Visiting Croome Court
On a beautiful but cool Monday morning, I traveled with Robert and Sally to their weekly volunteer assignment for the National Trust at Croome Court.
History of the Estate
The house and the church sit in a landscape designed to gradually reveal itself. The property, mansion house, church, and outbuildings are owned by Croome Heritage Trust, and leased to the National Trust, which operates it as a tourist attraction. The National Trust owns the surrounding parkland, which is also open to the public.
The origins of the Croome property extend to the 1640s as the ancestral home of the Coventry family of Croome. The Coventry line begins with John of Coventry, executor to Richard “Dick” Whittington and Lord Mayor of London in 1425. The family connection with Croome begins with the purchase of the land in 1592. Royal appointments to, and political prominence of, family members followed under James I and Charles I, with the owner of the land granted a hereditary title as Baron Coventry of Allesborough. The fifth Baron became the First Earl of Coventry in 1697 under the reign of King William III.
The rivers Severn and Avon merge about six miles south of the estate and the name Croome could originate with the welsh/Brythonic word crum or “bend in the river” or “hump-backed hill.”
When George William Coventry, the sixth earl, inherited the “boggy, unkempt parkland” and its thousands of acres in 1751, he determined to create a place of beauty in the countryside. He hired Lancelot “Capability” Brown to remodel the manor house and then sculpt the landscape into a vision with hidden highlights, visible only when walking around the estate. Trees planted as saplings blossomed into mature and imposing accents on the estate. “Eyecatchers,” or structures created in the distance, focused the viewer’s eye on the house and the nearby landscape.
Brown’s landscape philosophy could be defined as one where:
[S]mooth undulating grass … [runs] straight to the house, clumps, belts and scattering of trees and his serpentine lakes formed by invisibly damming small rivers, were a new style within the English landscape, a ‘gardenless’ form of landscape gardening, which swept away almost all the remnants of pervious formally patterned styles.
What is taste? The Picturesque debate (2013)
The estate went through periods of peace as well as upheaval. The 20th Century saw the estate used as an airdrome where radar was developed during World War II, then transferred to other hands, first for use as a Catholic boys school, then to the Hare Krishna movement, and to developers. The National Trust acquired the 670 acres in 1996 and began to restore the parkland, replanting trees and shrubbery.
As my tour demonstrated, the landscape is now returning to the 18th-Century vision of a great estate, one where contemporary visitors can turn back the pages of history to a totally different era.
Robert Wilkins
Coade Stone
As a footnote to the greater landscape and structural design of the estate, it seems fair to mention Mrs. Eleanor Coade, an entrepreneur and businesswoman whose firm created stone sculptures. In an era when few women left the home, Mrs. Coade created terracotta products featured in much Georgian architecture, including multiple examples on the Croome grounds. The stone itself used fired clay, ground fine, mixed with unfired clay, flint, sand, and ground glass, then poured into clay molds, before firing in a kiln. The end product could withstand extremes of weather and the details of the stonework stand out, even after time and exposure to the elements.
Resources
In their work as volunteer guides for the National Trust, Robert Wilkins and Sally Dean know a great deal about the estate and its history. I relied on them for a basic understanding of Croome, although any errors are mine alone. They introduced me to several texts about the estate, which also formed sections of this post:
National Trust and The Friends of Croome Park. Croome Before the National Trust: The Friends of Croome Park Oral History Project (undated). Wood Mitchell Printers Ltd., Stoke-on-Trent.
Trustees of the Croome Estate. Croome: The Place, The People, The Treasures Revealed (2005). Logaston Press: Little Logaston, Woonton, Almeley, Herefordshire HR3 6QH.
Van Lemmen, Hans. Coade Stone. (2006). Shire Publications, Ltd. Cromwell HJouse, Church Street, Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire HP27 9AA, U.K.
“What is taste? The Picturesque Debate.” (2013).
