellence, who was likened to a pair of scissors owing to the inordinate length of his legs.
Walk into the park and after about a quarter of a mile you see the Deer House, perched high on a promontory and, like the gatehouse, gussied up in the Gothic style. Decorated with dummy loops (crosses incised to look like arrow slits), it prickles with pinnacles and is swathed around with castellations.
It was designed by Thomas Wright of Durham – architect, astronomer, scholar, mathematician and mathematical instrument-maker, as well as landscape gardener; a polymath extraordinaire, whose claims to fame were many and glorious.
Wright designed the crocketed pinnacles on the towers of Durham Cathedral – just imagine the building without these enlivening additions. And he was the first to pinpoint, study, analyse and name the Milky Way.
The antiquary George Allen declared him to be a ‘singular character’ with ‘extensive genius and good disposition at heart’. He wrote that ‘His temper was gentle and affable, and his mind was generous but his studies leading him out of the common track of human affairs left him very little conversant with the ordinary duties of life. There was something flighty and eccentric in his notions and a wildness of fancy followed even his ordinary projects.’
Hurray for that, although nothing that Wright touched was in fact ordinary.
Witness his shelter for deer. A good example of ‘his wildness of fancy’ was his application to gardening design, with his calculations that his plants needed 21,783 degrees of colour to make a successful composition.
As to be expected with the great man, Wright’s design of his Deer House was as creatively practical as it was imaginatively picturesque.
Arches march round the wall of a square enclosure creating a passage, rather like inside-out cloisters, in which the deer could shelter as they pleased.
We can only pray that the Lord Bishop refrained from slaughter in so small an enclosure.
Cruel practices, I fear, were all too commonplace, with the terrified creatures gathered together and shot at close range. One weapon was a longbow (capable of firing 10-12 arrows a minute) and another a crossbow (with two bolts a minute). Known as ‘bow and stable hunting’, this was particularly denounced by James I as ‘a theevish sport’ – which it most certainly was.
In John Nichols’s The Progress and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth of 1823, there is an account of ‘Fortune’s Empress’ indulging in such monstrous practices laced with royal splendour at Cowdray in Sussex in 1591:
‘On Munday, at the eight of the clock in the morning, her Highness took horse, with her traine and rode into the parke: where was a delicate bowre prepared, under the which were her highnesses musicians placed, and a crossbow by a nymph, with a sweet song, delivered to her hands, to shoote the deere, about some thirtie in number, put into a paddock, of which number she killed three or four… Then rode hir Grace to Cowdrey to dinner and about sixe of the clocke in the evening, from a turret, saw sixteen buckes … pulled downe with greyhounds.’
Nor was that the end of it; after the kill, in royal circles it was common practice for the ladies of the court to paddle jubilantly barefoot – their jewels no doubt flying – in the gore of the slain creatures.
In The Gentleman’s Recreation (1686), we are told that James I would slit the deer’s throat himself and smear the blood on his courtiers. In fact, the greatest privilege that a lady could hope for was to make the first cut herself and wash her hands in the blood.
A shiningly silver lining to such dark clouds was that the passion for deerhunting encouraged the building of umpteen houses, folds and shelters that did handsome justice to the beauty of the creatures themselves.
With such graceful inhabitants, no other estate buildings for animals could so successfully perform the all-important role of enhancing the parklands in which they stood. Bishop Trevor’s creation in County Durham is a perfect example.
Of this cultured cleric, we learn from George Allan in A Sketch of the Life and Character of Richard Trevor, Bishop of Durham (1776) that there was ‘a singular dignity in his Lordship’s person’ and that, like his buildings, ‘He was tall, wellproportioned and of carriage erect and stately. The Episcopal robe was never worn more gracefully.’
We are spared no details of the poor man’s demise after he was attacked by gangrene when ‘a mortification of the most fatal kind ensued; his toes sloughed off one after another … the bark was taken as long and in as large quantities as ever known… but it was too malignant… And had already taken mortal hold.’
Bishop Trevor died on 9th June 1771. Allan recorded the words of ‘the animated preacher’ John Rotheram, Rector of Houghton-le-spring, as his praise for the bishop thundered forth from the pulpit: ‘He wore his temporal honours with dignity and ease. Never were the shining qualities of the Palatine more justly tempered by the milder graces of the Diocesan.’
Nor were these Bishop Trevor’s only attributes; as well as his Gothick embellishments to his castle and Deer House, he was a scholar with an artist’s eye of genius.
It was he who, in 1756, bought the resoundingly great paintings by Francesco de Zurbarán, looted from a Spanish ship, that still hang in Auckland Castle today.
They are incomparably powerful; as you stand before them, there are 13 eight-foot-high portraits of Jacob and his 12 sons (one is a copy), who, with their fierce European fire and flash, are in thrilling contrast to their Northern surroundings.
They were due to be sold; the story of their rescue by banker Jonathan Ruffer is one of the greatest and most glorious stories of philanthropy in the British Isles. It must be saved for another day. Let us instead be satisfied with the undoubted delights of the Deer House of 1760.
Auckland Castle has just reopened after a £150m refit. Open Wednesday-sunday, 10am-4pm; aucklandproject.org