THE LADY DE MOHUN ROOM: The Screens Passage

The Lady De Mohun (pronounced Moon) room is named after Christiana De Mohun, who married into the Trenchard family in the 1100s, bringing De Mohun money and their home, Wolfeton House in Dorset, which then became the main family home for the next four to five hundred years. In this fictitious castle, I have taken the liberty to completely reimagine this woman as Lady Arabella De Mohun: a creative Victorian lady, a devotee of the Pre-Raphaelites and Tennyson, who faced a life-changing dilemma: whether to marry for wealth and security, or for love, or to remain chaste. I imagine that she created this room whilst deliberating this fork in her life, and chose and arranged the tapestries, paintings and room decoration as a reflection of her thoughts. I was inspired in this by Isabella Stewart Gardiner's creative curation of art in her Boston House Museum. 

The room is the entrance hall to the castle and is linked to the screens passage, allowing entrance to the Great Hall beyond. The screens passage wallpaper is Morris' Michaelmas Daisy pattern, the closest I could find in colour to look like the Ante Library in Arundel Castle (below) which I love.

The ceiling is folded up paper printed with a design from a photo of the chapel ceiling in Elsinore Castle in Denmark. Elsinore Castle, and it's association with James I and Hamlet, will become a theme throughout the castle.

Around the cornice of the room is written an extract from Tennyson's poem The Lady of Shalott:

From underneath his helmet flowed

His coal-blacks curls as on he rode...

Rode down to Camelot: 

She left the web, she left the loom, 

She saw the helmet and the plume...

Out flew the web and opened wide, 

The mirror cracked from side to side,

"The curse has come upon me" cried

The Lady of Shalott.

The room design is of the Victorian era, when this poem was popular, particularly with the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood.

The front door of the whole castle leads into this ante room, which is hung with the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries from the Musee de Moyen Age in Paris, made famous in the Griffindor Common Room design in the Harry Potter films.

The lion and unicorn from the tapestries (representing sun and moon) are replicated on either side of the door frame, made out of layered up cereal packet card, with vine and olive leaves below. The door fittings are cut from card packaging, painted black, with a black paper clip and beads forming the door handle. The pillars are pencils. I have yet to design the capitals for them...

The cereal packet card fireplace inside has heraldry cut out from a postcard of Oxford Colleges shields, but the central shield is the Trenchard coat of arms. The surround tiles are all printed out from photographs of those at Dunster Castle, Somerset, but the overall fireplace design is a smaller amalgamation of two genuine tudor fireplaces in Tattershall Castle, Lincs (below) which I have only ever seen photographs of. 

The tapestries represent the five senses, and another sixth sense (possibly love) framed by a blue tent. This sixth tapestry hangs behind the fireplace, the pyramid of the tent door echoing the pyramid of the fireplace design below. The tapestries' lions and unicorns represent the sun and the moon, day and night. 

The paintings in this room develop the themes of sun and moon, Yang and Yin, the acceptable daylight of marriage, and the irrational (to men) feminine chastity of the moon goddess, Diana. Over the fireplace hang Mary I and Elizabeth I, sisters whose different religions and marital statuses set them as far apart as night and day: Mary who, to secure her honour and the Catholicism of her realm, accepted marriage with the powerful Philip II of Spain (who would later bring war to England in the form of the Armada); and Elizabeth the virgin queen whose fierce chastity and independence made her harsh enough even to be capable of ordering the execution of her favourite, Robert Dudley. Mary's portrait holds a rose of love; Elizabeth's a rainbow of peace (no rainbow without the sun, is the inscription, implying that she herself is both the chaste moon, AND the masculine sun). 

Mary's husband Philip of Spain commissioned a series of mythological paintings from Titian, two of which are in this room (the other five will be elsewhere in the castle too). These paintings further explain Lady De Mohun's exploration of spinsterhood and marriage.

Over the tapestry of sight hangs Titian's Diana and Actaeon (from the National Gallery), which shows the goddess of the moon and chastity, with a bow like Elizabeth's, killing Actaeon for seeing her bathe naked whilst out hunting. Chastity is fiercely independent and can gain dominance over men.

Over the tapestry of touch hangs Titian's Venus and Adonis (from the Prado), where Venus clings to Adonis (who looks suspiciously like Philip), as he goes off to the hunt that will cause his death. Mary correlates perhaps to Venus, and Elizabeth to Diana. In both these stories, the men's hunting results in their death.

