Lancashire 6 - Rufford / Lord Hesketh and F1/a black and white gem/a moveable screen /why take photographs

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The car with no name also known as Clint was parked up on a half full National Trust car park next to the Leeds to Liverpool Canal. It was midweek. The children are still at school and Clint had just been given a much needed run out of one and a half hours. When we started him up the voice control refused to work and the display told us the battery was getting flat. He needed a long drive to charge him up. Something he had not had for some weeks . Indifference has kept us in. What had discharged the battery was anyones guess. Not using the car. The alarm systems and dash cams running down the battery. We had no clues from the all singing and all dancing display.

The drive took us out of Wales in England . To Cheshire and on the motorway north to Lancashire . We had run out of places to visit locally and had increased our driving range to one hour from home.. Exhausted the one hour trip we were now travelling further in the hope of finding something interesting to see. As we drove we talked about the car , the motorhomes we saw on the route and some ideas for a holiday . Would we use the Channel Tunnel again ? Probably not . The drive down to Kent was the never the best . A bit like the M6 today which was quite busy and boring to the eye. Signs for Wigan Pier flashed by . Not a place we had visited - perhaps we should. Blackpool and Southport and still we headed north towards Ormskirk . Would the drive to France be better served by driving down to Portsmouth and catching the ferry to Caen? That at least would be easier but probably more expensive as my Tesco vouchers cannot be used for this ferry company . We would be nearer to where we wanted to be arriving at Caen. But would the boat dock at such a time that we could find a hotel open as many docked late at night . A great deal of homework was required .

We pulled off the motorway heading for Rufford . We had needed to manually input Rufford to the Sat Nav. Arriving near to our destination voice command was still not playing ball. The speed cameras were all in place along the roads . It was a pleasure to drive at 30mph in residential areas rather than Wales version of 20mph.

The area around Rufford looked extremely affluent. Large houses with names such as Four Acres . They told a story of large properties with a great deal of land around them. Rufford was a small village dominated by a Victorian looking church and Rufford Old Hall.

It was a short walk from the car through the woods to the house . There seemed few people walking towards the house . Perhaps the car owners had parked up and taken to walking the canal towpath . I was looking forward to seeing this black and white gem of a house with its newer addition of red brick . Normally houses of the black and white type had been pulled down by their owners as they were considered old fashioned . A new brick built square house would replace the older house . Here though the newer part was built into and alongside the older building . It did not jar at all and in fact enhanced the building.

The original house had been built about 1530 for Sir Robert Hesketh . The only bit of that really left untouched was the Great Hall. The brick built wing was added around 1661 at angles to the older structure . The Jacobean brick building was finished in the smallest of bricks you could imagine . Around the house were coach houses , a cottage and stables .

The structure of the hall is late Medieval. A style that continued into the Tudor times . A substantial house with flagged floors, stone chimneys , five bays and a hammerbeam roof.

We were welcomed to the property by a volunteer who explained a little about the house , issued us with a map of the house and gardens and offered us a walking map . We were told about the family church that was further up into the estate . Lunch could be taken in the small cafe . We had enough time to do justice to the house before taking in the church and having lunch .

First thoughts the house was pretty. It looked like the icing on a cake. The confectioner could had taken black colouring and added it to the white icing . They then could have spent all day icing the building with the black perfectly straight lines. It was one of the most stunning black and white buildings I had seen .

Until 1936 the house had been owned by the Heskeths who were the lords of the manor of Rufford . They moved to Rufford New Hall in 1798 and in 1846 the 5th Baronet married into the rich Fermor family heiress to the Earl of Pomfrets estate. Pomfret being another name for Pontefract in Yorkshire . Pomfret is also another name for Pontefract Cakes -those licorice sweets that I hate .

The family owned other properties in Northamptonshire and eventually the Rufford Old Hall was given to the National Trust in 1936 together with a collection of arms and armour. Later Lord Hesketh donated a large amount of oak furniture for the hall.

Hesketh - I did wonder about the name and finally realised that the connection was with the present Lord Hesketh who as a young man managed and owned an F1 racing team . He lost money and eventually the family home in Northamptonshire was sold .

