| Guy's Cliffe House was one of the
most attractive stories and buildings in Warwickshire, indeed in all the
UK. Now a sad but deeply atmospheric ruin situated in a beautiful spot on
the banks of the River Avon just outside Warwick, this is one of the most
beautiful, evocative, even spooky historical sites in all England.
Described as the "most beautiful abandoned stately home in
England", the house is possessed of an unearthly atmosphere which
only increases the more you look and learn. Being partly built in and
rising from the rock of the sandstone cliff, the indistinct edges between
house, rock and foliage seem to blur into one. Sadly not open to the
public, as it stands in privately owned grounds, one can still get good
views from a nearby footpath that runs down from the nearby, and similarly
ancient, Saxon Mill. |
|
|
(Taken in the 1860s, the
house's halcyon days, showing the beautiful riverside setting to good
effect. Tyack 1994). |
The ruin, not marked by the OS for
some reason, is situated next to the Church (of which more later) by the
River Avon, and just along from the Cave marked on the map (of which we
shall also hear more).
Today, tucked away behind woods not far from
a busy road leading into Warwick, the house is a hidden atmospheric jewel.
Unless you happened to visit the Saxon Mill pub, or were looking for the
house, one would not even know that it was there. Once found, however, one
could be in a different world. The jackdaws caw and flock above the
towering ruins, which peer out from behind the trees as if trying in vain
to remind the world of their former glory. No more than a tantalising
glimpse can be seen from the footpath, but one can see the wildly
overgrown exotic plants and lush vegetation that once made up the grounds
of this beautiful house. |
History of the Site
Guy's Cliffe has a long and colourful history. A house and the mill are
mentioned in Domesday Book, but the mill had reputedly been functioning
for two hundred years before this census. Thus inhabited since Saxon
times, the most famous legend of the site is that of Guy of Warwick. This
Saxon noble, the legendary founder of Warwick Castle in the 10th Century,
and killer of the Dun Cow, returned from his travels and adventures and,
as Dugdale says, shunning the "deceitful pleasures of this
world", retired to live out the rest of his days in a cave by the
river, which still survives by the Chapel. His wife, the lady Felice of
Warwick, remained ignorant of his unannounced presence so close. Just
before Guy died, he revealed his true identity to the poor lady who,
overcome by grief, threw herself from the cliff where her husband had
lived for so many years. It is said that her ghost, distraught with grief,
still haunts the site. A hermitage was founded on the site of Guy's last
days, and monks inhabited the cave dwellings until the fifteenth century. |
(Early drawing of the first
Guy's Cliffe house, from 1788. This shows the West wing with the medieval
chapel across the courtyard to the right. Compare the bay window
protruding with the same one on the next photograph, with is taken looking
the other way, i.e. with the chapel behind the camera. Tyack 1994). |
|
(The Entrance Front
and courtyard in 1951, the house's days of dying grandeur just before its
sad demise. Tyack 1994) |
People have enthused about the
site throughout history: in the 1530s John Leland was particularly
effusive, calling the site "a place of pleasure, an house meet for
the muses; there is silence, a pretty wood, caves in the living rock...the
river rolling with a pretty noise over the stones". The erstwhile
local historian Dugdale added his voice in praise: "a place of so
great delight, in respect of the River gliding below the Rocks, the dry
and wholesome situation, and so fair Grove of lofty elms overshadowing it,
that to one who desireth a retired life, either for his devotions or
study, the like is hardly to be found".
Piers Gaveston, Edward the Second's notorious "favourite", was
beheaded at nearby Blacklow Hill, by the Earl of Warwick and other nobles.
That tale is well told in the history books. Another famous resident, for
two years, was the actress Sarah Siddons, who stayed there much later as a
guest of Bertie Greatheed. |
History of the
House
The house grew up next to a chantry chapel which was founded in 1423. This
chapel is the only part of the complex of buildings that is still used
today: owned by a group of Freemason's, this is the only spark of life
left in this once beautiful site. The chapel is situated on a rocky
outcrop above the River Avon, was built partly into the cliff and has been
rebuilt many times in its history.
