Castle Howard

While in Hampstead, I was wandering through a bookstore when I stumbled upon a local authors section.  John Keats had drawn me to Hampstead in the first place, but as I browsed through the shelves in that featured section, I realized that another famed author called Hampstead home.  Hampstead welcomed Evelyn Waugh into the world 1903.  Educated at Oxford, Waugh grew up to pen the legendary Brideshead Revisited.  The memoirs of the fictional Charles Ryder, Brideshead Revisited explores issues in Catholicism, reflects a certain nostalgia for the lost English gentry class, and paints a picture of the generation that came of age between the two great wars.  I had been meaning to read Brideshead Revisited for some time, so I picked up the book and savored it over the course of a few weeks.  Inspired by affection for the book, I rented the 2007 Miramax version of the film (which, for reasons I won’t go into here, I did not love).  However, the beauty of the estate used in the film to represent Brideshead mesmerized me.  The house (if you could even call it a house, I think the term estate or castle or manor or mansion might be more appropriate) is just the beginning.  The grounds and statues seemed like something out of fairy tale.  I simply had to go— to Castle Howard that is, the property used to film two different versions of Brideshead Revisited. 

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And so we went.  Just after my mom arrived, on a bright, clear, wintry day, we hopped on two trains (London to York and York to Malton). Once at the Malton station, hailed a cab to our final destination.  I hope you’re all getting the picture— this place is in the middle of nowhere (God bless my mom for agreeing to the trip!).  But it was worth going to the middle of nowhere to see the kind of unadulterated architectural and natural beauty present at Castle Howard.

The Temple of the Four Winds

Castle Howard is another one of those places that I cannot even begin to describe— only pictures can do the job.  For starters, there is the house and it’s signature, gilded dome (which burnt down in 1940).  Lined with many mythological statues, the rear garden features a fountain revolving around Atlas holding up the world.  Despite the un-cleared pathways throughout the rear garden and grounds, I traipsed around the outside of the castle for a good hour.  Blessed by good weather (clear blue skies with the occasional bit of light snow), I walked all the way out to the Temple of the Four Winds on the edge of the property, which graced the screen in the 2007 film.  From the Temple, the family mausoleum looms not far out of sight, on the edge of the grounds.  As much as I wanted to go check it out, the journey would have required traipsing through fields blanketed with a few feet of snow, hopping a fences, and ignorance of a sign clearly labeling the mausoleum “not open to public access”.    

At the end of the day, Castle Howard was definitely worth the adventure of getting there.  As with Edinburgh, I hope to return someday to see the estate in the summer, when the grounds must be striking in a wholly different way.