Aston Hall

Our current cat sit is in Solihull, near Birmingham, in the West Midlands. The city of Solihull is lovely, but you have to travel a bit to see a lot of the historical sites of interest. So one day when Bruce was off pub crawling, I hopped on the train from Olton, just around the corner from our house, to Aston. The train stops at Birmingham Moor Street Station, then you walk through the biggest, most confusing-to-navigate shopping mall (2 malls, actually) to the Birmingham New Street station. My error was in going on a Saturday which is apparently the day when every human within 20 miles descends on the malls. Yikes! Anyway, I made it to New Street and caught the train to Aston, the home of the Aston Villa football club. If you're not into soccer (or football or "the footie" as it is know here) suffice it to say that Aston Villa is a major team and since Birmingham is the second largest city in England, there are hundreds of thousands of rabid football fans who crowd into town on game days. Things can get pretty rowdy. Happily, the game was on Sunday. I plugged "Aston House" into my GPS and found myself directed to a really seedy area just off the highway. [Note to self: always check the official name of the place you're trying to visit.] Since I was now quite far afield, it was a 25 minute walk through some very dicey neighborhoods and an area in which I was the only woman not sporting a hijab. Yeah, I stood out a bit. At last I made to a beautiful park which was once part of the grounds of the house I was visiting.

Crossing through the park I came to Aston Hall.

It's an incredibly impressive place and has a fascinating history. Built by Sir Thomas Holte from a design by John Thorpe and completed in 1635, it is a leading example of a prodigy house. According to Wikipedia, "Prodigy houses are large and showy English country houses built by courtiers and other wealthy families, either "noble palaces of an awesome scale" or "proud, ambitious heaps" according to taste."

I was greeted at the door by three people, one of whom took my entrance fee while another watched. The third person, a volunteer, told me that I was welcome to wander through the house or, if I wanted, he would give me tour. Naturally, I chose the tour. I'm still not sure if this was the right move because although he did tell me a lot of interesting things, I later learned that many of them were erroneous. One thing he did tell me which quite shocked me, was that the city of Birmingham is in bankruptcy. I did a little digging and found that one big reason for this is that the city was unable to reach agreement with the local trade unions who had sued over discriminatory and sexist practices. According to the BBC, Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Michael Gove, blamed "under-performance, poor leadership, weak governance, woeful mismanagement of employee relations and ineffective service delivery" at the Labour run council." I mention this because staffing at Birmingham museums is almost non-existent on the few days a week when museums are open at all.

Anyway, this lovely, somewhat ill-informed man took me around the house quickly, saying I could go back through the rooms and take pictures later. Okay.

The Entry Hall is a high-ceilinged room with oak paneling, the wood for which came from trees on the estate.

There's a portrait of Sir Thomas Holte on one wall and a large fireplace on the opposite wall.

Along the ceiling are wonderful plaster figures from nature and mythology.

The first thing you see upon leaving the entry Hall, is the magnificently decorated newels and banister of the main staircase, also made from trees on the estate.

My guide led me into what he said was the dining room. He pointed out that there was no fireplace and said that was because it wasn't needed. They hung tapestries on the walls to keep the room warm. Nice try, but wrong. The little sign in the room which I saw on my second walk around, said that this was, in fact, The Great Parlour, the main living room for Sir Thomas and his family, and that there had once been a fireplace in the room. It is currently set up as a dining room using furniture from the stock of items kept at the Museum Collection Center.

Up the stairs we went to what was actually the dining room.

On the table are dishes of the sort that might have been served when King Charles I came to visit, including peacock pie.

To one side of the dining room is the Withdrawing Room (whence comes the term "drawing room".) My guide said that this is the room where diners would go between courses. I'm not sure about that. I thought this was where guests would withdraw after dinner to smoke and socialize.

The highly decorated ceiling features faces and mythological creatures. The tapestry at the back hides two figures of red squirrels. More about that in a minute.

From there I was led to the Long Gallery, a "must-have" country house feature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages.

In this room, Sir Thomas would have hung portraits of his ancestors and of the king and queen. The windows look out over the gardens and, at 135 feet long, it would have been a good place to walk when the weather was inclement.

At the end of the Long Gallery is a stained glass window with the Holte coat of arms which features a red squirrel. My guide said that it was because there are so many red squirrels in the area and Holte was fond of them.

Down the hall from that is King Charles' Chamber, the room in which King Charles stayed when he came to visit.

