EVOCATIVE REMAINS

Few things are more romantic and evocative than architectural fragments hinting at former grandeur. The Swarkestone Pavilion, above, is all that remains of a great Derbyshire house demolished before 1750. The exquisite little pavilion, probably built as a place to watch games of bowls in the walled enclosure in front, in 1632 to designs by John Smythson (like Bolsover Castle,) can now be rented as an eccentric holiday house from the Landmark Trust.

A country road in Berkshire passes this splendid pair of gates opening onto beautiful parkland: all that survives of the great Coleshill House, built in 1660 by amateur architect Sir Roger Pratt for his brother Sir George, with advice from Inigo Jones. The house was destroyed by fire in 1952. The gates were not the entrance but part of the garden design behind the house, intended to be seen from it, as in the view below; the oval niches facing the house held busts of Caesars.

Above right, in a cow-field at Hamstead Marshall, also in Berkshire, stand several pairs of even grander gates, which once marked entrances and garden views at a vast mansion built by the Earl of Craven in the 1660's. This was a mad, romantic undertaking, a palace for his idol Elizabeth, Winter Queen of Bohemia, sister of Charles I, modeled on her former home at Heidelberg. She died before it was even begun but Lord Craven, a true obsessive, spent 34 years building it as a monument to her memory. It burnt in 1718, leaving only the exquisitely detailed stone and brick gate piers standing like ghosts in the fields.