The chantry priests lived in a stone house nearby, which was probably on
or near the site of the surviving ruin. After the dissolution of the
chantries by Henry VIII in 1547, the site was granted to Sir Andrew
Flammock, from whom it passed to William Hudson of Warwick, and then to
the Beaufoy family of Emscote. In 1701 the house was sold to William
Edwards of Kenilworth, who built a modest new house on the site. |
(Another picture of the Front
and Entrance Hall, taken mid 19th Century. Reid 1980) |
|
(The entrance hall, one of the
few photos of the inside of the house before its slide into ruin. Shows
the Rococo plasterwork which decorated some of the house. Reid 1980) |
However, the earliest parts of the
great Guy's Cliffe house that we see the ruins of today really dates from
about 1751, when it was sold to Samuel Greatheed, the son of a West Indies
sugar planter. His ambition was to create a position for himself in
politics and in society. In that age, this meant a big country house for
the obligatory entertaining. To this end, he set about extending the
existing house, by building a new block to the east of the older house,
and at right-angles to it, with a south-facing entrance front and a north
front overlooking the river. It is not known who the architect was, but
work was certainly underway by 1748, when a mason called John Smith carved
his name on a pediment. The new wing had an entrance with a neo-Palladian
facade of Warwick sandstone, with an Ionic porch and pediments over the
end bays. This entrance bay looked out over a stone courtyard and
onto stone stables, coach houses and office buildings, which were built in
about 1755. In 1764, the top of the chapel tower was rebuilt to provide a
pleasing view through the new archway into the courtyard. |
| Some of the rooms, including the
entrance hall, were decorated with Rococo plasterwork, fragments of which
still survive, or at least they did before recent filming work on the site
(of which more later....). In addition to Gothic fireplaces, the plaster
decorations featured wreaths of foliage, busts, and even, to the East of
the Entrance Hall, a room decorated by shells. According to Ward,
Greatheed's wife gave directions for laying out the grounds, which
included grottoes and an avenue of firs, which can be seen in a photograph
to the right. However, not all visitors were complimentary, for example
the young poet Thomas Grey, who thought that "It was naturally a very
agreeable rock...But behold the trees are cut down to make room for
flowering shrubs...Even the poorest bits of nature that remain are duly
threatened, for he says...it shall be all new". Not a pleased
visitor! |
(The avenue of firs, taken
from the now-overgrown grounds, looking down towards the house.) |
|
|
Greatheed died in 1765, to be
succeeded by his infant son Bertie (1761-1832), who was to become a
renowned artist. This Greatheed also achieved distinction as a travelling
companion of Napoleon, and painted many of the surviving portraits of him.
In his hands, Guy's Cliffe came of age as the great romantic Warwickshire
country house to which the times aspired. If large houses for entertaining
were de rigueur in his father's time, they were doubly so in his, which
stretched into the Victorian age. Having travelled in Italy as a young
man, and having had a writing career crushed by the critics, he later
began to turn his creative energies to the remodelling of the house. The
immediate spur seems to have been the death of his only son in 1804, and
he exclaimed, "What can I do with this large house? How can I live in
it at less expense? How can I leave it?". Not wanting to leave the
house, but not being able to afford to keep or renovate it, Greatheed was
faced with a dilemma. This was solved a few years later by his selling off
of some inherited land in Leamington Spa. In addition to financing the
house, he also bought some land nearby from the Earl of Warwick, and built
a monument to mark the site of the execution of Edward II's favourite
Piers Gaveston. |
| Greatheed's primary aim was to
give the 18th Century house an appearance which would do justice to its
romantic surroundings. However, he also wanted to make it more comfortable
and suitable for the necessary country-house entertaining. The alterations
were carried out bit by bit over a period of some fifteen years, designed
by Greatheed himself. with the help of local builders. Miss Berry, a
friend of the family, wrote in 1810 that it was "one of the most
comfortable gentleman's houses I know". More work was done in
1812 to the interiors, and also to the stone Saxon Mill (now the Harvester
pub and restaurant that is the best place from which to see the house,) by
adding galleries and overhanging eaves. More improvements began in
1814, with what Greatheed called an "arched wall between the
chimneys". The North or River Front, containing the Dining Room and
Library, was also renovated in 1815. These improvements gave it a very
striking appearance, resting on a massive substructure of rock with
polygonal projections to add variety to the wall surfaces. The
appearance is one of a house that seems literally to grow out of the
supporting rock below. |
(The entrance arch, which
still survives, albeit in a decrepit state. Taken from an old print). |
|
(Another photo taken in 1951,
this is the West Front. The formal gardens that can just be seen growing
into ruin in the foreground were overlooked by the Music Room and Drawing
Room on the Ground Floor. Tyack 1994) |
Further improvements included
adding Jacobean-style gables to the roofline, some of which can still be
seen, ghostly and isolated against the sky-line, on top of the surviving
ruins. Behind these was a keep-like structure that contained the chimneys.
