ASHPOLE MANOR spreads across 3,200 acres of field and woodland in northeastern Buckinghamshire.  A large house of some sort has stood here since before Domesday, associated with the Cavendar family.  The present pile looks from a distance like a college of Oxford or Cambridge weirdly transported into a gigantic pasture and left as a prank, a sprawling collection of buildings welded together by brute force in disregard of style or reason.  The main house is a hollow square fused by the implacable will of Jeffrey Wyattville between 1814 and 1820 from several earlier buildings and wings.  At a cusp in architectural history, when many fads and fashions were dying and birthing, Wyattville had trouble deciding from month to month the direction his massive project was to take.  The house, therefore, seems grown, not built, in some exuberant mitosis, an uncontrolled multiplication of wild, living cells.

            The south front is a grand Palladian structure built in 1735 by the twelfth earl to teach that surly pup Burlington a thing or two about true English classicism.  To this noble stone structure, with its superbly balanced porch and pediment, Wyattville grafted two rebuilt wings—the west wing (the so-called “Turkish façade”) and the north wing, a slightly restored Jacobean block that had been servants’ quarters for a century.  To this, Wyattville added a balancing east front in a neogothic style that would have made Horace Walpole blanch with envy, complete with pointed turrets, narrow dart-shaped windows, cupolas, bow-windowed bays and other odd excrescences.  Wyattville finished his unification of the house by decorating the roofline with dozens of louring gargoyles, twisty chimneys and strange pyramids, obelisks and other bizarre scrimshaw.

            The effect of Ashpole House is one of crazy-quilt heterogeneity, so when a visitor walks the long circuit around the building, he is likely to return feeling disoriented.  Nothing looks the same from differing perspectives, and at varied times of day, the house may look sinister, reposeful or merely silly.  Wyattville told the fifteenth earl that he aimed at an effect “of wildly playful Nature at Her sportive best.”

            The vast park was developed by Charles Bridgman and William Kent, who were then shouldered aside by Lancelot Brown who uttered his stock comment about the landskip’s great “capability” for improvement by the hand of man and then went on to lay out rides and vistoes and to plant 400 oaks, limes and beeches and a handful of sequoias from savage America.  Humphrey arrived next and drew a careful Red Book of the park (still preserved in the archives of the Old Kitchen), which improved on the improvements of Mr. Brown, further decorating the Nature so abundant in the lawns, hills and vales.  Repton added a serpentine canal and three lakes at different levels in the grounds, connected by ingenious conduits, pipelines, rills, cascades and waterfalls, all powering a half-dozen fountains.  Scattered on the grounds were a herd of red deer (estimated at 90 head today), a smaller herd of Highland cattle, a stable block built by Kent in 1732 but extensively revised by Sir John Soane (at about the time the fourteenth earl was being shot to death in the Peninsular Campaign with the Iron Duke), a Long Water and a Palladian bridge sketched by Brown and appropriated by Repton, an Aegyptian Tomb from a drawing by Sir John Van Brugh (discarded from his first drawings for Blenheim), the Vale of Ida (dominated by its Nelson Column), a gothick eyecatcher by William Kent, which resembles a giant, ruinous pocket comb inserted in a large meadow, a Gothick Temple cobbled up from hints by Alexander Pope and James Gibbs, the Duke’s Hunting Lodge, an odd capless tower like a colliery smokestack perched on a distant ridge.  There were also a handful of lesser follies, quincunxes, cascades, knot gardens, mazes, temples, etc.  Vistas shoot in every direction, and a ha-ha almost four miles long wiggles like a snake’s track around the landscape and is as effective a deterrent against poachers as any of the seventeenth earl’s patent humane mantraps.

            In short, Ashpole Manor is a supreme example of the architecture of egotism and power from about 1650 to 1850, and only its status as a privately managed institute for industrial management training prevents it from being overrun by mobs of tourists or turned into a menagerie-cum-carnival stocked with many gormless lions, spavined camels and molting ostriches.

            South of the estate, just outside the majestic Ramillies Gate, stands the ancient village of Ashpole Norton, in medieval times an important market town, noted for the quality of the sheep traded there.  In the late nineteenth century, the seventeenth countess was smitten, after poring through the works of Mr. Ruskin and Mrs. Morris, with the notion of “improving” the village, so now a half-dozen largish cottages ornee stand on the east end of the green, dumpy thatched structures with crutch-like timbers propping toadstool roofs.  They look like fit dwellings for the Seven Dwarfs.  In the middle of the village stands a magnificent Jacobean market house, a lock-up shaped like a squat beehive (dated 1610 and reputed to be the villagers’ concerted, if belated, response to the unfortunate Guy Fawkes affair) and The King’s Leap, a meandering inn cobbled together from buildings once a glass factory and a brewery.

