Western Daily Press (Saturday)
‘Workers downed tools in 1870 – it’s just me and 1,000 bats living here’
Max Raven tells Jonathon Hill how he has grown passionate about the mostly empty and incomplete Woodchester Mansion, which was set to be one of the grandest private properties in the UK before its original owners realised they didn’t have the money to fin
NESTLED deep in the Gloucestershire countryside stands an unfinished gothic mansion where workers downed tools and walked out in 1870.
Woodchester Mansion, a work of neo-gothic art from the outside with gargoyles sprouting from its eaves and imps perching on its pinnacles, is an incomplete shell. On the inside, with a roof rendering it sufficiently weather-tight, it has survived to the present day with the stonemasons’ original tools still remaining.
It is home to more than a thousand bats and also to Max Raven who agreed to live here when he visited on a public open day more than a decade ago.
“It’s my fault that I’m living here,” the site manager and self-proclaimed “general dogsbody” said from inside the chilly mansion where I do not need to ask him why it shuts to visitors in the winter.
Showing us around the unique building, which you’ve probably never heard of but which allows visitors on Fridays and at weekends from Easter until early November, Max recalls: “I made a joke to the tour guide. He looked like an estate agent showing me around a house and I said: ‘It’s wonderful – when can I move in?’
“Then he said they’d just put a position up and they were actually looking for someone to live here.
“I thought ‘well, I’ve got to put my name down now. This is fate.’ A courestorer
ple of months later I’m trying to lug a piano up the stairs with bats flying around my head and I’m thinking: ‘what have I done?’. I live here with my partner and my children come on weekends. They love it. Playing hide and seek takes a while.”
The mansion, buried in a valley that is also home to cows and sheep which graze the land among hanging woods a few miles south of Stroud, was to have been one of the finest private houses ever built in the gothic revival style with the distinct French influence of Notre-Dame Eugène Viollet le Duc until owners the Leigh family realised they couldn’t afford to complete it.
William Leigh, a devout Roman Catholic convert, had moved to the area from Staffordshire to set up a Catholic community at the 4,000acre Woodchester estate.
Agreeing to the expensive construction of the mansion in 1846, which would include a chapel as its main event, poor health and ultimately William running out of money led to work stopping on the mansion in 1870, leaving it half-finished.
William’s son, Willie Leigh, also decided to take little action over the mansion because he couldn’t afford plans suggested by architects he’d consulted.
Designer Benjamin Bucknall, who had worked on the mansion, wrote to Willie expressing his sadness over its state in 1878: “There is nothing more sad to the sight than an unfinished work. It is even more forlorn than the ruin of a building which has served its purpose and gone to decay. Believe me that these remarks are only suggested by a sincere interest in a place which is associated with many happy days.”
Vincent Leigh, one of Willie Leigh and Ada Jarrett’s five children, was the only member of the family to have ever lived in the mansion when he occasionally occupied a couple of arguably habitable rooms in Woodchester’s north wing while he ran the estate from 1907 until 1922.
After his then-fiancée made her first visit in 1907 it is said that she changed her mind about marrying him because she was “horrified” by the state of the mansion.
Vincent sold the estate to his sister Blanche Leigh who owned it until 1939, letting the north wing rooms out to a local farmer who kept cattle in the valley, before she sold it to Barnwood House in 1939 to be used as a mental hospital.
The Home Guard then used the estate in the Second World War for training, evidenced by the bullet holes in the old face of the clock tower.
The mansion was never used to
You might get kids coming at night, for example, or YouTubers. But if I go to the window in my black dressing gown and flick the lights on and off a couple of times they tend to run away screaming, which is always funny MAX RAVEN
treat patients following the creation of the NHS and was unused until it was bought by Stroud District Council in 1986 for £20,000, single-handedly maintained during those decades by Reginald Kelly, who owned a property called The Cottage nearby on the estate.
Since 1988 the mansion has been run by the charity now known as the Woodchester Mansion Trust, which has a 99-year-lease on the building while most of the surrounding estate is owned by the National Trust. While there are almost 50 volunteers at Woodchester, the mansion trust employs Max as its only full-time worker to live inside the mansion, carry out maintenance, help with events and deter trespassers.
