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Gothick restoration at Raby Castle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Alistair Rowan
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Extract

The eighteenth-century interiors surviving in parts of Raby Castle, Co Durham, are not well known. Though the building was extensively repaired from the 1740s to 1788, and embellished with a suite of Palladian and Rococo Gothick rooms, its subsequent remodelling, from 1844 to 1850 by William Burn, left it so conspicuously Victorian that the surviving Georgian work has been largely ignored. The immediate impression offered by Raby today is either of a medieval fortress impressively massive and surprisingly intact, or of a nineteenth-century house with a rich Jacobethan drawing-room and an immense Baronial hall. Between these two Rabys, the medieval and the Victorian, stand the architectural developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Of the earlier period little is now known, but a series of architectural drawings dating from the opening of the eighteenth century until Burn began his remodelling permit the Georgian schemes for the castle to be followed in some detail. The work of four architects may be identified: Daniel Garrett, Thomas Wright, James Paine and John Carr. Their drawings, though generally incomplete and not in good condition, are valuable as a record of the renovation and improvement of a medieval castle in the mid-Georgian age. And they reveal a surprising concern for authenticity in Gothick restoration design.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 15 , 1972 , pp. 23 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1972

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References

Notes

1 Architectural descriptions of the castle are as follows: [Catherine, 4th Duchess of Cleveland], A Handbook for Raby Castle, William Clowes &Sons, 1870, privately printed with some account of the eighteenth-century work, though primarily a description of the medieval castle and the Victorian furnishings; Rev. ﹜. Hodgson, F., ‘Raby in Three Chapters’, Transactions of the Architectural and Archaeological Society of Durham and Northumberland III (1880-89), pp. 113–181, & IV (1890–95), pp.49–122, 153–260Google Scholar; O. S. Scott, Raby, its Castle and its Lords (Gateshead, 5th edn, revised by S. E. Harrison, 1960), the present castle guidebook with a brief general description; Pevsner, N., The Buildings of England, Co Durham (1953), pp. 193–195 Google Scholar, no mention of the eighteenth-century work; and Rowan, A., ‘Raby Castle, Co Durham’, Country Life, 10 & 17 July 1969, 1, 8 &22 January 1970.Google Scholar

In the Country Life articles, Nos.III & IV were devoted to the Georgian restoration of Raby. Space was not then available for more than a general discussion of the schemes proposed in the eighteenth century, and I am grateful for this opportunity to publish the material in a more extensive form. In preparing it I have incurred several debts of gratitude: to Lord Barnard for his kindness in permitting me to borrow the drawings and to reproduce them; to Miss Jean Jackson and to Mr Leslie Young for their great helpfulness on my various visits to the castle; to Mr Ken White for his patience with such difficult photographic material; and lastly to my wife who compiled a working list of the drawings and whose careful attention to handwriting suggested some of the attributions.

2 Burn's plans for Raby are RIBA Drawings Collection (ARC III). The drawings preserved represent only a selection of the working designs prepared by Burn. A second smaller group are in the muniment room at Raby: these are eleven in number and deal with the alterations to Bulmer's tower, the chapel, the estate office stair (Mr Scarth's) and the mausoleum in Staindrop churchyard.

3 The halls at Raby were both to be rebuilt; the lower hall by Carr and the upper or ‘High Hall’ by Burn. Pennant, Thomas gives a description of the lower hall shortly before its remodelling in A Tour from Alston Moor to Harrogate in 1773 (1804), p.21 Google Scholar. It is described as having ‘six pillars’ which seemingly influenced Carr's design. The high hall is described by Hodgson, op. cit., and is recorded in drawings made by S. H. Grimm in 1778, British Museum, Add. MS 15,540 ff. 39, 40. Outline elevations of the south and west walls were prepared in 1787 when the hall was decorated with illuminations at the coming of age of Lord Barnard. These are at Raby, loose drawings Nos.29 &30.

4 An extract of the case of Vane v. Lord Barnard (as reported in Vernon's Reports II, part II, 738–739) is given in Scott, op. cit., p.64. The case was heard in the Chancery Court on 24 January 1716.

5 Thomas Wright seems to have only designed garden structures and none of these was built. Paine and Garrett were apparently employed simultaneously in the south and west wings of the castle.

6 Ledger Book A, (1737–42): ‘23 Oct. 1740, to William Bode 400 Bricks for dog kennel’.

7 Lord Barnard's landscape improvements are to be the subject of a final article on Raby in Country Life. Dates for the work in the park are taken from a slim notebook kept by the second Baron from 1727 to 1749 entitled ‘Trees planted about Raby’. A green ledger book covering the years 1742 to 1755 refers to building ‘the Bath Little House’ in 1752 and to the ‘Building in the New Garden’ in 1753.

8 Ledger Book A.

9 Green Ledger, passim. Terry's name is traditionally attached to the folly archway made up with fragments from the castle and built on the ridge of hills to the north ( A Handbook for Raby Castle, p. 210 Google Scholar, and Jones, B., Follies and Grottoes, p. 185 Google Scholar).

10 The title of Duke of Cleveland is twice connected with the owners of Raby. The Duke referred to here is William Fitzroy, Duke of Cleveland and Southampton, at whose death in 1773 the title and honours of the first crea tion became extinct. In 1833 the Dukedom (of Cleveland only) was re-created in favour of the third Earl of Darlington, a great-nephew of the second Duke (Complete Peerage).

