Emperors, walls and money

There are no Roman emperors in Kentucky, even if we must endure politicians who act like ancient despots (or just idiots). We can, however, claim miles of beautiful drylaid stone fences and walls. Scots-Irish stone masons immigrating to the Americas brought their craft for drylaid masonry to Kentucky, constructing fences from quarried limestone, and shaping the cultural landscape in a way that is celebrated now some 200 years later. The Bluegrass has the most quarried stone fences in the country; as you move out from the Inner Bluegrass, fences made from field rock are just as common as quarried stone.

A drylaid stone fence in the Outer Bluegrass

Fence along a roadway in Franklin County, Kentucky

Emperors and stone walls were not at the top of my agenda when my sleep fogged brain registered the NPR story on the radio this morning, about Hadrian’s Wall and the loss of funding that has shut down the Hadrian’s Wall Trust, which maintains this incredible feature of northern England. I realize this story also plays heavily on the upcoming Scottish vote for independence, but my thoughts instead focused on the ramifications for this UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Hadrian's Wall, between Housesteads and Once-Brewed (or between my sweaty exertions and a pint)

When I look back on the adventures of my holiday in 2013, my most memorable time – and I saw many incredible buildings and gardens – was spent hiking along Hadrian’s Wall. It was one of those experiences you drink in like air, and are barely able to register the meaning and beauty of it in words. I posted about it last year, but mainly through a series of photographs - I didn't feel equipped to assign words to how the walk made me feel, what I saw, and what I thought.

As a professional in the field of historic preservation, I consider myself slightly inured to the lack of concern and funding for our historic sites. Our land fares a little better, with organizations like the Bluegrass Conservancy and Fayette Alliance helping to save thousands of acres of valuable Bluegrass – but a land ethic, alas, is not widespread across our Commonwealth. As you move away from the few urban centers in Kentucky, property rights are scared, and many farmers and rural residents depend on the sale of their land – for development – as their only reliable retirement option.

Detail shot of Hadrian's Wall

Do I expect better things in England? I suppose I do. The relative youth of our country often seems to be both our greatest strength and weakness. Our history is too recent, our monuments still evolving, and contentious. But to be able to follow the line of wall that the Roman empire constructed to defend their territory – to gaze out on a landscape both magnificent and forbidding – to sink into the evocative mood of the surroundings, which is surely enhanced by the very air you are breathing – it defies the petty issues that cloud our lives and blind us to the fabric of the world to which we belong.

I remember when the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP) lost federal funding. The NTHP did not fold, though the growing pains of becoming self-funding were difficult. It can be a good thing to not have all of your eggs in one basket, and diversification behooves all organizations, not just businesses. Can the various councils that will now share the responsibility of caring for Hadrian’s Wall (see story here) work together to protect and promote this very special landscape?

Drylaid stone walls line a road in Central Kentucky

 The real issue, of course, goes beyond the meandering curves of Hadrian’s Wall. The challenges facing English Heritage and its re-focus (and lack of government funding) will impact all of England, and the consequences will shape the tourist experience of the future. I’m not too worried about seeing residential subdivisions cropping up along the route of Hadrian’s Wall – (indeed, many of the houses and buildings one sees and admires along the wall were constructed with robbed stone) but I am uneasy about what this signals for the next generation of heritage protection, management and interpretation in England.

Hmmmm...I wonder where they got that building material? 

Bus Collisions and Discoveries on the Interwebs

One of my favorite stories from my time spent in London during college was the day I was almost hit by a bus. Not that I relish the adrenaline rush of narrowly avoiding death from such an ignoble source, but that it was me hitting the bus, rather than the other way around. I was on foot - and given that my hair had been sheared away in the basement of one of the Vidal Sassoon schools in London (only £5 if you used the coupon from the back of Time Out) - I couldn't blame the encounter on the cloud of hair obscuring my vision.

Shoreditch is not the land of John Nash homogeneity.

As usual, I was in a hurry. My normal energy levels (they tend to be high) propelled me a furious pace from Regent's Park to Shoreditch - not very far as the crow flies - but the combination of tube and bus resulted in what seemed a journey of a million miles. My destination was the Geffrye Museum, which none of my friends had heard of, nor cared to visit - we were 20 years old, after all. Mental congratulating myself on reaching approximately the right area, I looked one way across the street, and stepping off the curb, I...smacked into the side of a very slowing moving bus. The damage to my body was non-existent. The wounds inflicted upon my pride were absolved only by weaving the incident into a humorous story with my eagerness to visit the Geffrye blinding me to potential dangers in the streets.