The reign of King Charles I was fraught and led to the English Civil Wars, a series of conflicts fought between those loyal to the king and those loyal to Parliament. At the heart of the conflict were fundamental questions about power and religion. Sir Thomas Holte tried to hold out and not choose sides in the matter, but when King Charles announced that he was coming to pay a visit, Holte was forced to declare for the king's side. Down the road from Aston Hall in the next town over, thousands of Parliamentarians were gathered. This, as you can imagine, had Sir Thomas feeling apprehensive. He wrote to the king to ask if he could send a couple of soldiers to the house to help protect it. What he got was a garrison of 40. Fearing that this would inflame the Parliamentarians, he left town, leaving the garrison and his 40 servants behind. There were some skirmishes between them, but when one of the servants killed a Parliamentarian, a full-scale battle ensued. Forty people in the house were killed. There is still evidence of the battle on the stairway, where you can see the damage inflicted by a cannonball which sailed through a window,

Leaving town didn't serve him very well. Even though he claimed that he was not around when the skirmish happened, he was fined over 4,000 pounds by the Parliamentarians. this roughly what it cost to build the house.

My little tour over, my guide spoke to the one employee on duty, Matt, and asked him to take me to the servants' quarters since that was off limits to volunteers. I wasn't sure what to expect, but this ended up being a fascinating little side tour. We took a small set of servants' stairs up four floors, ending in an attic room where the male servants would have slept on straw mattresses on the floor. This room is also known as Jack's Garret. Jack is one of three (or more) ghosts said to haunt the house. Sir Thomas Holte was known as a very cruel man and master. One of his young servants, a 12-year-old boy named Jack was caught stealing a loaf of bread. [Cue music from Les Miserables.] Sir Thomas put him in a small room at the top of one of the towers of the house. Whether he forgot about the boy or if he was being intentionally cruel is not known, but after three days of being locked there with no food or water, the boy hanged himself. He is said to haunt the attic.

As we headed down to the landing below, Matt told me that some UK organization had name Aston Hall one of the most haunted houses in England. He said he only knew about three ghosts for sure. The first is Jack. The second is the Green Lady, a housekeeper during Sir Thomas' time who is said to keep watch on the house. Matt told me that a few years ago he took an elderly lady on a tour of the servants' quarters and she told him that, as a young girl, she had toured the house and seen the Green Lady. She had stopped on the landing and a woman in a green dress stopped, curtsied, nodded, then walked down the hall and disappeared.

The third ghost of the house is the White Lady, aka the Grey Ghost, who is said to be Sir Thomas Holte's daughter, Mary. Sir Thomas had found a suitable husband for her but she was in love with a local farmer and refused to marry her father's choice. So enraged by this was Sir Thomas that he locked her in another tower where, after four years, she died.

Matt also showed me The Red Room just below the servants' quarters where family guests not quite of royal standing would be lodged when they visited.

In 1817, Aston Hall was purchased by James Watt, Jr, son of industrialist James Watt, who improved on the steam engine developed by Thomas Newcomen and which launched the industrial revolution. The plaster figures in the Entry Hall may come from his time in the house, as the elephant is on his family crest.

There are some wonderful pieces of furniture dotted around the house which display magnificent marquetry.

I found a couple of other highly decorated rooms, but had to keep reminding myself that these aren't from the Holte family, but are mostly props filling the house.

There were some lovely glasses on display that were made by F & C Osler, a Birmingham company, in honor of Queen Victoria's visit to the house.

Supposedly, the Queen liked the glasses so much she took one with her and later ordered a set for her daughter, the Princess Royal.

There's a room that holds a collection of taxidermy animals and birds.

Taxidermy was very popular in the Victorian era. At the time, they used arsenic in the process, so touching the animals could be dangerous to one's health. BTW, the tiger's name is Nigel.

To the side of the house is Lady Holte's garden. I'm sure that at some point it was a magnificent place, but lack of funds has contributed to its current somewhat sorry state.

There is an interesting modern sculpture in the garden which, though interesting and thought provoking, seems quite out of place.

The city of Birmingham seems to be making an effort to strive for equality and representation (see reasons for bankruptcy above.) Since this grand hall stands so close to neighborhoods of immigrants, perhaps the city is hoping that art like this is a bridge to the wider community.

As I was leaving I saw a number of squirrels frolicking on the lawn. My guide got this wrong, too. They were grey squirrels.