            The King’s Leap opened in 1898, although it pretends to be Restoration in origin, and its faux-primitive sign shows a strange robed and crowned figure mounted on what seems to be a rocking horse, flying in the air over a stunted tree.  It celebrates a spurious local legend that Charles I found refuge at Ashpole Manor and when routed from this lair by rabid Roundheads fled on a Cavendar stallion of prodigious jumping ability.  During his escape, the horse reputedly carried him over a ravine in which grew a full-sized ash tree, the Ash of Ashpole Manor.  A tiny ossified bit of this rests in a reliquary in the great hall of the house.  Next to it is a battered copy of Eikon Basilike also reputedly given by the First Good King Charles to the eleventh earl (an odd notion, considering that the book only appeared after the Good King lost his Good Head).

            The whole demesne might be a plate from one of William Morris’ late books or a sketch by Howard Pyle for a wildly romantic Merrie Englande tale, except for the intrusion of metalled roads and road signs into the greeny landscape.  The thick forest, the huddled village, the vast storybook house sited in meadows and woods, looming above the valley, are the stuff of fantasy.

            Imagination has always transformed the tranquil landscape of Ashpole Manor.  The pragmatic imagination of a Capability Brown or a Humphrey Repton created lasting metamorphoses of the topography, indenting idyllic valleys, watercourses, unsinister tarns inhabited by waterfowl and huge, mossy carp, also surprising vistas with statuary groups guarding distant termini. 

            Other forms of reality intruded into the place from generation to generation.  A scaffold sardonically dubbed “Ashpole Tree” by locals stood for a half-century at the crossroads beyond Namur Gate, and a dozen or so malefactors were dispatched there over the course of years.  A wily hermit lived in the deep woods beyond the Temple of the Four Winds for a decade in Victoria’s reign, subsisting on herbs, vegetables and deftly poached game.  The seventeenth earl’s cadre of gamekeepers pursued him fruitlessly, until one cold December morning he was found caught in a patent humane mantrap, quite frozen and coated with rime.  His lonely ghost joined the battalion of shades said to haunt regions of the house and grounds.

            In 1941, a Heinkel bomber was chased back from the Channel after a dawn raid on London, shot full of holes by three Hurricane pilots from the Polish fighter squadron, finally downed on the estate.  It fell, trailing clouds of black smoke and futile Teutonic glory, into the Vale of Ida, barely clearing the obelisk dedicated to Lord Nelson and killing all four crew members on impact.

            Village oldtimers in Ashpole Norton often date reminiscences as before or after the Heinie plane came down, and Arthur Hopcraft, village postmaster emeritus, still has a swatch of the aircraft’s hide in his garden shed, a bit of wing fabric with an iron cross lacquered on the camouflage motley.  He sometimes opens the past to visitors by showing them this relic and telling horrific tales of the mangled Kraut airmen, all for the price of one pint of best bitter at the King’s Leap.

            Past and present wars shaped Ashpole Manor.  Bits of ancient armor and weaponry grace the walls of studies and corridors—a Spanish sword from the Peninsula, a French epee from Namur, three full suits of leather and iron armor from the Civil Wars, under a brace of crossed matchlock muskets.  Several pikes, ending in unpleasant canopener-like blades intended to peel back a cavalier’s armor.  Swords so vast and blade-heavy that big men can scarcely lift them, let alone wield them.  A fine set of fifteenth-century Flemish court armor, engraved like table silver, sporting a large, ragged hole through the curiass, reportedly indited by a service-issue .45 caliber pistol in 1944, when a rowdy contingent of U.S. 8^th Air Force bomber crews were billeted briefly at Ashpole Manor.

            The twentieth earl had been as much a military enthusiast as every Cavendar, serving with the R.A.F. and piloting a Lancaster bomber in a score of night raids on the Ruhr.  After the war he spent years trying to procure his former aircraft, named Miss Adventure, to have her mounted on a large steel pylon in the great meadow back of the Vale of Ida.  The scale model he commissioned from an architect still resides on the model of the estate in the grand foyer.  The ugly warplane seems tiny in proportion to the rest of Ashpole Manor.  The twentieth earl had walked out every morning in the great meadow, an excellent Purdy 12-bore tucked under one arm, giving his ramble an air of gentlemanly purpose.  There he stood staring at the landscape where he hoped his beloved behemoth would one day hover, a dozen feet off the ground, as if lifting off for one last glorious midnight mission against the detestable Hun.