I revisit this memory, and the Geffrye Museum (which is one of my favorite museums) because a website I stumbled across this summer...a website that mentioned me! The Displaced Nation is a blog created in 2011 by three individuls with a "passion for what we call the "displaced life" of global residency and travel—particularly when it leads to creative pursuits, be it writing, art, food, business or even humo(u)r."  Every week, the Displaced Nation presents an "Alice Award" to a writer "
or other kind of creative person who we think has a special handle on the curious and unreal aspects of being a global resident or voyager. Not only that, but this person tries to use this state of befuddlement to their advantage, as a spur to greater creative heights." (I am quoting to ensure accuracy. I haven't had the necessary amounts of tea today for fail-proof paraphrasing.)

The Geffrye Museum.

Apparently I received an Alice Award in November 2013 for a post I wrote on my very favorite blog Smitten by Britain. What a pleasant little gift to discover in the heat of July! The link to the page bearing  this fortuitous and unexpected revelation is here, but I've also posted the details below.

2) Architectural historian JANIE RICE BROTHER, American expat in UK and blogger at FH & FAG

For her post: “The Geffrye Museum and the History of the Almshouse” for the Smitten by Britain blog Posted on: 22 November 2013 Snippet (after noting that the Geffrye Museum in Shoreditch occupies the building and grounds of a former almshouse, or poorhouse):

The Geffrye is the only museum in the United Kingdom dedicated to the history of the domestic interiors of the urban middle class. . . . [I]t took an excellent collection of buildings—home for many people over the generations—and preserved not only the structures themselves but the fleeting and changing sense of home and its traditions over the years.

Citation:  Janie-Rice, we love the sense of wonder with which you approach this almshouse-turned-museum. It reminds us of Alice’s excitement when showing her black kitten, Kitty, the “little PEEP of the passage in Looking-glass House”:

Oh, Kitty! how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty.

A Looking-glass House, an almshouse, a museum of houses…whatever floats your (house)boat and spurs your creativity, we heartily approve.


And to think that usually my discoveries wait behind the closed door, or through a thicket of brambles...but to find that someone DOES read my posts, and enjoys them...hidden within the recesses of the web...it makes this rainy day alright. 

In the garden at the Geffrye - no rain, but lots of lovely blooms.

There's more where that came from...

Just in case anyone DOES look at this blog besides my dearest and nearest, and you don't already arrive here from Smitten by Britain - you can find more stories of England, written by yours truly, here!


My talents as a writer do not extend to composing blog posts as I am shepherded to three country houses and two lectures a day. But now that the idyll that was Attingham is over, and I feel the outlines of reality settling back around me...I will update this more often. I promise.

Country Houses (of the Bluegrass and Beyond)

I grew up in a country house. To be more accurate, I grew up in a house in the country, as my family doesn’t have an urban townhouse to which we decamp for most of the year. Instead, I spent the first 18 years of life on a farm in the Outer Bluegrass of Kentucky, surrounded not only by tree-lined creeks and rolling hills, but also by the stories attached to a beloved landscape.

 

The house itself, built by my parents in 1970, is a re-imagining of the 1830s home in Mercer County, Kentucky, which my mother called home. Serene on a hill with clusters of trees, its red brick exterior and traditional form causes it to be mistaken as a historic house many, many times, underscoring its membership in a timeless vocabulary of architecture and landscape. 

Great Uncle Harvey

As I went through graduate school, the “historicization” of modern buildings was consistently lambasted as a negative, but I always viewed my childhood home as an organic part of the our family farm, as much a part of the landscape as the black tobacco barns and the catalpa trees that my great-uncle Harvey planted in the 19-teens (in a get-rich quick scheme to corner the market on fence posts and railroad ties. It didn’t work out as he planned). 

Some of Uncle Harvey's catalpa trees

My mother taught history and my father farmed the land that had been in his family since the 1820s. Family trips centered on historic sites and house museums, where I invariably got in trouble for sneaking up the closed-off staircase to the attics or basements, or opening shut doors when the docent turned around. I knew even then that the best stories were usually hidden away, sometimes literally in a closet. 

