Let’s assume that you do not run a hedge fund. Let’s further assume that all
your rich aunts are full of health and vigour, and that your prospects as a
professional footballer are bleak. You are, in fact, pretty much like the
rest of us. You own a modest home that, no matter how high your wages seem
to rise, you are struggling to afford. In that case, you might find the
following account rather harrowing.
It is more than 45 years since Michael and Isabel Briggs decided to move from
London to Bath with their first child. Michael, after a couple of years in
the City, had offered to help Jeremy Fry, of chocolate fame, run an
engineering company in the West Country. Isabel had embarked on a literary
career.
They lived, initially, in one of Bath’s Regency terraces, then looked for
something a bit more interesting and rural. They stumbled upon Midford
Castle.
Although it calls itself a castle, and has turrets and a flagpole, Midford
looks more like a modest bishop’s residence, assuming that the modest bishop
in question has a sense of humour and an eye for quirky architecture. Quirky
because the castle, viewed from above, is the shape of an ace of clubs.
When the Briggs family spotted it, on a hilltop overlooking a village about
three miles outside Bath, it belonged to a hairdresser who needed a lot of
cash at short notice. So he agreed to sell to Michael and Isabel, and I
should warn you that we have reached the point where you should prepare to
choke back your envy. What follows is a sign of how much the housing market
has changed, and not for the better.
For this eccentric three-storey, seven-bedroom mock-gothic castle, the couple
paid £15,000. They were young, and comfortably off rather than rich, but
they don’t recall feeling stretched. That was in 1961. The equivalent in
today’s money, says Halifax, would be £247,000. So, today, they would have
to settle for a two-bedroom terrace in a village outside Bath, or perhaps a
dull three-bed bungalow in Portishead. Midford Castle is on the market with
Humberts for £5m. “If we were buying this now,” Michael says, “we couldn’t
afford it.”
It was here, in spare moments between restoring the castle and raising three
children, that Isabel wrote most of her 14 books under her maiden name,
Colegate; one earned her a Booker nomination. Most are stories of class and
aristocracy, of which the best known is The Shooting Party, a critically
acclaimed account of pre-1914 England. The book won a WH Smith literary
award and, to her surprise, became a popular film in the mid-1980s, starring
James Mason, John Gielgud and Dorothy Tutin.
“The thing about this house is that it’s fun,” Isabel says. “It’s frivolous.
It is meant to be lived in.”
Midford Castle was built in 1775 for a country gent, Henry Disney Roebuck.
There is a theory that he asked for the ace-of-clubs design because he’d had
a handsome win at cards. It’s a nice story, which first appeared in a
magazine article in 1899, but is unlikely to be true. For a start, the stem
of the ace was added later. “I think it’s more likely that he inherited
money from a rich uncle in Yorkshire,” Isabel says.
It’s also likely that the castle’s architect pinched the idea from an article
the previous year in Builders magazine, which had featured a house of
similar design. “I think trefoil shapes were quite popular at the time,”
Isabel adds. “It wasn’t so exceptional. Blaise Castle, in Bristol [built in
1766], has the same design, for example.” Whatever the truth, it didn’t
prove a happy home. Roebuck and his wife eventually divorced. He sold the
castle and went to live alone on a yacht off the Kent coast.
Inside the castle, the rooms are clustered on each floor around a hall in the
shape of a lozenge, albeit one on which somebody has had a good suck. Each
floor has two D-shaped rooms and another that, well, isn’t a D shape. The
ground floor contains a drawing room with fine views of the Midford valley,
a dining room, a library and a kitchen. Just outside the kitchen are
cupboards that reflect the castellated style, and on top of them is a set of
organ pipes, picked up from a Bath antique dealer. They cover a water
heater.
The first and second floors are all officially bedrooms, and there is a
bath-room on each. The architect has littered the building’s interior with
references to the trefoil, mainly in the windows. You’ll also see the coat
of arms of the Connolly family, an Irish Catholic family who bought the
place from Roebuck in 1810.
The Connollys really expanded the castle in the early 19th century. They built
stables and an adjoining private chapel, designed in the English
perpendicular style, and added the stem, perhaps turning a trefoil into a
shamrock. That stem is now the kitchen. “Thank goodness they did build this
little box,” Isabel says, “because it’s a Grade I-listed building now, and
you wouldn’t be allowed to do it.”
The last of the Connollys sold up in 1910, and the chapel was deconsecrated.
By the time the Briggs family arrived, the chapel, stables and some
surrounding land — basically, the entire garden — had been sold off.
Such had been the venom of a dispute between the owner of that plot and the
castle’s previous owner, the two properties were separated with barbed wire.
The owner of the land where the stables and chapel stood was a developer who
wanted to build houses there, but was refused planning permission. So,
shortly after the Briggs family arrived, he offered the parcel of land to
Isabel and Michael — probably the only people who would actually want it —
for £5,000.
So, apart from the barbed wire and the ruined chapel, what was the castle like
when they arrived?
“We had a survey, and you know how surveyors love to tell you that it’s a
ghastly building on the point of collapse,” Isabel says. “The surveyor
actually said, rather crossly, that it is in extraordinarily good condition
because it sits on top of its basement, which keeps it totally dry.
“Inside, though, we did have to do everything. The man who had it briefly had
done some work. There was fine-flock wallpaper, in keeping with a
hairdresser’s salon, and he had made half the kitchen into a bar. The fun
has been putting it back together with its belongings. Getting the stables
and restoring it into living space and clearing up the chapel.” The ruined
chapel and stables have both had the original two-bedroom living quarters
restored, which Isabel says didn’t need planning approval.
“Then, about 10 or 12 years ago, we got the park, a pretty wood and a stream.”
The land is just under 59 acres.
It was while clearing some of the woods that the couple stumbled upon an old
hermitage, built by the original owner when such follies were the height of
fashion. They discovered it just as Isabel was thinking about writing her
first nonfiction book, about people who seek solitude. The result was A
Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries and Recluses, published in
2002.
Isabel, now 75, wrote from an early age. “I never did not write,” she says.
“It’s much the easiest way, because it becomes a habit and you go on doing
it. One of my granddaughters does it already. She’s 11, and she has about 10
completed novels in boxes under her bed.” Isabel’s first novel, The
Blackmailer, was published while she worked for the literary agent Anthony
Blond. She still writes, and her works line shelves on the top floor. “I’m
too modest ever to give them to anybody,” she says.
The Briggses haven’t decided where to go next; it rather depends on how the
castle sale goes. They are leaving because, although their adult children
love the place, none of them wants to take on what is, in a way, a museum
piece. Their sons live abroad — Joshua, in America and Barnaby in the
Hague — and their daughter, Emily, lives near Bradford-on-Avon, in a
National Trust property, Westwood Manor.
The castle is an example of what could once be done by a couple who were
comfortable rather than wealthy. Not just finding an unusual house, but
furnishing in a fitting style — gothic chairs, gothic bookcases, gothic
book-ends — from sales and junk shops.
Oh yes, those were the days.
Midford Castle is for sale for £5m through Humberts, 01249 444555, www.humberts.co.uk
