Burghley House
Click on the title above to go to the Web site for Burghley House.
This is a new feature in Blogger.
I also have a link to the site in Dr. Johnson's Links.
On Thursday a group from my class visited Burghley (pronounced Ber • lee, with the accent on the first syllable) House in Lincolnshire, which is about two hours north of London. Burghley House was built by Sir William Cecil on land granted to him by Queen Elizabeth I. He was her chief advisor. If you've ever seen the movie Elizabeth (1998), Sir William Cecil is played by Richard Attenborough. If you've never seen the movie, I recommend it highly!
Anyway, it's the most spectacular house we've seen so far. It's also the oldest. It was built in the sixteenth century (although it has been extensively modified since). Scenes from The DaVinci Code and Pride and Prejudice were filmed there. I haven't seen either movie yet, but now I've got to see them. Besides, I've heard Pride and Prejudice is an excellent film. As for The DaVinci Code, according to a brochure I picked up at the house:
"Burghley played numerous different locations in the film, including all the scenes representing the interior of Castile Gandolfo and many additional scenes. The film crew were on site for five weeks and scaffolding was erected along the whole south elevation of the House as well as the recreation of a bedroom twenty feet in the air in the Ash Yard. The park was also used for their main unit base in the area with over thirty trailer units and three hundred crew!"
The interior is indescribably ornate. It is filled with sculpture, furniture, ceramics, paintings, and tapestries, not to mention the architecture of the rooms themselves. Upon entering some rooms, so many things competed to draw my attention that attention could be paid to nothing. I might leave a room feeling as if I hadn't really seen anything! We were there to look at furniture and ceramics. We are scheduled to go back next semester to look at paintings.
One of the nice things about it was that it is closed to the public for the season except for a restaurant that is open year round (part of the house is still occupied by the owners). But the house was opened up especially for our group, so we had the whole place to ourselves without a lot of other tourists buzzing around. The question arose as to why they would close it in the winter, and the answer was that it costs too much to heat. There are one hundred rooms on the ground level alone. Of course, no pictures are allowed inside and I didn't have an opportunity to take many on the outside. I got a few, but they're not great. I'm posting them anyway.
The entrance to the house was through the original sixteenth-century kitchen. It was as big as most people's houses, with a Late Gothic-style vaulted stone ceiling. Apparently the kitchen was used into the nineteenth century, so most of the kitchen 'appliances' were newer than the kitchen itself. We were shown and inventory, written by hand in the seventeenth century, of all the objects in the house. Things have been added since, though, so it wasn't complete.
This is a new feature in Blogger.
I also have a link to the site in Dr. Johnson's Links.
On Thursday a group from my class visited Burghley (pronounced Ber • lee, with the accent on the first syllable) House in Lincolnshire, which is about two hours north of London. Burghley House was built by Sir William Cecil on land granted to him by Queen Elizabeth I. He was her chief advisor. If you've ever seen the movie Elizabeth (1998), Sir William Cecil is played by Richard Attenborough. If you've never seen the movie, I recommend it highly!
Anyway, it's the most spectacular house we've seen so far. It's also the oldest. It was built in the sixteenth century (although it has been extensively modified since). Scenes from The DaVinci Code and Pride and Prejudice were filmed there. I haven't seen either movie yet, but now I've got to see them. Besides, I've heard Pride and Prejudice is an excellent film. As for The DaVinci Code, according to a brochure I picked up at the house:
"Burghley played numerous different locations in the film, including all the scenes representing the interior of Castile Gandolfo and many additional scenes. The film crew were on site for five weeks and scaffolding was erected along the whole south elevation of the House as well as the recreation of a bedroom twenty feet in the air in the Ash Yard. The park was also used for their main unit base in the area with over thirty trailer units and three hundred crew!"
The interior is indescribably ornate. It is filled with sculpture, furniture, ceramics, paintings, and tapestries, not to mention the architecture of the rooms themselves. Upon entering some rooms, so many things competed to draw my attention that attention could be paid to nothing. I might leave a room feeling as if I hadn't really seen anything! We were there to look at furniture and ceramics. We are scheduled to go back next semester to look at paintings.
One of the nice things about it was that it is closed to the public for the season except for a restaurant that is open year round (part of the house is still occupied by the owners). But the house was opened up especially for our group, so we had the whole place to ourselves without a lot of other tourists buzzing around. The question arose as to why they would close it in the winter, and the answer was that it costs too much to heat. There are one hundred rooms on the ground level alone. Of course, no pictures are allowed inside and I didn't have an opportunity to take many on the outside. I got a few, but they're not great. I'm posting them anyway.
The entrance to the house was through the original sixteenth-century kitchen. It was as big as most people's houses, with a Late Gothic-style vaulted stone ceiling. Apparently the kitchen was used into the nineteenth century, so most of the kitchen 'appliances' were newer than the kitchen itself. We were shown and inventory, written by hand in the seventeenth century, of all the objects in the house. Things have been added since, though, so it wasn't complete.
(Click an image to enlarge)
Labels: Burghley house, Lincolnshire, sixteenth century
posted by Michael K at 11:47 am
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