Tea at Trianon: A Crinkle-crankle Wall

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, June 11, 2022

A Crinkle-crankle Wall

From Country Life:

The mysterious term crinkle-crankle wall is something you'll see scattered in to architecture books and even property listings. But what are crinkle-crankle walls? Why are they shaped as they are? And who first came up with the idea? Martin Fone explains all.

By the River Debden, about three miles south of Framlingham, lies the Suffolk village of Easton, the erstwhile seat of the Dukes of Hamilton. After the death of the 12^th Duke in 1895 from ‘an attack of the kidneys’, and in the absence of a male heir, his daughter, Lady Mary, assumed responsibility for the upkeep of the 27-bedroomed Easton Hall and its 4,833-acre estate. Unable to service the family debts and meet the high tax demands, in 1919 she put what was described as ‘a residential and sporting estate’ up for auction, parcelled up into 137 lots.

While most of the lots were sold, raising £56,000 —£4.6million at today’s values — the house and its 150-acres of parkland failed to attract bidders. A private buyer was eventually found three years later; the parkland was transferred to nearby Martley Hall; and the house, deemed surplus to requirements, was demolished brick by brick in December 1924 by a team from Reades of Aldeburgh. The bricks were reputedly transported to America and re-assembled as a ranch.

If true, it completed a remarkable journey for this country pile, for this wasn’t even its first demolition. The building had started life in Tacket Street in Ipswich before being dismantled by Sir Anthony Wingfield in 1627 and re-erected to form the original Hall at Easton. The demise of Easton Hall, sad as it was, was not unique. During the twentieth century it is estimated that around one sixth of England’s country houses, some 1,200 in all, were demolished.

Easton does, though, have a lasting memorial to the Hall’s former glory in the form of an eccentric boundary wall, which runs all the way to All Saints Church and surrounds three sides of the graveyard. Built in the 1830s and reputed to be the longest wall of its type in the world, at its prime it stretched some 2.5 miles, although now its longest continuous section runs for three-quarters of a mile. It was designed to ensure that the Duke and Duchess could walk to church unobserved and made the headlines in November 2013 when a hit-and-run motorist drove into it, knocking down a section.

What is distinctive about Easton’s wall is that it is wavy, sinuous, snake-like, with alternating convex and concave curves. It is what is known as a crinkle-crankle wall, defined by Nikolaus Pevsner in his Architectural Glossary (2010) as ‘a garden wall undulating in a series of serpentine curves’. (Read more.)