Bowood for the Times Weekend Section

Maud was four months old, her prawn legs dangling from the baby carrier strapped to my chest, when I first saw the adventure playground at Bowood. We gazed greedily at the walkways high in the trees, the alarming Space Jump, the high, steep and exciting slides and a grounded pirate ship. The reality of having children I think came home to us that day 13 years ago – we imagined bringing a bigger, walking version of Maud, and other, shadowy, children and their friends as yet unborn Nearly every summer we have returned, first with Maud who scrambled up the rope netting fearlessly from a very early age. Then with Archie, now 10. Now we have Tolly (18 months) whose excursions this year were limited to bouncing on trampolines sunk in the ground and spinning on low level plastic pads. He has an unaccountable dislike of swings. Bowood is the ancestral home of the Marquises of Lansdowne since 1754. It is the old Brideshead story – but with a twist. Over the centuries, the family had built two houses – the Little House, rather like a very grand bungalow in golden stone with elevations at either end, and the Big House – a classic Palladian four-square mansion to one side. On that first visit we met an old retainer who, like the Ancient Mariner, wanted to tell us his destructive secret. ‘I attached chains to the pillars, and just drove the tractor away,’ he said, conscious that only a few years after 1955, the house would have been listed and preserved. As it was, like so many large houses after WWII it had been commandeered by the RAF and was in a fearful state. The 7th Marquis and his brother and heir were both killed within a few days of each other in 1944, no doubt leaving crippling death duties. Class-ridden left-wing propaganda after the war had it that the upper classes were exempt from the carnage. When you visit a house like Bowood, the evidence is very strongly to the contrary. Nothing remains of the Big House except photographs – one poignant one of the portico left standing with rubble behind. Its footprint seems so small for such a grand mansion – just a bit of terrace now. The remaining Little House is charming and unusual, with an orangery, now a gallery of sculpture, running across the west front, and the family chapel behind. The current Marquis, who inherited in ????, is the first to live there permanentlyThe terrace that spans the whole front of the elegant building, is decorated with a 1978 sculpture of his first wife, slim but voluptuously breasted, in vaguely Epstein style by David Wynne (most famous for his boy and dolphin on Cheyne Walk in London). ‘She’s weathered a bit now,’ says one, long time visitor. ‘She used to stick out like a sore thumb.’ Below the terrace, with its rose garden in muted creams and pinks, and its vaguely phallic yew topiary leaning at various angles like the Tower of Pisa, the vast lawn rolls smoothly away down to a lake. It has Capability Brown’s ambitious earth moving written all over it. On the other side of the lake is a Doric temple, and below a system of caves and a waterfall. The children love running down the sloping lawn – Tolly could hardly control his little legs. They disappeared like rabbits among the bushes, and we could glimpse them streaking away by the stream below looking for the caves. It reminded me of the C16th Monster Garden at Bomarzo in Lazio, Italy in its studied rusticity and surprising effects. The house is stuffed with eclectic treasures gleaned from a past at the top of several heaps - Byron’s Albanian costume given to the family for fancy dress, an all purpose piece of furniture for use on sea voyages (including a pull-out potty) and Napoleon’s death mask amongst them. And, unusually, a laboratory where the family kept scientists rather as others kept hermits in caves. There, Dr Joseph Priestley, tutor to the 1st Marquis’s sons, discovered oxygen in 1774. There are plenty of informal family photographs as well as fine portraits – my late mother-in-law particularly enjoyed these. The family resemblances are striking. She also loved the menus for gargantuan Edwardian banquets. We picnicked, but there is a self-service café by the gates, where a shop and garden centre used to be. The restaurant in the restored stables is really good. The tea is like a National Trust one – excellent home made cakes and scones. Since we were last there, they have built a soft play area for toddlers. Tolly and I went into the ball pool, and he lay on my chest giggling as I slowly sank beneath him. There are also two new party rooms beside it. I had a slight twinge (no doubt due to being brought up by an early feminist) when I noted the strict segregation of theme – fairies for the girls, pirates for the boys. The Space Jump is a large shed housing a vertical slide of highly polished hardboard – at the bottom is a carefully calculated curve that catches the falling child and flings it, shrieking with delight, onto the flat shiny finish. Last year Archie banged his head and was put off. But this year he followed my advice and hung by his finger tips from the top before launching himself into the minor abyss. Then a tiny but vicious redhead went along the top flicking off the other children’s fingers.. Unlike a theme park or playground, Bowood offers culture as well as thrills, plus glorious landscaping studded with specimen trees artfully arranged. Everyone from Granny downwards is guaranteed a rewarding day. Body copy ends Sidebar Bowood is open for seven months a year – 23 March to 3 November 2002. Grounds: 11am to 6pm House: 11am to 5.30pm For six weeks, from late April to early June, the separate Rhododendron Walks are open as well. Bowood is off the A4 at Derry Hill, midway between Calne and Chippenham in Wiltshire. No dogs allowed. Bowood, Calne, Wiltshire SN11 0LZz Telephone: 01249 812 102 www.bowood.org email: houseandgardens@bowood.org