This morning, our group ventured away from Bath to the village of Lacock in county Wiltshire. Lacock is a quintessential English village that has changed little in 200 years. Its streets are lined with timber-framed and stone houses and small shops–the perfect setting for period piece films.
And so it has been. Almost entirely owned by the National Trust, the village, abbey and abbey gardens have been used in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, The Other Boleyn Sister, Downton Abbey and others. Most important to our visit, Lacock was the stand-in for the local villages in two Jane Austen filmed adaptions:
- Highbury village in the 1996 Emma
- Meryton village in the 1995 Pride and Prejudice–with the Red Lion Inn standing in for the Meryton Assembly Rooms.
Here are a lot of pictures to try and capture the old-timey look of the village. None of the buildings or street scenes brought back any specific scenes from the films to me. That will require another watching with attention paid to the background. But you can well see that, excepting the cars, time seems to have stood still in the whole village.
(And, no, I did not cut-n-paste my selfie into each of those pictures…although they do look frighteningly similar!)
I did overhear one of the Trust employees explaining to an inquiring guest how the TV antennae have all been hidden behind the village houses to maintain the period look.
After spending an hour or so wandering this pocket of 18th century preservation, we gained entry to the adjacent Lacock Abbey.
The abbey was founded by Ela, Countess of Salisbury in the 13th century as a nunnery of the Augustinian Order. It was closed by Henry VIII. The nuns left and Sir William Sharington, a Tudor courtier, purchased the abbey, turning it into his country house. He incorporated the abbey cloister into the design of his home, an unusual move that has helped preserve it to this day.
In the 1700’s, the abbey was inherited by the Talbot family who eventually gave it to the National Trust in 1944. I mention this because one of the Talbots, William Henry Fox Talbot, captured the first photographic negative in August 1835. His invention of negative-to-positive photo transfer became the standard for photography worldwide…until the onslaught of digital capture. There is an adjacent museum telling his story that would probably be very interesting to professional and amateur photographers alike.
After our allotted time in the abbey, we were transported back to Bath for an afternoon to ourselves. I chose this opportunity to 1) find a bank’s ATM to “gain” a few more pounds; then 2) set out to find and photograph all of the other still-existing Jane Austen residences while en route to 3) the Royal Crescent Gift Shop.
Jane Slept Here
Here are my finds. There was one other residence that Jane, her sister and her mother occupied before their worsening circumstances forced another move. However, the address, nay the building no longer exists.
Missions accomplished, I returned to the hotel after stocking up on water and a banana at Pret A Manger (a store I used to frequent in London). Then, it was a shower and a short nap before getting dressed up. Yup! I wore the sport coat and th’other dressy paraphernalia that I had carted across The Pond for our Regency night out. More on that in my trip take-aways later.
Boarding the motor coach again–with two of our group finely done up in full Regency dress–we were taken to the Bailbrook House Hotel for an evening of champagne with hors d’œuvres, a Regency entertainment and a buffet dinner.
The evening’s performers were Captain George Featherstonehaugh on the keyboard and Miss Cholmondeley on the vocal cords, presenting us with an “Evening devot’d to songs by composers known to the immortal Miss Jane Austen.” (And songs there were: twenty-one of them!) The material consisted largely of opera pieces of the period — Mozart, Händel, Haydn and Beethoven were all represented — with a couple of sea chanty-ish digressions thrown in for good measure.
Evenings such as this must have been the rock concerts of their day.
After dessert, we piled back onto the motor coach and returned to the hotel. We needed to pack up and pack it in as our time in Bath was coming to a close and we were leaving for the coast (Lyme Regis) and Winchester in the morning.
13,683S/6.5M
Dave In Austenland 