Hafod - one of the sites in The Three Landscapes Project

Notes on the Picturesque - Three - The House

On deciding to try to get both 'close' and 'distant' and to avoid the 'middle ground' I started at what I though! would be a simple, practical and 'real' place - at the built architecture of Johnes' house - at masony and mortar.

I knew that there had been a house - Hatod Uchtryd - on the site when Johnes acquired it, and I knew that he had built his mansion with the help of the architect Thomas Baldwin of Bath. I knew that Nash was reputed to have designed a circular library, and I knew that the house had been altered and extended by Johnes and subsequent owners.

This architectural 'narrative', I thought, would be a foundation for some very direct understanding of Hafod. However, none of this information exists.

All of Johnes' plans - if he kept them - were presumably destroyed in the fire of 1807. Baldwin's copies were also destroyed during some legal wrangle that implicated him, and the only information we have of even the most basic floor plan is full of uncertainty. We have no plan of the arrangement of rooms upstairs at all. All we have to go on are a small number of paintings of the house, and from these it is possible to see the general massing, and the gothic detailing. Some of them don't appear to agree with each other, and even early nineteenth century accounts by visitors to the house are riddled with inconsistency. We also know that, after the fire, Johnes moved people from the upstairs rooms downstairs for safety, so rooms called libraries or dining rooms, or plate rooms might have been used for radically different purposes at different times.

Even the most assiduous at researchers can only make informed guesses at the exact layout, design and detailing of Johnes' Hafod, and the constant changes he made to both the fabric of the buildings and the use of rooms within. We know that his house burned down in 1807 and that he used the remaining masonry as the template for a new Hafod, but, without substantial archaeological effort, it is impossible to know, in any detail that would be useful to us, what the 'architectural narrative' of Hafod might be.

For a house that is so important, this astonished me.

Once again, all we can do is, from a distance, project what we assume the architecture was, and what it might have meant to inhabit and move through it, onto what we know. One such ‘projection' in our reading would be to invoke Hafod's 'gothic' identity and contrast it with the 'classical' as employed in other similar properties of the time. And a sort of an understanding or dialogue might emerge - a certain lightness of architectural detail, a developing informality of massing, a move away from symmetry, the pointed arch, the masonry pinnacles and so on - but this is only 'middle distance' material once again.

And then, somewhere, I read that Johnes used camphor extensively to protect his books from attack by insects, and suddenly, I am grateful for detail. At last - a big close up. We know what Hafod smelled like.

Cliff McLucas