            Death and taxes, irresistible twentieth-century nemeses, forestalled his scheme, although a large concrete pedestal stands in the midst of winter rye in the great meadow.  The twentieth earl’s instructions to be buried under the slab were ignored, also, and he was interred in 1961 with his endless chain of ancestors in the undercroft of the village church, surrounded by cold white statuary by Robilliacs and Grinling Gibbons and by swirling script carved on dozens of hatchments, preserving excellent funerary verse.

            Ashpole Manor was marked by the long, guilty peace of the Victorians, by the revolution in the English countryside which moved the nation from medieval pastoral crafts and traditions into the rationalized industrial agriculture of the twentieth century.  A contemporary of Piers Plowman had prophesied in semi-literate alliterative rhyming prose that Ashpole Manor would stand till Ashpole sheep were no more seen in the high meadows.  Now only a decorative herd of dark-brown Jacobs’ sheep are kept as a petting zoo.  Eighteenth century landscapers lusting for proper naturalized vistas and glades  obliterated the irregular old working fields and enclosed the meadows that made the manor a working farm.  From 1750, lords and ladies could play at pretty pastoral sports, but the vast acreage no longer fed and clothed the county.

            Hedges, fields and coverts still sheltered wildlife, and a pair of conservation-minded college-trained under-managers strolled the grounds to control the animal population, shooting an occasional fox or pheasant in a spirit remarkably different from that of the blood-sport-minded gentry.  Scientific agriculture ruled, and the broad fields under cultivation were tilled, tended and maintained by a suit-and-vested bureaucrat dependent on a personal computer.  The main aim of the staff was to keep the estate tidy as a very large, very whitewashed elephant, an immense stage set from the past, designed as a stately backdrop for purely contemporary dramas of group-process training.

            It was a magnificent setting, a kingdom-within-the-kingdom, a little world made cunningly and set off by walls, hedges, fences and clumps of ancient plantations from the modern swinging Britain that buzzed, bloomed and pulsed beyond it.  A dozen miles east was a spaghetti nexus of major highways.  A railroad line surveyed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, still adorned with Greek Revival bridges and tunnel heads, nearly touched the northern boundary of the estate.  Heathrow jets etched straight white lines in the blue sky, and occasionally small, nasty American fighter planes from a Midlands base pulsed over at treetop altitude, leaving a wake of sonic booms rattling the china services displayed in the Palladian wing or inflicting hairline fractures in the eighteenth earl’s lovingly preserved collection of 2,743 blown bird eggs.

            But nothing deflected or disturbed the deep sleep of Ashpole Manor.  Peasant revolts, treason, threatened invasion, Civil Wars, Popish Plots, Enclosure Acts, industrialization and the antic dance of Captain Swing, agricultural depressions, the catastrophic slaughter of young men 1914-18 all left the place unmarred.  The depredations of revisionist architects and gardeners were superficial.  The whims and caprices of careless owners scarcely scratched the surface, let alone damaged the soul of the place.  Legends said a Roman villa once stood in the Vale of Ida, a minor east-Saxon kinglet had camped where now grows a dense beech and oak plantation decreed by Repton to ward the eye from a distracting vista.  A chest of plate is still buried, it is said, somewhere near the old kitchen’s site, hidden from Cavaliers or Roundheads or other impromptu taxmen seeking war revenue in 1647.

            The sun rose and set on Ashpole Manor as if nothing else existed, no worlds elsewhere, once the traveler set foot inside the parkland.  Poets imbibed the placidity:  George Herbert and Thomas Gray and William Collins and Lord Byron and Alfred Lord Tennyson and Ernest Dowson indited minor works here.  William Cobbett rode through and snorted at the bad farming.  Robert Louis Stevenson walked up to Ramillies Gate, felt a twinge in his chest and trudged on to Oxford.  One Mitford sister described the house as “an awful pile in a wilderness,” and Betjeman at Ashpole was stumped for a rhyme to describe the distant chiming of parish church bells.

            Into this storied setting Richard Poole walked in early morning light, after a hasty breakfast in the nearly vacant common room.  His head buzzed with a mild headache, and he felt less like stout Cortez, silent on a peak in Darien, than Lemuel Gulliver, alone, tongue-tied and afraid in Brobdingnag. ###