The weather had improved by the time we walked in through the entrance door into what was once the kitchen serving the house. The guide smiled and apologised that the heating boiler had packed up so the house was cold . She explained that this room was once a bigger room and the huge inglenook fireplace told a story of a different use. Now made much smaller it no longer housed the kitchen but was used as a snug with oak rocking chairs making the best advantage of the fire when it was lit. No photographs here the guide said nor in any of the rooms apart from the Great Hall. She smiled and said that in fact the Great Hall was the best room and there was probably nothing as interesting in the rest of the house. That was not strictly true and I missed not being able to click click away as I went into each room .

The second room was another snug but this time looked less like the old servants rooms . A massive window let in the light and the Autumn sunshine. Pictures hung on the walls and easy chairs looked comfortable .

The Great Hall was quite small. I found myself renaming it the small great hall or the very tiny version of a great hall. A double height room was completely carved with a moveable screen across the door . It was however one of those rooms where you are grateful to be allowed to photograph the interior and just stand looking up at a fantastic carved roof complete with angels . The screen was made of bog oak and dated from somewhere between 1530 and 1540. It is the only known example surviving from the first half of the 16th century. I admired the workmanship but in some ways it looked quite ugly , There are three spiral finials on the top and two outer ones carved from single lengths of timber . On the sides traceried panels . There were mistakes in the construction . The story goes or so the guide told us that the makers did not want to be charged with heresy . The belief of the time was that only God was perfect and could create perfection so one panel was fitted upside down, on the opposite end a panel of a different design . To complete the errors an angel has an extra finger .

The roof was stunning and we were told that we would get a better view either using the mirrors provided and by looking through the squint hole in the room above .

Around the room were cases housing swords and there were the usual pictures on the walls. The staircase as always was impressive with a large painting of Hesketh and his family. We found the tiny squirrel that the painter had popped into the corner on the seat the family were siting on. Other paintings had been sent for conservation . High quality digital photography had been used to capture the images and they had been placed around the rooms downstairs. The guide in that room told us that the painter had been extremely clever in that he showed he could paint the usual landscapes with mythical scenes , portraits and also still life painting . A Curriculum Vitae in one photograph . The painting was crying out "Look at the painter - ask me to paint anything and I will oblige .

The rooms upstairs included a school room/nursery , a bedroom or two , small sitting rooms and long corridors with paintings of horses and the hunt on the walls . The corridors went up and down with the changes in levels mastered with a step here or there .

The room above the Great Hall had the squint window to look through to the hall below . We were level with the roof and we could see the complicated nature of the woodwork . We were close to the angels as we looked through the peep hole . "Why don't you just look ?" the guide asked a little sourly . "Why are you taking photographs instead of taking it all in?" We tried to explain . Photographs gave us memories which we could look at next week or next year . We would forget the roof but with the photographs we could remind ourselves of what we had seen . She warmed a little when we explained that a blog requires photographs .

Rufford is a small house but it was certainly an interesting one . Now it was time for lunch . The tea rooms were situated in the old outbuildings formed around a courtyard . The tea rooms were almost empty or at least seemed so due to the way it was set out . A serving area was in the corner on one small room . Beyond that was another tiny room with a couple of table and finally a small back room with half a dozen tables . Four people sat in the back room and two in the serving area. We had our choice of tables . There was not much choice in the way of food . Sandwiches , sausage rolls , Italian tomato soup or jacket potatoes . A one pot dish was a Three Bean Chilli . We chose the jacket potatoes with cheese , a small salad and coleslaw washed down with a Capuccino and an Earl Grey tea . We were joined by a few other people just as we were leaving to head out and look at the gardens and the local church .

The gardens were not at their best at this time of year but then we had not expected much from the long borders. There were some pink Japanese Anemone blooming here and there plus a few mauve Autumn Crocus . The borders would have looked good in the height of summer . The signs were there . The topiary trees were works of art. The squirrel was a complex cut yew and a second one was in the process of being created . It would be some time before squirrel number two was complete but we could see it taking shape. Down the garden were a number of sculptures . We headed that way towards the end of the garden . Our next stop would be the Heskeths church . Two different sites in one visit . Can't ask for more .

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