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February 12, 2012
Bath Spa Outskirts: Venetian Fountains and Henry Fielding
Despite living in the much famed Cotswolds, we have as a favorite day trip a jaunt to the city of Bath Spa in Somerset. You don't realize "awarded World Heritage Site status for its outstandingly preserved Georgian architecture" means until you've seen it. The centre is indeed magnificent but once you leave it and start climbing the many hills that surround the city, the architectural sightseeing is still never ending. So, armed with the Bath Pevsner Guide, we took to go see the beautiful villas of Widcombe, bagging Priory Park Gardens and its Palladian bridge in the process.
(as a recently arrived expat excited to find out more about the city where I was living, I went into Foyles on Charing Cross Road and tried to describe these series of books I had seen elsewhere to the bookshop assistant: "Their covers have a black background; they're about the architecture of the different counties; published by a university press, I think". She looked at me as if I were an alien - which was figuratively correct - and said "You mean the Pevsner Guides? Of course we have them!". Now I can't live without them.)
The Pevsner guide describes the smallest architectural features in great detail but often fails to mention signficant places of cultural or literary significance. One of such is the house, Widcombe Lodge, where Henry Fielding wrote most of Tom Jones while staying with his sister. The book "A Henry Fielding Companion" says this story of his stay is a tradition which should be a polite way of saying there is no documentary evidence for it. Tradition also has it that he might have written books while staying next door's at Bennett's Widcombe Manor.
And so, right next to Fielding's Lodge sits Widcombe Manor which, other than the obviously impressive façade, has a late 16th century bronze fountain said to have been taken from one of the Grimani palaces in Venice. The fountain was added by one of the previous owners of the manor, Sir John Roper Wright - a steel tycoon - in the 1920's. Authentic or not (and I suspect that zoologically correct seahorse gives it away), it looks rather exotic in the middle of the English countryside.
 | At the top there is a putto riding a seahorse. |
 | Baby satyrs sitting on the rim of the bowl on the second level. |
 | Tritons around the Medici family coat of arms and turtles at the base. |
The next owner of Widcombe Manor, Horace Annesley Vachell, a prolific novelist and playwright, wrote a family saga entitled "The Golden House, a romance of Bath" using the Manor as a model. Vachell writes in one of his books that Fielding wrote Tom Jones in the lobby of his "Golden House".
Jeremy Fry, the "British inventor, engineer, entrepreneur, adventurer and arts patron" and friend of James Dyson also owned Widcombe Manor from 1955 to 1967 and held memorable parties there - or else, any party attended by Princess Margaret seems to have been memorable judging by the frequency by which mentions of the princess and the phrase "memorable party" appear together in English memoirs.
From there we walked to Priory Park Gardens - built by Ralph Allen with advice by Pope and, unsurprisingly, later coveted by William Beckford - to see one of four surviving Palladian bridges (three are in England and another one is in Russia).
19th century graffitti. So elegant probably because good penmanship was something to be proud of and pocket knives were popular.
Posted by claudia
Comments
Posted by tristan forward at February 16, 2012 07:47 PM