About me

Frederick Gatfield

Currently an Art History student and National Trust volunteer, I am a lifelong architecture enthusiast – I have visited more than 60 country houses and counting! With their architecture, art, gardens, estates and social history, I’m convinced these places are a great source of not only information about our past, but restorative calm and beauty for our present and inspiration for our future. I aim to better understand historic buildings, in order to show their worth to all. On this blog I will share my notes, thoughts and photographs from my visits and reading around the subject.

Do you need help with a project? I’m looking to develop skills and experience in the heritage industry or do further research. Don’t hesitate to contact me.

There is a contact form in the dropdown menu.

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Penrhyn Castle, Gwynedd

North Wales can boast some of the most formidable medieval fortresses in Europe: Caernarfon, Conwy, Harlech, and Beaumaris. As such, in the early nineteenth century, when gothic and castle style houses were in fashion, some local landowners chose to echo the massive form and defensive details of those edifices when building their country houses. Results of this trend include Bodelwyddan Castle, Gwyrch Castle and – the most intact – mighty Penrhyn. While on holiday in the area with my parents, locals were often surprised when we expressed our preference for Penrhyn over another nearby National Trust property: Plas Newydd. Any pair of major country houses so close together always attracts comparison. On the north side of the Menai Strait, elegant Plas Newydd was a home to the Paget family, Marquises of Anglesey, becoming their chief country residence after the demolition of their Staffordshire seat, Beaudesert Hall. It has connections to the Napoleonic Wars and twentieth-century ...

Saltram, Devon

A property of the National Trust since 1960, Saltram Park is a crucial rural space among the urban sprawl of Plymouth. The woods and pastures are hemmed in by the noisy Devon Expressway to the north, and to the south by a former landfill site, where there was once a racecourse. The serene river Plym forms the western boundary while railway lines and a dual carriageway buzz on the opposite bank. This was the seat of the Parker family (Earls of Morley from 1815) for 200 years. With the former walled gardens and other outbuildings cut off, on the north side of the expressway, marooned in a twentieth-century housing development, Saltram is no longer a unified working estate. The house appears to be a plain, rendered, boxy Georgian building. However, inside there are many surprises, not least interiors by Robert Adam and a collection that includes several works by Joshua Reynolds (born in nearby Plympton), the first President of the Royal Academy, and Angelica Kauffman. Saltram Hous...

Wentworth Woodhouse, South Yorkshire

When it appeared for sale on the open market in 2015 for £8 million, Wentworth Woodhouse must have been the largest house for sale anywhere in the world. It is reputed to have five miles of galleries and passages and as many rooms as there are days in a year! These are perhaps exaggerations , but i n the sales brochure, the agent Savills marketed the house as ‘one of the great Georgian houses of England . ’ Imagine if Chatsworth came up for sale with a leaky roof and a handful of acres. It is not likely a similar house will be offered for sale in England ever again. I ts extraordinary size (over 124,500 square feet plus cellars, according to Savills) is in part due to t he politically charged taste for architecture in the eighteenth century , and a family feud. Thomas Watson-Wentworth, first Marquess of Rockingham and a Whig politician , remodelled a Jacobean house on the site in English Baroque style from 1724-28 . Lord Rockingham’s liberal politics were be...

British Country Houses

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