Posted by Caroline on Wednesday, 22 July 1998, at 8:55 p.m.
Have you ever wondered whether Pemberley really existed? Jane Austen had such a clear idea in her head of its location and layout, that many people have been tempted to find the house for themselves. Chatsworth is the one most often suggested, but there are as many reasons why it shouldn't be Pemberley as reasons why it should. It is debatable whether Jane Austen herself ever went on a tour of Derbyshire at all, as there is no letter or diary entry known that suggests she did. Did she therefore get the idea from a house outside Derbyshire? Did she get the plan from a book, about Derbyshire and create it from that? If so, which book? I guess we'll never really know the truth, but it's fun to speculate, isn't it?
For my birthday I got Mavis Batey's book Jane Austen and the English Landscape, which, by the way, I find excellent reading. The book itself is about ideas on landscaping and land use that were around in Jane Austen's time, and it's not really about finding the long-lost Pemberley. However, she cannot resist a little foray in this direction (do you blame her?), and makes some statements which immediately grabbed my attention.
In essence, she says that:
1) If Jane Austen did have a holiday in the area, she most likely did it when staying five weeks with the Coopers of Hamstall Ridware in the summer of 1806. Mrs. Lybbe Powys, a relative of the Coopers had done the trip a few years before, and had written it up in her journal. Did Jane see her journal?
2) Lizzy and the Gardiners seem to have followed the same tour as that laid out in William Gilpin's Tour of the Lakes. Jane is known to have had a definite preference for his works, and uses the arguments set forth in them quite extensively in her earlier novels. Is Pemberley based on one of the grand houses included in Gilpin's Tour? The vision of Jane and Cassandra, travelling through the countryside, Gilpin's book in hand, was dancing in my head. I wanted them to have made this trip. (Wouldn't you wish that ?)
Now, Ms. Batey also makes a stab at deciding which house, or houses, could possibly be Pemberley. If you pick apart each tiny phrase in the description of Pemberley's house and grounds, then most of them are fairly common-place, and can be applied to many houses. But if there were a superabundance of these phrases that could be applied to one location, then there would be a strong possiblity that a proto-type Pemberley could be found, wouldn't it? In locating such a place, Ms. Batey puts emphasis on the grounds, rather than the house itself, because the description of Pemberley's grounds is so very detailed, whilst the house is not. And she comes up with one strong contender, in Ilham House, in Dovedale.
So, did Jane choose Ilham as a base for Pemberley, either because she saw it herself, or because she was taken by Gilpin's description of it? I really wanted to know. Now I couldn't get hold of Gilpin's books to read for myself, drat it, but I could do the other thing - go and see Ilham. So I did. And if I haven't bored the pants off you already, and you want to know what I found, read on. If you've had enough, then I'll let you bail out right here.
Posted by Caroline on Wednesday, 22 July 1998, at 9:01 p.m.
I wasn't supposed to be in England on vacation at all. I was supposed to be sorting out some family business. But it just so happens that the village of Hamstall Ridware is just a few miles from where my brother lives. And from Hamstall to Ilham is less than thirty miles, an easy afternoon's excursion. And in between the two is Sudbury of Sudbury Hall fame, P&P2's Pemberley interiors. My wonderful brother is the perfect accomplice for this kind of thing. When I suggested the trip, following up a journey that JA might have made, on a day that looked full of thunder, he didn't even blink. He merely remarked that the Manifold stream , that flows through Ilham, was Izaak Walton's favoutite trout stream, and we should look for trout too, and that the best teashop in Dovedale is at Alstonfield, not three miles from Ilham, and I'd have to buy him lunch. How could I refuse?
We were late setting out on our afternoon's excursion. We ended up in Hamstall Ridware in the middle of a humungous thunderstorm, and we drove round dismally, looking for some building that might have been the Cooper's Rectory. We gave up pretty quickly (after all, we were not expecting a plaque that said "Jane Austen Stayed Here" or anything). The village is pretty, but nothing extraordinary , really, and it was pouring, so we pushed on to Ashbourne. The sky cleared a bit, as we climbed through the town, out on the Alstonfield road, towards lunch. by this time we were definitely in the uplands, where on a day like that, the clouds sit low, smothering the tops of the mountains, and creeping in cold, grey, fingers down the valleys. We shared the teashop with a group of weary school kids, dressed in bright orange anoraks, and climbing boots. It was an excellent lunch. Then we pushed on to Ilham.
Lizzy's first glimpse of Pemberley, across the valley, is a dramatic one. Our road didn't give us that - maybe because we approached from Alstonfield, not Ashbourne. We sort of crept up to it from the side, finding ourselves in a tree-edged car-park before even sighting the house. We walked along the path , through the trees, and suddenly, all was revealed. And it was a bit of a shock.
