Suddenly a new and secret landscape opened before us. We were at the head of a valley and, below us, half a mile distant, grey and gold amid a screen of boskage, shone the dome and column of an old house…’
The house is one of the most famous in fiction: Brideshead Castle, where the charmed, cursed Flyte family lived out their decadent tragedy in Evelyn Waugh’s most popular novel. Who could resist a visit to the real-life house from which it was drawn?
The trouble is, more than one house has a claim to have been Waugh’s model for the novel. The fashionable view is that he wrote with Madresfield, the Worcestershire seat of the eccentric Lygons, in mind. Yet in the popular imagination there is only one ‘real’ Brideshead: Castle Howard in Yorkshire.
Both views may be correct. The human story that inspired Brideshead Revisited clearly came largely from Madresfield, but Castle Howard almost certainly supplied much of the architectural detail, from the shining dome to the spectacularly ornate fountain by which several crucial scenes are set. And with Castle Howard about to feature in its second major screen adaptation of the novel, opening next month, the connection between place and book seems irreversibly fixed – not least in the minds of the 200,000 people who visit the house each year.
Waugh himself would not have approved. He despised ‘trippers’. (‘Oh, Charles, don’t be such a tourist,’ says Sebastian Flyte at one point in Brideshead, when Charles Ryder expresses an interest in the origins of the dome.) But Castle Howard has literature – and showbusiness – running through its veins.
It’s not just that it was designed by a playwright, John Vanbrugh. The whole place pulsates with drama: a vast architectural explosion of aristocratic extravagance, with giant statues glowering haughtily from its domed roof; all set in 1,000 acres of immaculate grounds. I doubt if anyone sees it for the first time without a sharp intake of breath.
It’s hard to imagine living here happily, amid so much grandiosity, but the outrageous scale makes it a great place to visit: the vastness soaks up the crowds so you hardly notice them. And the Brideshead connection adds a layer of interest few other stately homes can offer.
‘Brideshead has been extremely important in bringing Castle Howard to the attention of many people who might otherwise never have heard of it,’ says Simon Howard, the current owner. ‘The house and estate would have survived without Brideshead, but we would not have moved on as fast as we have without it.’
