In 1752 Richard Trevor became the new Bishop of Durham. A perk of the post was two palaces: one in the city and a country seat at Auckland Castle, on the edge of the town of Bishop Auckland. In around 1760 he erected there this gorgeous gothic Deer House in the park at Auckland. As is so often the case with garden buildings, it combined the functional with the frivolous –  as well as sheltering the herd it also provided a banqueting room with extensive views and served as an eye-catcher in the park.

The Deer House was built on high ground above the River Gaunless, a tributary of the Wear, which meanders in an extremely pretty manner through the park (genuinely useless fact – Gaunless is apparently old Norse for useless). Trevor’s predecessor had already begun to remodel the park, a project that the new incumbent was happy to continue. Bishop Trevor (1707-1771) was a great builder, having remodelled his family seat at Glynde in East Sussex, and built a new church there.

At Auckland Castle he commissioned plans for entrances and garden buildings from the gentlemen-architects Richard Bentley and Sir Thomas Robinson, but the designer of the Deer House is thought, on stylistic grounds, to be Thomas Wright (1711-1786), the polymath who was born and died in County Durham. The Reverend James Raine, in his A brief historical account of the episcopal castle, or palace, of Auckland, published in 1852, gives the date as 1760. Raine also wrote that the ‘winter shelter’ was said to have cost £379, but sadly he gives no information on the architect. Other sources give the date as 1767, which may be when the works were completed.

The Deer Shelter, high on an eminence in the park, was thought ‘well plac’d’ by a visitor in 1766, and the grand scale of the building (‘very commodious’) was noted by another tourist in 1775 . The historian of Durham, William Hutchinson, described it in 1794 as a ‘well-fancied erection, in form of a cloister’. Sadly no accounts of enjoying a repast in the tower, with a vista across to the castle, have been found.

But half a century later fashions had changed, and the building failed to impress one visitor who though it ‘a piece of bad taste […] a sham with no reasonable motive’. Raine also expressed some doubt about the Deer Shelter: he thought it had a good effect from a distance, but did not stand up to closer scrutiny by an ‘architectural eye’. The Folly Flâneuse is firmly with the 18th century admirers.

There had been deer in the park at Auckland for centuries. The keeping of a herd fell in and out of fashion over the years, and the park needed to be restocked on a number of occasions. Bishop Trevor was seeking to increase the herd soon after arriving in Durham, and his steward was tasked to find an estate with deer to spare. But in 1856 The Gateshead Observer reported that the ‘episcopal deer’ had been sold by the ‘economical Church Commissioners’, and that some of them had already been shot & sent off to the London market. The paper was saddened by this move, writing that ‘the romance of the Church is fast disappearing’. A century later the now redundant Deer Shelter was taken into the care of the state to ensure its future was safe.

Early this century the Church Commissioners were once more criticised when they announced plans to sell off a number of Bishop’s Palaces, stating that they were too expensive to maintain, and unfit for 21st century episcopal life. Auckland Castle was on the list, and there was very vocal opposition, but a saviour was on hand in the form of Jonathan Ruffer, a hedge-fund manager. In 2012 he bought the estate and established a trust to save the castle and park, and to help reinvigorate the town of Bishop Auckland. Since that date Heritage Lottery Funding has enabled The Auckland Project to develop new museums and attractions, creating jobs and attracting visitors to the town.

The deer park is currently open for local visitors only. The Auckland Project is scheduled to reopen in June and should definitely be on your list of things to look forward to https://www.aucklandproject.org

And whilst discussing the follies of County Durham there is the excellent news that the updated The Buildings of England (Pevsner) volume on the county is published this month (March 2021). Fully updated by Martin Roberts, this will be a real treasure trove of information. And the icing on the cake? County Durham’s extraordinary eyecatcher, the Penshaw Monument, is on the cover.

You can find out more about the book here https://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?k=9780300225044 And the Paul Mellon Centre is hosting a virtual launch, details here https://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/whats-on/forthcoming/pevsner-county-durham

Researching her recent post on the Monteath Mausoleum in the Scottish Borders, the Folly Flâneuse chanced upon a mention of a mausoleum at Windlestone, County Durham. Further investigation revealed that the Windlestone and Monteath mausolea are siblings, realised by the same architect and builder, at the same date. Sadly, whilst the Monteath mausoleum has been restored to its former glory, that at Windlestone was demolished late in the 20th century.

NB if you want to catch up on the Monteath Mausoleum read this post first: https://thefollyflaneuse.com/monteath-mausoleum-ancrum-borders/ 

Of the two burial places, the Monteath Mausoleum was the first born, with work commencing in 1864. It is interesting that Sir William chose J. Dick Peddie of Edinburgh as his architect, for although prolific in Scotland the Windlestone mausoleum seems to have been Peddie’s only English commission. Sir William may have been familiar with the plans for the Monteath Mausoleum, possibly from seeing Peddie’s design in the Royal Scottish Academy exhibition in spring 1865. He may also have been familiar with the new banking hall that Peddie had created for the Royal Bank of Scotland in Edinburgh. Opened in 1857, the extension to what had been Sir Laurence Dundas’s 18th century mansion in St Andrew’s Square was widely admired. The dome features 120 stars, and smaller versions of the design would soon feature in the plans for the Monteath and Eden mausolea.