“We’ve had Most Haunted filming here and we’ve done ghost hunts too but a small problem with that is it does increase the number of people coming here believing it to be an abandoned building,” Max said.
“You might get kids coming at night, for example, or YouTubers. But if I go to the window in my black dressing gown and flick the lights on and off a couple of times they tend to run away screaming, which is always funny. It’s not as bad as it could be. It tends to get worse around this time of the year. But it has tended to happen less over the years with me being more of an active presence on site. I understand why people are intrigued by the place.”
His Dark Materials and The Crown have also been filmed at the mansion, which for part of the year has more than 1,000 roosting bats, including greater and lesser horseshoes, that feed on moths in the estate’s woodland.
Dr Roger Ransome, who has been monitoring the bats in the mansion since 1959, holds the Guinness World Record for the longest-running study of any mammal by a single person for his work at Woodchester.
“In the summer we do bat walks for an hour in the evenings before sunset,” Max says. “There is a talk about the house and everyone gets a bat detector and you can see them whizzing around.”
Has he never been bothered about living among so many bats?
“Well, they’re not here at the moment. They’ve moved away for their hibernation roosts. We do enjoy living here. The challenge sometimes is the location. We’re a 45-minute round trip from the nearest shop so we have to always be forward thinking about what we need. It is very nice that I have the children come and stay with me on the weekends and we can play in the grounds and enjoy lovely walks around the estate.”
He has grown passionate about the mansion, which needs a huge cash injection to continue to be preserved.
“The aim will always be to keep it unfinished and to preserve it but that is estimated to cost around £5m. That is just to get it to the point where it looks like it did when the stonemasons walked out all those years ago.
“The preservation of the chapel is estimated to be around £2m alone. When the building was abandoned the gutters filled up with leaves and detritus and water penetrated the walls in the chapel and shattered the buttresses. We’ve got scaffolding up to hold the space in place until we can get a big lottery grant or the like.”
In what would have been the mansion’s library stands the wooden ladder and arch-former used by the original builders while tree trunks used as scaffolding remain in putlog holes in the walls. A panel sticking out of the wall in the corner of the room was used to ensure dropped tools didn’t damage the stonework.
“There was protection for the stonework but when it came to protection of workers it was: ‘Oh well, we can always get another one’,” Max laughs. Save for health and safety he adds that “much of the techniques haven’t changed greatly”.
A local foreman, Albert Tilley, carved his name into an eave in the library ceiling. The dots were joined when descendants of Albert visited the mansion knowing he’d worked on the building. His note simply reads: “1866. AT.” “It’s one of the only names that we know for sure worked here originally,” Max explains.
Among the mansion’s other untouched rooms is the bathroom where the solid stone bath is accompanied by hot and cold water grotesques.
“You can tell which is hot and cold by the expressions,” Max continues.
“They would all have been controlled by a servant behind the wall and the person in the bath would literally have just asked for more hot or more cold.”
The bath neighbours a shower cubicle with two similarly openmouthed grotesques coming out of the ceiling.
“The smaller one is where the pull chain would have been and the larger would have dropped cold water. It’s effectively a wet room – a pretty modern and untypical thing to have in a home at the time.”
The only finished room in the mansion is the drawing room, completed in a rush in 1894 for the visit of Herbert Vaughan, the cardinal bishop of Westminster. It is thought the Leigh family had hoped to persuade Cardinal Vaughan to take on the mansion himself during the visit.
“While it’s a lovely room and gives an idea of what the mansion should have looked like there are a few mistakes,” Max adds.
“There are nice white mortar lines up the walls but they all turn grey and that’s because cement was used in the joints rather than traditional lime mortar.
“It gives us an insight into how the room was rushed for the visit and was done on a budget.”
The mansion, which is gearing up for another busy Hallowe’en period where it will be hosting its annual pumpkin trail, is now used weekly to host training workshops for stonemasonry students from the Stonemakers’ Guild.
What would have been the laundry room is now full with intricate stone displays from huge urns to sixfoot sculptures and a chess board inspired by Woodchester’s gargoyles and grotesques.