I soaked up my parent’s appreciation of history, and from an early age I vaguely understood that I was part of a cycle. My story was only the latest layer. Farming drilled this point home, as life and death could not be avoided. Becoming fond of a calf I raised on a bottle led to trauma and tears when he was sold along with the other steers…but I remained an equal-opportunity eater. 

Stories informed me and comforted me. In school, I naturally gravitated toward both literature and history. Kentucky’s story was my family’s tale as well – from the late-18^th century when brothers came to the Bluegrass on a military expedition, and then moved the entire extended family from Virginia to Fayette County. I could point to chairs in the front hall of my house that came through the Cumberland Gap during this journey. Material culture asserted itself at an early age…

My great-grandparents.

Westward migration repeated itself on a local level in the 1820s when the younger sons moved eastward in search of cheaper land, and began to purchase the land we farm now.  These men built houses as shelter and as symbols of their place in the agrarian economy, providing fertile ground for me 150 years later, as I wrote my master’s thesis about their architectural and agricultural choices. Their stories intertwine with the landscape of my childhood, always tugging, always remembering. And yet these roots, for the most part, I’ve found liberating rather than constrictive.

The lure of the true English country house then, echoes for me, rather than being something new and unknown. All evidence points to my ancestors leaving England one step ahead of the law, so I doubt the existence of a “genetic memory” that provides me with the connection I feel with the rural countryside of England. Rather, it is the interconnectedness of house, land, and outlying rural communities - combined with a landscape that sparks sudden and tight pangs of longing for the one I’ve known since birth – that pulls and propels me toward the country house. 

 

Petworth House in West Sussex, England

And it is also, perhaps, the feeling of obligation – of belonging to something weightier and more important – and occasionally draining and overpowering – than your own daily concerns. Responsibility and stewardship perhaps not sought, and grudgingly accepted. The English country house, of course, carries the weight of these emotions much more so than my own “country” background.  But the basic connections remain intact – and the use of house as a statement of power and prestige is one well-known in antebellum Kentucky, and even in the 21^st century power plays of the thoroughbred horse farm world.

Delighted, then, doesn’t even begin to express my feelings upon learning that I had been accepted to the 2104 Attingham Summer School. Ear-splitting, shrieking and a spontaneous jig better illustrate my reaction this spring (thankfully, my co-workers are quite familiar with the impressive range of my voice, both in octaves and decibels). 

Founded in 1952, with the initial goal of introducing American curators to the “fabric and contents of the British Country House,” the Summer School has “enjoyed outstanding success and is highly regarded by museums, universities and historic preservation societies throughout the world for its careful selection of members, and sustained academic standards.” (It’s much better for me to quote from the website than to subject readers to multiple exclamation points along with a stream of sentences most profound, such as “the best 18 days ever.” “Brilliant.” “So awesome.” “I loved it!!!!!!!!!!! Whoops. Those just crept in somehow.)

Sheep grazing at Chatsworth in Derbyshire

Helen Lowenthal, of the Education Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Sir George Trevelyan, a pioneer of adult education and Warden of Attingham Park combined forces to create the summer school. The summer school’s moniker stemmed from Trevelyan’s place of employment, the 18^th-century country house in Shropshire, England, which was an adult education center from 1948-1971. 

Eighteen days in England, with behind the scenes access to around 30 houses, with the following purposes (again, I borrow from the Attingham website to best describe this):

To EXAMINE the architectural and social history of the historic house in Britain and its gardens and landscape setting.
To STUDY the contents of these buildings – their paintings, sculpture, furniture, ceramics, silver, textiles and other applied arts – as well as the planning, decorative treatment and use of the interiors.
To STIMULATE debate on problems relating to the conservation and presentation of the country house and its contents.

Did I mention that it was absolutely wonderful? And that 48 scholars (24 Americans and 24 Europeans), traveling together on an un-airconditioned coach (bus) became friends and conspirators as we flew lightning fast from house to lecture to meals, all according to a highly planned and timed schedule, and feasted our eyes on art collections that museums covet, architecture with inspiring rhythms and use of materials, and landscapes that would cause any self-respecting southern belle to fall into a fit of vapors over the joy of it all? I saw and learned so much – and the reflection that will cause these lessons to become a permanent part of my mental fabrications (I hope) will stem from writing about the marvels of the country house in England in July 2014. Stay tuned. And stay tuned as well as my blog gets reworked. Who knows what will happen? A new name (unless you scroll to the very first post, it makes no sense and is offensive), new design...and most importantly, new stories.