Sir William commissioned Peddie to design a ‘chapel-tomb’ in which could rest the remains of his four children who had died in their infancy. In plan the building was cruciform, and like the Monteath structure it was surmounted with a dome pierced with star-shaped openings. Each arm of the cross was terminated with a pediment, that at the entrance being supported by columns. Advertisements were placed to recruit workmen in June 1765 and, as in Scotland, the work was superintended by James Harkness of Hawick, who must have found the commute to Durham somewhat more cumbersome. Tragically for Sir William and Lady Eden, two daughters died just before work began, and 12 year old Blanche and 8 year old Rose were buried together at the parish church in nearby Merrington until the vault was ready.

Peddie’s initial designs show that, as at the Monteath Mausoleum, sculpted angels were to watch over the dead, although at Windelstone there were to be four on the exterior of the building. They do not appear on the updated design of September 1865 and were probably never implemented.

The ‘mortuary chapel’ at Windlestone was consecrated in May 1868 and in July Sir William noted in his diary that ‘during the night the remains of our six dear children’ were moved into the new building from their previous resting places at St Helen’s, St Helen Auckland, and St John the Evangelist, Merrington. In the pediment was carved a child shepherd with his crook, and a small pelican tearing its breast to symbolise paternal piety. An inscription read ‘Ego sum pastor bonus et agnosco oves meas’: ‘I am the good shepherd and I know my sheep’. Sir William himself was interred there on his death in 1873.

Peddie was clearly proud of the building and a sectional view was published in The Builder in 1880. Two years later he showed a work called  ‘Windlestone Mausoleum’ at the Royal Scottish Academy exhibition, current whereabouts unknown.

In 1911 the gardens at Windlestone were in their prime and a later Sir William was praised as an ‘expert in horticulture’ who had created ‘numerous well-planned walks which are edged with beds filled with an astonishing variety of flowering plants’. Such a walk led to the chapel, as seen in the view above. Curiously it does not show the stars in the dome so either the roof  had been replaced, or it was never built to Peddie’s design. No descriptions have yet been found to provide any firm evidence.

Family financial problems, and the toll of the First World War, saw the estate slip into decline soon after the war ended. The most famous member of the family, Anthony Eden who was the British Prime Minster 1955-57, was born at Windlestone in 1897 and remained a frequent visitor. Eden visited his mother in the Dower House there at Christmas 1935, shortly after he had been made Foreign Secretary. They must have discussed the grave family news that Windlestone was to be sold the following year. The chapel and burial ground were exempt from the 1936 sale, but without the family present the mausoleum attracted the wrong kind of attention. In 1954 the building made headlines across Britain when thieves smashed their way into the underground vault. As they escaped with a lead-lined coffin the body of Robert Eden, who had died aged 9 in 1856, was exposed. The thieves, miners aged 21 and 15, escaped but were arrested when the body was discovered. Guilt got the better of the younger of the party and he confessed.

Further ‘disturbing incidents’ led Sir Timothy Eden, Anthony’s brother, to seek permission from the Diocese of Durham to demolish the chapel, which was now ‘almost ruinous’, and seal the vault. The faculty was granted in November 1957 and local builders were given the contract to start work. The memorial plaques were removed, and taken to Sir Timothy’s home in Hampshire for safekeeping, and the lead was stripped from the roof to deter thieves. The door to the vault was then securely sealed. Revisiting late in life the former prime minister Anthony Eden, now 1st earl of Avon, was shocked to see the mausoleum derelict: ‘I looked along the avenue that led to the chapel. Here was frank ruin. The building lay open to the sky…’

In 1983, accepting that the mausoleum remained a target for vandals, and was at risk from the elements, the Eden family began the process of arranging for the coffins to be removed to St Helen’s, Bishop Auckland. It took over a year to get permission from the Church of England, and then the Home Office, and moving the remains was one of the most unusual jobs handled by Sydney Pearson, Manager of the Co-operative Funeral Service of that town. On December 10th 1984 a short service was held at St Helen’s and the remains were reinterred in the churchyard underneath the east window. Lines from Longfellow, which had previously been on a memorial in the chapel, were added to one of the stones marking the graves:

Oh! not in cruelty, not in wrath
The Reaper came that day
An angel visited the green earth
And took the flowers away

The chapel was demolished to ground level soon after. St Helen’s, St Helen Auckland, is now the Eden resting place, and memorial plaques from the mausoleum have been returned to County Durham and can be seen in the porch. The gate piers from the entrance to the chapel, were given to the town of Rushyford by the Eden family, and re-erected at the entrance to the recreation ground on West Chilton Terrace.