I spent yesterday at Eastnor Castle, Robert Smirke’s impressively fortified Regency castle east of Ledbury:-

Smirke had travelled widely in Europe, including Athens, where he was deeply upset by the damage being done to the Parthenon by the removal of its friezes, recording how the removal of each stone ‘seemed like a convulsive groan of the injured spirit of the Temple’.

But his first work was not Greek Revival, but castellated, Lowther Castle for William Lowther, Lord Lonsdale.

At Eastnor, his client was John Cocks, Baron Somers, who had been MP for Reigate before succeeding his father in the House of Lords in 1806, a Whig, but an independent-minded country Whig: ‘The true old Whig principle of our ancestors, if I apprehend it rightly, is mine.  It avoids both extremes, and in many cases will not fear a coalition of extremes in order to produce the happy medium’.  Smirke went down to Herefordshire in February 1812 to discuss plans.

Inside is extraordinary and unexpected, much less austere than Smirke intended.  The second Earl Somers commissioned Pugin to do up the drawing room, which he did as if it was the House of Lords:-

His son, Charles Somers-Cocks, the third Earl, married Virginia Pattle, the sister of Julia Margaret Cameron.  He remodelled the castle, employing George E. Fox and was responsible for the wonderful Long Library:-

It is due to his marriage that one of the turret rooms is full of photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron:-

The house was apparently occupied by the army in the War and then very adventurously refurbished after James and Sarah Hervey-Bathurst took over the house from his mother in 1988, employing Bernard Nevill, the Professor of Textile Design at the Royal College of Art to advise them. 

The results are magnificent:-

Sorry, this is an unusually long entry because I forgot to read the guidebook.