Day One of the great Vanbrugh tour.

We started at Seaton Delaval.  I didn’t photograph the north front because the coach was parked outside.  But I was able to study the south front, which is equally original, with its powerful colonnade and octagonal corner turrets, the local stone presumably blackened by coal dust:-

Here is a view of the entrance front with its ringed columns:-

The staircases are to the side away from the entrance hall:-

Its Vanbrugh at his most inventive and original – late Vanbrugh when he was playing around with architectural form in the sketches he was doing for smaller houses on his Greenwich estate.

And the ruined statuary is always impressive, burned by the fire of 1822:-