If you build it...I will come

Today we took an outing to the Compton Verney House. Though describing this as a house would be like calling the guillotine a cure for dandruff. The original manor house was built in 1150, and most of the land, had been acquired by 1430s.

When I say acquired, I mean it in the same sense one might say Kenneth Lay built a company. When the Verney family, who owned the house and land that adjoined the house, found that by law they couldn’t evict the peasants living there, they came up with a cunning plan. They walled in all their property with stonewalls and then levied outlandish taxes for all livestock within the wall. Of course, the peasants couldn’t afford the tariff, so they moved beyond the wall, and the Verney family had cleared the land. And no, those serfs were not related in any way to the American Indian, except perhaps through the soul.

Anyhow the Verney family had land to die for and a house that grew wing after wing and floor after floor. What it didn’t have was inside pluming. The house built by a river, and of course there were lots of servants, so the family saw no need to build sanitation when they had all that help. After all you have to keep the help busy.

The house passed down from family member to family member until falling on hard times the Verneys unloaded it on someone who was to become the 12th Baron Willoughby de Broke. He had petitioned parliament for a title on the grounds that someone with big a house deserved a title. It took two years of debate before the title was bestowed. When it was awarded it was to what was to become the 12th Baron. Parliament figured that the last eleven members of this family had to be of the upper class, but the family had just been unaware of the family history.

Now we come to the “fun” part. In 1768 along came Capability Brown, the famous English landscape designer. Let’s discuss Capability for a minute. I believe it was Joyce Kilmer who said, “Only God can make a tree.” Joyce didn’t know Capability.

The man would strip away everything that he thought didn’t work, and that included forest as well as buildings. He loved vistas, so if a hill got in the way he removed the hill. But, he also loved balance. So, if a hill put his vista out of balance he would move the hill. Sometime a hill would only have to be moved a few feet, but move it he did. He would change a river by digging out a new channel so the river would flow through the property the way it should so there would be balance. But fret not my friends, he would then landscape the riverbank so it looked like it had been flowing through that riverbank since the beginning of time.

He built Ha-Ha’s so fences wouldn’t get in the way to spoil the view from the house. When Capability was finished the land didn’t look anything like it had looked. It looked better. I know, I was there, and trust me on this, you’d love it.

A byproduct of Capability’s genius is that he gave birth to one of Terry Pratchett’s better characters. In Pratchett’s Disk World he has a landscape architect, builder and inventor who never gets anything right. He deigned a fishpond, and when built to his blueprints the pond was 100 yards long and one inch wide. The one fish in the pool couldn’t turn around. The man had a long list of designs and inventions. Had he been able to draw a good blueprint, he could have eclipsed Capability Brown. But for a bit of dyslexia, Bloody Stupid Johnson would have been a household word.

Anyway history continues and the house and grounds pass from hand to hand. It has gone from splendor to squalor and back again. It is almost restored and is the home of a truly terrific art collection.

I enjoyed the tour, but I was a little disappointed. It reminded me too much of my place in mid-town.