Firstly, the house we saw, couldn't possibly have been Pemberley House. It is a real oddity, built in the Gothic manner. Not the rambling gothic of medieval times, or the overblown victorian gothic, but the curiously graceful, perfectly balanced, golden-rectangle, Georgian "Gothick". And it was obvious that it wasn't all there. It was kind of pleasant though, and the rain had stopped! It turns out that it was built in the 1820's, and three quarters of it was demolished in the early 1900s. The remains is now a Youth Hostel, which means it isn't for visiting, but inside was an information board which described the Jacobean house that it had replaced, with an artist's rendering of the faintest possiblity of that structure, showing a fairly standard, square-built house, and the information that the Jacobean stables were still at the back. So we took "the road which led behind (the house) to the stables", to see if there was any trace of Mr. Darcy there. We found a large structure, rather plain, of Jacobean proportions, shining dark grey in the watery sunshine. Definitely built as stables and carriage -house, and something JA might well have seen. It certainly suggested a "large, handsome stone building standing well on rising ground."It is "backed by a ridge of high, woody hills" and in front of it is a "stream of some natural importance...swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance." But Mavis Batey never claimed that the House was Pemberley, only that the grounds were, and that is what we came to see.
In the front of the house, the lawn slopes gently to the river. The grass is plentifully dotted with "Oaks and Spanish Chestnuts" (well, Oaks and Copper Beech really, plus a Chestnut or two.)To the side of the house is a rather grotty ruin of an Italianate garden, a product of the 1820's or later. JA's Pemberley didn't have a garden, only lawns. We walked "across the lawn towards the river" where the path crosses by means of a "simple bridge" and then makes a "circuit walk", "a beautiful walk by the side of the water" following "still nobler fall of ground." Here the path "bidding adieu to the river for a while" ascends "some of the higher grounds" where "openings in the trees" give you "many charming views of the valley, the opposite hills (Thorpe Cloud to be exact), and occasionally, part of the stream. "The "accustomed circuit" now descends among "hanging woods "(at least, I think it does!) down to "the edge of the water in one of its narrowest parts." The valley here is still "unadorned", and is "contracted into a glen", but I couldn't find the "rough coppice wood", only mature trees. It was raining again by this time, and we spent only a little time looking at "the occasional appearance of some trout" before heading back to the house and our carriage.
I have to say that I found a couple of things, sufficiently noteworthy in themselves to be in Gilpin's book, but which are not mentioned in P&P. The first thing is the fact that the river, in dry weather, disappears underground, and then bubbles up again further down stream, in a place called, very unromantically, "the boils." Since I was visiting in the wettest June this century, I had little hope of seeing this phenomenon. It is also quite possible that it didn't exist in 1806 - limestone is like that. The other thing was that though the church is very close-and visible- from the house, the village is tucked away in the valley, out of sight. I found it that it was built as a "model village" as part of the 1820's rebuilding, but I suspect that before then it might have been clustered around the church.
Brother and I stood in the shelter of the entrance arch, looking down the valley, as the rain continued, and tried to make sense of all this. Was Ilham the inspiration for "the beautiful grounds of Pemberley?" Did Jane Austen stand more or less where we were, and think that to be mistress of Ilham "might be something?" I don't know, and if I'm really to decide I'm going to have to go back there again, with a decent large scale topographic map and do some digging in the British Library, which has the sale particulars for the estate, which changed hands in 1809, after being the "work of many generations" of one family. But I do know this. The place is beautiful. Beautiful in a balanced, enlightened sort of way, too, not with the wild and rugged, terrible beauty of the Bronte moors, or in the placid, gentle rolling downs beauty of Southern England. When I looked towards Thorpe Cloud, and the clumps of oaks on the lawn, I could see what Gilpin meant by the 'picturesque.' Rarely have I seen "a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste" (except for that horrible Italianate garden, that is;-) ). No wonder he included it in his book. No wonder Mr. Walton fished there. And no wonder Samuel Johnson based the "Happy Valley" of Rasselas on Ilham village. If Jane Austen saw this place, she would have loved it. And if Mr. Darcy reallygrew up here, no wonder he spent more than half the year at Pemberley, as Mrs. Reynolds tells us. I didn't want to leave.
The grounds of Ilham are owned by the National Trust, but are not in their website at present. Parking costs 1 per day, and gives you access to the nine miles of beauty that is pedestrian-only Dovedale. I think the Youth Hostel is run by the YHA, which means you should be able to stay ther every cheaply, but unfortunately their website isn't complete yet. There are buses to Ashbourne.