Dancing
horses and a dodgy Venus: why Derbyshire’s Bolsover Castle is my wonder of the
world
This is a
very English wonder, fusing the arcane symbolism of northern England with then
modern ideas from Renaissance Italy
SEE ALSO: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/bolsover-castle/
Lucy Worsley
Sun 19 Jan
2025 14.00 GMT
Bolsover
Castle, topped with turrets, sits at the crest of a hill with the best view in
Derbyshire. You could be forgiven for thinking it must be the home of a
medieval knight, if not a wizard. But really it’s a gothic, chivalric, romantic
recreation of a medieval castle, constructed by a 17th-century aristocrat. He
was so pleased with his “new castle” that he took it for his title, becoming
Duke of Newcastle.
The castle
seems pretty wondrous to me, not least because it determined my choice of
career. As a teenager, I read about it in a book describing a treasure hunt
undertaken in the 1960s by the architectural historian Mark Girouard. He was
looking for traces of the lost houses designed by the Smythsons, a talented
family of master masons and designers in Elizabethan England. Their work at
Bolsover formed the climax of his quest, and through several lucky breaks I
ended up working there myself in my first proper job as assistant inspector of
ancient monuments for English Heritage.
One of the
castle’s oddest buildings is its Riding House, where each morning the Duke
trained his wildly expensive horses in the art of horse ballet. This strange
sport was popular at the court of Charles I, and you can still see something
like it at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna.
At first
sight it seems pointless, and yet the repetitive discipline required to teach a
huge beast to leap through the air involved what we would now call mindfulness.
To be good at it, you need to be completely calm, and alive to the
possibilities of each given moment, qualities needed by any leader. A rider in
superb control of a powerful animal was supposed to represent a person capable
of taming the unruly animal passions that lie within us all.
The castle’s
style used to be known as ‘Artisan Mannerism’, the work of artisans not artists
… in other words, a bit of a bodge
The castle
is a very English wonder, because it fuses arcane symbolism and architectural
ideas from the ancient fortresses of northern England with the then very modern
ideas from Renaissance Italy. The Renaissance as it arrives here in Derbyshire
looks a bit dodgy to expert eyes familiar with the “real” Renaissance of
southern Europe. The castle’s style used to be known, patronisingly, as
“Artisan Mannerism”, the work of artisans rather than artists. Or, in other
words, a bit of a bodge.
The famous
statue of Venus in the garden, for example, climbing from her bath, has one leg
much longer than the other. But there’s an intriguing argument that quirky
“mistakes” like this were quietly but deliberately introduced by the local
craftspeople who thought that even Chesterfield lay practically in a foreign
country. By making the Bolsover Venus so flawed, and funny, perhaps her
sculptor was secretly laughing at his master for coming home from his Grand
Tour of Italy so full of pretentious, new-fangled ways.
Bolsover
itself – a town so deeply associated with the 1980s miners’ strike – seems an
unlikely place for avant garde art and elite sport to have been practised four
centuries ago. But, in fact, the castle is a reminder of why the mighty are
fallen.
It has an
air of failure. When the British civil wars (1642-51) broke out, the Duke of
Newcastle became a Royalist general and sent his great leaping horses from the
Riding House to the battlefield. However, he lost the key battle of Marston
Moor because he had a hangover and didn’t turn up on time. The king himself
ended up losing both the war, and his head. The buildings at Bolsover were
plundered by Cromwell’s troops, and narrowly escaped demolition.
Today they
survive largely as a roofless ruin, the few remaining rooms empty and echoing.
But still they retain a whiff of decadent magic.
Series two
of Lucy Worsley Investigates is on BBC Two, Fridays at 9pm, and on BBC iPlayer
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