IT is a bright morning in spring, and joyful rays of life-blessing sunshine bathe the ivied walls, noble turrets, squeaking weathervane, rolling lawns, gleaming greenhouses, red gravel paths, carved stone bird baths (with optional cherub), ornamental sundial, stable-block, shrubbery, flower beds, fountain and bijou folly in the shape of an apricot that comprise in sum, with sundry other parts (such as the pond with statue of Diana), the house and grounds of your demesne.
Suddenly, your tranquil reverie is disturbed by a small, elderly man in a collarless shirt and soil-stained waistcoat who issues a brusque warning that you’re about to step backwards into his weed-filled wheelbarrow. The wizened professional labourer adds: “It’s seven quid twenty if you want to see inside the house.”
For reality has reared its ugly head with this cruel news just in: you are not at home at all. You are visiting a stately home, owned by the public or perchance the cooncil, and the sub-Blandings description with which our chastening sermon began serves merely to confirm that places like this are only for the likes of you if you use the public car park and pay for a visitor’s ticket.
I am minded to witter thus after the public prints were awash with tales this week about “mansions”. This is, I guess, the correct term, though “mansion” has something of the suburban (if substantial) about it, and these properties might also credibly have been described as country houses, which come into the category of stately homes, which I expect have some more exclusive definition.
But if it looks stately and it is a home, then it is a stately home. It’s nothing to do with the state and doesn’t have to be owned by the National Trust for Scotland. Indeed, the two mansions I’m thinking about are privately owned, which I do not condone, believing – as I shall do till my dying breath – that everything large, from ships and trains to factories and mountains, should be owned by the state.
Gilmerton House, in East Lothian, was in the news after being declared the “most exclusive private venue in Scotland”. A Grade A-listed Georgian mansion and the Kinloch family seat, it has played host to the Beckhams (a former footballer and a woman who wears peculiar clothing), and Ronan Keating (out of, I think, The Beatles) and his new wife. To hire Gilmerton House for one night costs between £2,500 and £3,500, for which I would expect the leccy to be un-metered.
Also making the headlines was Underwood House, in Ayrshire, which has gone on the market at offers over £975,000. A B-listed Georgian mansion, it was visited in 1926 by the future Edward VIII, who went out for a spot of fox-mangling while there.
Indeed, the current estate agent’s spec boasts of “pheasant, partridge and grouse shooting” in the area, in much the same way that brochures designed to tempt you or me might speak glowingly of a Tesco Express and a bus-stop.
Helpfully, the brochure advises potential owners that Prestwick Airport is nearby, perhaps in case they need to flee should Scotland fail to trust Labour and vote for independence instead.
Ach, they’ll be all right whatever happens. There isn’t the appetite to commandeer stately homes as there was when Britain went all socialist after the Second World War.
Even my own executive-style pitchfork, from John Lewis’s “Bastille” range, remains unused as, by and large, there have been few opportunities to storm anything for a while now.
I wish those staying at Gilmerton House or purchasing Underwood House all the best, and feel no envy at all, as the sun’s spring rays stroke the crumbling garden shed, plastic birdbath and half-harled walls of my nice wee semi in suburbia.
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