Over the tapestry of taste, behind the door, hangs Mary Queen of Scots, cousin to Mary and Elizabeth. She married three times, allegedly killing her second husband by poisoning (like Gertrude in Hamlet). Around her portrait hang Salome, with the head of John the Baptist on a platter, and Judith with the head of her attempted rapist Holofernes. Robert Dudley, Elizabeth's favourite, whom she intended for Mary Stuart but later had executed after he married one of her ladies, also hangs here. The power of women's love to poison and destroy their partners is evident on this wall. 

Turning towards the Great Hall, the visitor will see Rubens' Judgement of Paris (also from the National Gallery) hanging between the two screen's passage doorways. Here Paris chooses between three archetypal women: the power and wealth of Juno, the wisdom of Minerva, and the beauty and love of Venus. He of course chooses Venus, launching a thousand ships to Troy, like the Armada to England. The right doorway has shells above it like the oyster of Venus' birth. The left doorway has butterflies above it, including the 'peacock' of the 'monarch' Juno. 

If these doors represent choosing these respective goddesses, then the third door to the far left must represent the wise choice of Minerva. To seek wealth and power or love will take us into the Great Hall, the place of family and heritage. But to choose wisdom will lead us to a different part of the castle...

HORD DRACONIS: The Jacobean Rood Screen

Made from coffee stirrers, cocktail sticks, a wooden fan, mouldings and pewter statuettes from historic house gift shops, the screen is inspired by the Jacobean screen at Knole in Kent (below). 

I built it over a four month period whilst temping as a medical secretary. 

The heraldic shields are cut out from a postcard of Oxford colleges. The shield of the college I went to, St John's, is in the centre.

I am thinking of adding more cocktail sticks to the panelling to make it look more elaborate, along with various other pewter pieces I've collected like a Medusa head, lions and dragons, as Knole has heraldic leopards and Gorgons carved on it. Eventually I will varnish the whole piece to give it a polished tone.

On top of the minstrels' gallery, which leads to the chapel, I want to build a chamber organ eventually.

HORD DRACONIS: the beginnings of Hordle Hall

Miniature Madness

When I was a kid, my Dad was into model railways and my Mum was into dolls houses, so it was inevitable I would end up with a secret passion for all things small. On family holidays we would always visit National Trust properties and I would fantasise about living in a castle or stately home of my own, planning out on graph paper how each room would look and how the rooms would fit together. 

However, I also always wanted to perform on stage, and I knew that I would never be able to afford my own real life Country pad as a jobbing actor, so at about the age of twelve, I set about the mad project that will probably now dominate the rest of my life: making my very own castle... in miniature. 

Back then, I used to work in 1:12 scale making miniatures for my Mum's dolls houses, so my eye was already attuned to that scale, and I had already started collecting some 1:12 items for the castle from dolls house fairs: fireplaces, a Victorian kitchen oven unit, suits of armour, swords, and canons. So when my Dad offered to help me saw up the plywood for the Great Hall, I knew it had to be 1:12 scale but viewed from unusual perspectives so that it could be slightly smaller than an exact model. Little did I know in my teens how large this little house would grow up to be. I wish now I had chosen 1:24! 

The walls of the Great Hall were finished in my teens, complete with bought panelling and stone flooring and fireplace made from old cereal packet cardboard. My main inspiration was Athelhampton Hall in Dorset (although I had only ever seen photographs of it in books, below). 

But as I was distracted by A-Levels and University, finding a job in the City and moving to London, and then going to drama school and starting a performing career, the Hall was sadly abandoned, without a roof or a rood screen, and with plans for the cardboard mullion oriel window barely passed the template stage. So there in my brother's garden shed, the Hall was left to decay, gradually falling prey to the ravages of time, like so many if its real life ancestors, a ruin.

When I had a real life property of my own (nothing as grand as the dreamed of stately home of my youth) my brother returned the shell of the Great Hall to my hands. The whitewashed walls were damp with mould, and the panelling was disintegrating after its 20 year neglect. So I set about restoring the panels with replacement card and wood stain, and began constructing the hammer beam roof from bits of old oak (work is still underway as I haven't worked out how to make the curved girders). 

In four months at home whilst temping, I had completed the rood screen too, made from coffee stirrers, cocktail sticks, an old wooden fan, statuettes from country house gift shops, and a postcard of Oxford Colleges' coats of arms. 

And I realised that the miniature madness of my youth was still an immutable passion in my adulthood. Soon I was researching every stately home and castle in Britain for ideas, and the graph paper plans of my teens became a full blown blueprint for a 20 room manor house, complete with chapel and dungeon, library and ballroom.

This blog will be the story of my miniature madness from this point on, in the hope that what has been for me up until now a private pastime might bring some delight, fascination or inspiration to anyone else in the world who is interested.