Another country

I get easily obsessed with things from the past. When I was a child growing up in Staffordshire, we used to go past the ruined Ranton Abbey on our way to school, and I was scared and excited every time I saw the ivy-coated tower above the trees.

http://www.thornber.net/staffs/html/ranton.html


A few years back, it was the last Jewish tailor's shop in Petticoat Lane, the wooden interior with the pinstriped suitings standing out in old-fashioned sobriety against the pound shops and sari fabric shops. It's gone now, but it led me to the book "Konin" by Theo Richmond, about a vanished shtetl in Poland, and I suppose, eventually, to the Jewish music that I did last year at Dartington.

My latest find is rather posher than this. I started driving a different route to work after one too many close encounters of the articulated lorry kind on the M8, and after a bit noticed that there was a funny looking tower thing set back from the road, and a very ornamental gateway. It turns out that they are all that's left of the old house of the Duke of Lauderdale, Hatton House. Built in 1680ish (records disagree), it was dynamited in the Fifties.

After a while of driving past it every morning, in the end I had to drive along the track that leads off the road and see what was there. All that remains is two ornamental towers with a wall running between them, enclosing an ornamental terrace that was originally in front of the house. And where the house used to stand? A very ugly 1950s farmhouse and outbuildings. It's strange to think that nearly 300 years of living, and very grand living at that, has left so little trace. There: my very own Brideshead moment.

nale.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/. ../hattonhouse.html