As Geoffrey Tyack says, this was "visually a master-stroke",
although sadly little of it now remains. Further changes occurred in
1819, after Greatheed inherited some Lincolnshire estates. Most important
of these was the building of a new West range on the site of the old 18th
Century house (see picture). This was also designed according to
Greatheed's conception of the "old English" style, with two
massive towers, a Gothic-arched loggia, and shaped gables on the
roof-line. On the ground floor of this new range was a music room
with a Doric freeze and a neo-Rococo Drawing Room, with an ante-room in
between. New offices, lit by tall lancet windows, were also built between
the Palladian South front and the chapel. |
The idea of rebuilding the South
front was mooted in the mid 18th century, but the idea was dropped. In
September 1821, Greatheed wrote, with understandable contentment
"Except the ornament over the windows all the exterior is now done of
my house, without blemish or flaw in itself". Greatheed's
efforts paid off, for the house not only became a favourite of his
personal friends, but also for artists and casual visitors.
The Prussian Prince Pukler-Muskau, visiting in 1826, thought that
"the whole is extremely picturesque [with] a most inviting and
homelike air". He goes on to describe the views across the river and
into the French garden, both of which can be made out today. |
|
|
(The House today: as close as
you can get from across the river: a tantalising glimpse.) |
Greatheed died in 1826, and the
house passed to his daughter Anne, who lived there until her husband's
death. During her time there, she added a new lodge (possibly the one on
the Warwick road that is now part of the Riding School?), and a new flight
of stairs up to the entrance front. Minor repairs were also made to the
River Front and gardens.
Lord Algernon Percy, who succeeded her in 1882, added a tower for a lift
at the junction of the South and West Fronts. This was in 1898, and was
the final alteration to the house, which had been growing for over three
hundred years, and was on a site that had been inhabited for the last
thousand. |
| Early 20th Century
photographs of the house, as shown in the photographs at the beginning of
this article, depict an immaculately maintained house with superb gardens,
but more recently the house has suffered a tragic decline. It was
inherited in 1922 by Captain Heber-Percy, Lord Algernon's son in law, and
it was used as a school for evacuees during the Second World War. It was
sold in 1946 for conversion into a hotel, but the project came to nothing.
The next owners, a firm of builders, tried and failed to gain planning
permission to build houses in the grounds. After a number of unsuccessful
attempts to fix the roof the furniture was sold in a grand auction, the
lead roof and fittings stripped and sold in 1952. By now, the
building was in a serious state of decay, and soon fell into ruin.
In 1955 the house was purchased by Aldwyn
Parker, who leased the chapel to local freemasons, who still use (if not
own) it today, and have maintained this part of the building in relatively
good condition. The house, however, has had a rougher time, and its
future is uncertain. Left open to the elements, it is clearly in a gradual
state of decay and decline, especially as the later brickwork and thin
walls are not, in the absence of a roof, very strong. An episode of
Sherlock Holmes, "The Last Vampyre", was filmed there in 1992,
during which the house was further damaged. This film does give the
interested reader a good view of the house, for the characters spend quite
a lot of time in the ruined shell. However, the house was set ablaze for
the first scene of the film, which cannot have had a salutary effect on
either the structure or any surviving internal features. As the site is
closed to the public and its future is unknown, it is impossible to tell.
It is, in any case, a very sad end to a wonderful house. |
(The top of the ruined house
peers out from the undergrowth that grows high around the once impressive
view. Once, as the photographs show, these bushes would not have been
there and there would have been an unobstructed view of the house.) |
|
(A ghostly reminder of past
times: steps down into the river opposite the house, presumably for boat
launches) |
|
(Good aerial photo of the
house in its ruined state) |
(A great photo showing the
impressive, sprawling size of this spectacular house in its glory days.
Reid 1980) |
Do you know of something that you think should be added to this site? Why not
e-mail me and let me know?
