Details
The Deincourt family had owned the land here since the 1170s and on the marriage of Elizabeth Deincourt to Sir William de Stirkeland in 1239, the estate passed into the hands of what became the Strickland family, who owned it until it was gifted to the National Trust in 1950. The Strickland family still live at the Castle.
The core of the medieval castle is a 14th-century solar tower surrounded by a Tudor house. It was extended in Elizabethan times and has oak-panelled interiors, including the Inlaid Chamber, complete with period furniture and panelling inlaid with poplar and oak.
The contents of the Inlaid Chamber had been sold to the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). During the last part of the 20th century, the V&A starting loaning the panelling back piecemeal. The entirety of the panelling was restored in 1999 under a long-term loan.
Around 1770, the great hall was again expanded in the Georgian style.
Catherine Parr, the sixth wife of Henry VIII and a relative of the Stricklands, is thought to have lived here after her first husband died in 1533. Catherine's second husband, Lord Latymer, was kin to the dowager Lady Strickland. The estate covers 647 hectares (1,600 acres), in the midst of which is a garden including two lakes as well as an award-winning rock garden. The estate dates from 1336, when a grant from Edward III allowed Sir Walter Strickland to enclose the land around Sizergh as his exclusive park. The rock garden is the largest limestone rock garden belonging to the National Trust and includes part of the National Collection of hardy ferns.
The Castle contains a variety of paintings, including portraits by Alexis Simon Belle of Queen Mary of Modena and her daughter Princess Louisa Maria., Lady Edeline Sackville who was later to marry Lord Strickland. Sizergh also has an interesting collection of portraits of the Catholic Royal Stuart family, including 'The Old Pretender'.
Read more about this topic: Sizergh Castle And Garden
Famous quotes containing the word details:
“There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however naïve that may have been, it was a good deal less naïve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
“Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Patience is a most necessary qualification for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request. One must seem to hear the unreasonable demands of the petulant, unmoved, and the tedious details of the dull, untired. That is the least price that a man must pay for a high station.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)