Barnsley House. I typed the name in and then looked at it, listening to the sounds of the house around me, waiting for some sort of sign that it was safe to proceed. Outside, the street was quiet, apart from the occasional car door or the slam of a basketball against a backboard in our neighbour’s driveway. There was a limited amount of time before my father and Fleur came back from dinner, and I didn’t want to answer their questions about what I was doing just yet. I didn’t really know what I was doing just yet.
Wikipedia, Great Houses of England, TripAdvisor; a raft of entries came up. I clicked on the Wikipedia link, thinking an overview would be the best place to start.
Barnsley House
Barnsley House, also known as Barnsley House Hotel, is situated in a unique geographical location at the tip of two coves on the rugged coast of England’s West Country. Continuously the family seat of the Summer family for over two hundred years, it passed to the ownership of Maximilian Summer in 1987 and is run as a country house hotel with the Michelin-starred restaurant The Summer Room. The garden is supposed to have been designed by Hugo Bostock, but there is no known documentation of this, and it is considered by most historians to be too far south of Bostock’s usual area and thus most likely derivative.
The house, then known as Barnslaigh, first appears on maps in the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century it was the site of a small ferry point in a line that ran in the summer months between the villages dotted along that coastline. The water was notoriously rough, and the ferry service now runs only in the warmest months. Consequently, the land and the small manor house were sold off to a local farmer, Montgomery Summer, who was expanding his already substantial landholdings. Summer built the house that stands there today.
Unusually for the time, Barnsley was built in stone brought in from the Cotswolds, and as a consequence the house is striking, and unique in the area. The gardens, which in their heyday were overseen by eighteen full-time gardeners and ground staff, have been restored and updated in recent years to their former glory by the current incumbent.
Barnsley House has a long and colourful history and is known locally as “The House of Brides,” in reference to the best-selling book by the same name, written by Tessa Summer. The book’s title refers to the distinctive character of Barnsley’s chatelaines over the years. Although the house has come close to sale a number of times, it has always been these enterprising and resourceful women who have saved the estate from passing from family hands.
The first and most notable “bride” was Elspeth Summer, who convinced her husband to build her the aptly named Summer House on an island just offshore from the main house. Elspeth was a complete hermit, and refused to accompany her husband on his travels abroad. He brought her back a collection of unusual plants from all over the world and she had great success in establishing an almost tropical garden on the site. Her love of white wine from France was well known, and she attempted to start a vineyard on the island to grow the grapes to make her own. This project failed in the adverse conditions, but the island was renamed Minerva Island by the family after a rare grape varietal from France (minervae). Still known by that name, it is private but open to tour groups during the summer months.
Elspeth’s daughter-in-law, Sarah Summer, unusually for the time, accompanied her husband on many of his travels, and developed a keen interest in architecture. Inspired by their grand tours, she controversially oversaw the transformation of the nearby Anglican chapel of St. John’s in Minton to an almost exact replica of a tiny Italian church she had visited in Tuscany.
Much later, in the early twentieth century, Barnsley House was the home of the famous writer Gertrude Summer, one of the last American heiresses—who married the then owner and brought with her an American fortune. She used the house as a backdrop for her crime fiction, lampooning the British upper class who refused to accept her into their inner circle. In the process Barnsley House became almost as well known as her books, the sales from which, along with her inheritance, propped up the estate for years. The marriage ended amid claims of infidelity, and Gertrude moved farther along the coast, where she would live for the rest of her life.
The house fell into disrepair after the Second World War, in which it had gained some notoriety as a training ground for intelligence officers. It had a brief resurgence under the ownership of Maximilian Summer (senior) and his wife Beatrice, who became known for their wild house parties during a time when most other country houses were being sold and entertaining as a whole was being scaled back. The notorious and short-lived Barnsley Festival was both founded and then folded under their watch.
By the time the current owner, Max Summer, inherited from his father Maximilian, the house was decrepit and the debts were piling up. Together with his wife, Daphne Summer, Max Summer has reinvigorated Barnsley House as a luxury country house hotel.
Most of this I already knew, or had a vague knowledge of. There was no mention of anything untoward happening lately, despite what Sophia mentioned in her letter.
I assumed Sophia was Max and Daphne’s daughter. There was no mention of any children on the Wikipedia page, so I quickly clicked on the link for Daphne Summer. It directed me towards an article from the Daily Telegraph from July, and I read it hungrily, eager to find something written about Daphne from an outsider’s point of view.
For the longest time, I had cared about nothing except myself. Or to be more specific, what other people thought of me. My entire existence was based around projecting an image of my lifestyle, and if something wasn’t on Instagram, then in my mind it hadn’t happened. I had missed a lot. The real world. Friends. Family. Common decency.
It felt good to be thinking about something else.