Winter Break: English Gothic and Gothic-Revival Art and Architecture

After waking up to views of Lake Windermere and the snowcapped mountains in the distance, we ate breakfast, took last minute photos of Broad Leys, and headed over to another house by the lakeshore, Blackwell, designed by M.H. Baillie Scott. We were greeted by Sierra Kaag, a Carleton art history alum who works for the Lakeland Arts Trust, the non-profit organization that now operates the building. She kindly agreed to give us a tour of Blackwell, “The Arts and Crafts House”—and what a house! Upon commencing the tour, Sierra reminded us that Blackwell has been altered a bit since Baillie Scott completed it in 1900. After the original owners vacated the property after World War I, the house passed through many hands, serving as a girls’ school and as offices for the English Conservancy Council. Most of the furniture in the house is on loan from private Arts & Crafts collections around England. The Lakeland Arts Trust redesigned part of the ground floor to include a bookstore and a café, and some of the upstairs bedrooms are now gallery spaces. On the ground floor we toured the main hall, dining room, and white drawing room. We transitioned upstairs via the minstrel’s gallery, a room that overlooks the main hall through wooden windows carved with the ever-present rowan berry motif. Upstairs, we saw the one bedroom that shows how Baillie Scott would have designed a bedroom in the house. The rest of the rooms were part of an exhibition on woodworker Arthur Simpson, who lived not far from Blackwell and worked on its carvings. After the tour we sat down for lunch with Sierra, and she kindly narrated how she transitioned from Carleton to her job in England and her experience in a graduate program overseas. After leaving Blackwell, we got a bit lost on the way to the old Anglo-Saxon church in Escomb, since our bus driver’s satellite navigation system conked out in the Pennine mountains. Fortunately, there were steep hills with sheep and stone walls to distract us as we drove. Our navigationally-challenged bus driver, who we privately nicknamed “Sir Grumpy,” grew more and more impatient with us as he got more and more lost. At one point, as we passed a church that was definitely not the one we were looking for, he asked, “Won’t that one do?” And when we finally arrived at the ancient small church, he remarked, “Ye came all this way to see that thing?” The tiny church predates the Gothic period of architecture, and is surrounded by a very old graveyard. Inside, it was quite dark despite the fact that we were there in the afternoon, because it had only a few small windows. It was a very intimate space compared to the immense and spacious gothic buildings we had visited already, like Westminster Abbey. The simplicity of its plain whitewashed walls and humble wooden roof stood in stark contrast to the sweeping arcades and dazzling stone vaulting of the gothic structures. We then proceeded to Durham Cathedral, the Norman church of ARTH 101 fame, after nearly running over several pedestrians in the crowded city center. We were guided through the building by a friendly and knowledgeable white-haired gentleman who gave us an overview of the cathedral’s history. He had a wonderful Scottish-tinged accent. Durham was an elegant and massive building. The columns carved with lozenges, chevrons, and stripes were beautiful, as were the dogtooth decorations along the undersides of the arches in the arcade. Seeing Durham directly after seeing the small Anglo-Saxon church in Escomb emphasized the enormous architectural, political, and religious changes that the Norman conquest brought to Britain.