West Wycombe, Part II

Did you believe me when I said I had a lot of pictures? This is only about half the visual booty I stole away from the Wycomb estate, and I was doing my best not to be compulsive.

This is a full view of the visitors' entrance/ now the back of the house/ formerly the front of the house. It's magnificent, isn't it? The clutter is BBC prop-related; our guide said Little Dorit is actually set in Italy, so they were attempting to make the accoutrements look more Italian. The house itself is already Italianate; Sir Francis brought the architectural style back over the Channel as a souvenir of his time abroad as a young man. He brought the blueprint plans to life by marrying several rich women in a row-- they all seemed to die young-- from outraged sensibilities, perhaps, or childbed or disease. His completed estate launched an Italian craze among the landed gentry.

This is a closer shot of the Adonis temple (a sign outside the entrance read "Cockpit") that Sir Francis saw fit to build next to his back door.

There were hundreds of tiny daisies carpeting the lawns. Like the bugs, and the alleys, evidently the flowers are smaller and more abundant here than in Texas. I didn't want to step on them, but had little choice as they were all over.
This reclined woman statue was literally on the back porch and totally a naked hermaphrodite. One side (the side shown) is obviously female, the other obviously male. Evidently it's a reproduction of an original in the Louvre. I'll have to look for it this weekend.

The worn fresco on the wall behind has holes worn in it. The late Baron Le Despencer, while bored as a child during a rain shower in the 1930s, tossed a ball at the wall to keep himself amused.

That game I played myself, though I didn't have the satisfaction of an old painting to destroy. I had to be contented with plain old brick walls.
Does this need an explanation?
Yeah, this would be an island in their personal lake; the building is the Music Temple. Sir Francis had the lake shaped as a swan in a not-so discreet reference to the Greek myth about Zeus and Leta. During the Victorian era, however, the lake was altered to look like a heart-- a symbol of romance and affection substituted for that of lust. Good for the Victorians.  They literally whitewashed the interior walls of the house during their editing process. After the National Trust bought rights to the house early in the 20th century, they had to remove the whitewash to reveal the original Italian marble finish underneath. 

The BBC were filming in the Music Temple, too. You can see the equipment. Again, I highly suggest clicking on the pictures in order to see them larger, and in a higher quality.
This would be yet another statue of the reclining female form. Would you believe me when I say the Victorians ousted the landscape of all truly naughty statues? That there were many worse than what I have pictured? 

According to my research, the hedges and shrubberies were actually laid out in a design that beat all the statuary on the shocking front.
The house from across the lake. These estates may have a lot to titillate, but there is definitely a superficial level of beauty that anyone can appreciate. 
A temple to Venus. This is a reproduction of the original that Sir Francis had built, though the site is the same. You can probably guess what happened to the original-- the Victorians demolished it. I believe the temple was brought back when the National Trust took over the upkeep of the house and grounds, as the unique history of the Dashwoods was re-embraced in the 20th century. Re-embraced, and couched in winks and euphemisms.
Apart from the estates I've shown you so far, Dashwood also excavated caves halfway up a steep (I would even assert completely sheer) hill about two miles from the house. Ironically, directly above the caves, on the top of the hill, stands a church and a family mausoleum.

Once you enter the caves, you descend deeper and deeper into the earth. Someone in class reported that the caves were built to emulate a woman's anatomical structure, with round antechambers like the womb, etc. 

Legend has it that all sorts of private rites were conducted by Sir Francis and members of a Hellfire Club in these caves; their proper name is The Hellfire Caves. Half running through the chill, dark passageways in order to make it back to the bus and its recalcitrant driver before 5pm, it still took us nearly fifteen minutes of slip-sliding to reach the deepest caverns.

Evidently ghosts live in the caves. This was supposed to be creepy, eerie, playing on my sense of the dramatic-- but I ruined the effect when I tried to imagine a large group of robed, drunken adults with torches attempting to weave up the sheer hill, down the steep passageways, and into a private antechamber. 

It really just doesn't seem possible; perhaps they had to wait to drink until they were already situated. The caves were difficult to negotiate even for me, sober, with electric lights, arrows pointing the proper direction, and a textured path for easier footing-- How would a drunk manage it?

The troop descending. It was actually nearly pitch black, but my flash ruined that effect.
Okay, I'm out of pictures and energy. Tomorrow we go to see Midsummer's Night Dream at the Globe in Stratford (I believe). The following morning at 3 am, it's off to France. I'm not taking my laptop, and Monday we're going on a three hour bus ride and six mile hike through Tintern Abbey. So wish me luck, and expect many good stories when I next find the opportunity.