11 A bundle of documents relating to this case is at Raby.

12 A careful comparison of the handwriting on the drawings for these rooms has established that they are entirely by Garrett, and not as I suggested in Country Life by Paine. The carved dado rail in the drawing-room is identical to work by Garrett in the interior of the Culodden tower at Yorke House, Richmond.

13 Green Ledger: ‘Sundry Masons &C. at the new Library and Passages in 1751 & 1752 brout from common Ledger fo 114, £22.13.8’.

14 Designs and Estimates for Farm Houses & c (1747), pls3 &4.

15 See catalogue entry for Fig. 4b.

16 I am obliged to Mr H. M. Colvin for bringing these drawings to my notice.

17 This attribution is made on the basis of the stylistic similarity with the south bedroom corridor scheme, and because Paine certainly refaced the exterior of the castle here and designed the gateway bedroom window outside.

18 Carr's earliest drawing (B,17) for alterations to Clifford's tower is dated 1768.

19 This memorandum is still preserved at Raby.

20 The evidence for attributing this plan to Carr is as follows. Inscriptions mentioning Lord Barnard limit its date to before 1759 or after 1767, as no one of that title existed between the two dates. If the design is pre–1759 it is unlikely that it is by anyone other than Paine (Carr does not appear until at least nine years later), but if it were by Paine the obvious alterations, incorporating some of the suggestions he later made, would presumably not have been necessary. Carr's authorship is more probable. The plan of the rooms on the south front corresponds exactly to Carr's proposed elevation, submitted to Paine, and the alterations to the arrangements in the south-east corner were presumably made to incorporate some of Paine's ideas, notably the staircase behind the rectangular drawing-room. The kitchen passage and new arrangement of the servants’ hall, drawn over the design, show proposals for the work that was carried out in July 1770; yet the plan also shows the doorway cut through the west side of Clifford's tower as an alteration. This had been first suggested in 1768 and was apparently intended to be executed in that year. The design must therefore represent a very early stage in the evolution of Carr's schemes for Raby, dating from 1767 or 1768. It is odd that it was not submitted to Paine until three or four years later.

21 The appearance of the arcade is preserved in a rough elevational survey among the Raby drawings (A,10,a). The arcade also appears in Lord Burlington's plan at Chatsworth.

22 There are no ledgers or account books relating to the building work of this period.

23 Few of these proposals were executed according to the existing designs. The stables and north-east lodges may be attributed to Carr on stylistic grounds, and the bridge by Staindrop church is probably his work. The church gallery and menagerie were never built. Of all the memoranda left by Carr only one, dated 6 July 1770, relates to a building in the park. This concerns the battlemented garden house in the walled garden, which was enlarged by Carr with single-bay, single-storey wings.

24 On 6 October 1782 there is a note of the stones required for the piers in the lower hall, including ‘Stones for steps, 36ft wide; 8 stones for plinths; 2 stones for ditto upon the landing, 10 stones for moulded bases, 2ft 3. square and thick; Stones for Shafts of eight Pillars each shaft 14ft 3. long and 23in sq.; Stones for Shafts of 2 Pillars 10ft 10 long; 10 stones for Caps, each 2ft 8 sqr & 15in thick’. The note ends: ‘N.B. All the above stones are for Octangular Pillars, the corners may be taken off’.

25 On 7 October 1785 a ‘temporary roof’ was to be put over the round room and a memorandum states that ‘the Drawingroom must be coved 3 feet down below the ceiling to the cornice, & the two circular ends must be framed with brick’.

26 5 October 1780: ‘Mr Carr's opinion is that the window to the drawing- room should be enlarged one division on the outside towards the round tower, which division should be sashed but not to appear in the inside of the room.’ Carr's drawings also show that he wanted to contrive a design that would have a square head outside and yet appear pointed within.

27 1788: ‘You must remember that there must be a way kept open to the Kitchen from the great Hall - and also a way from the Bakehouse to the Kitchen, therefore the great landing within the stair case against the end of the Hall cannot at present be completed.’

28 Handbook for Raby, pp.84 & 117. This work was probably by J. Brown of London, some of whose designs for Scagliola columns, dated December 1814, are at Raby. Brown executed the columned screen in the dining-room in verde antique scagliola (of which only the pilaster responds remain) and the square green and ormolu fireplaces there, decorated with foxes heads and oak leaves. He also redecorated the low hall for the first Duke, who had ‘conceived the unhappy idea of coating the columns with scagliola, in imitation of porphyry’. According to the Morning Chronicle of 23 October 1815 Brown's work in the hall took two years to complete. An undated design for a Gothick fireplace for the ‘New Octagon Room, Raby Castle’ may be related to the design for a ‘Gothic Drawingroom at Raby Castle’ exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1820 by R. Hughes (Colvin). This scheme came to nothing, but it may account for the over-drawing on Carr's plan of c. 1767.

29 These drawings are of two general views from the south-east and from the south-west and of the courtyard looking towards the high hall. Further outline views of Raby are among the Buckler drawings in the British Museum, Add.MS.36361, ff.218–221.

30 Hodgson, op. cit., passim.

31 Handbook, pp. 152 & 159Google Scholar.