EXPLORING A MANSION

Shannon News, 25 June 1926, Page 4

EXPLORING A MANSION

BOUND FOR AMERICA

In the grounds of Agecroft Hall yesterday afternoon (writes a representative of the "Manchester Guardian") the rooks were busy making their uncomfortable looking nests, calling to one another in a lazy, un. concerned way, as though nothing could ever disturb the continuity or the rookery. Under the walls of the house a few workmen stood round some long white-wood packing cases. One of them had a stencilling outfit, and letter by letter he jabbed on to to the wood "Glass —with care." And, lower down, "Norfolk, Va." to.day these packing cases, containing some of the windows of the hall, will be taken down to the Ship Canal to bogin their journey to "Norfolk, Va." Thus th e best-laid schemes of rooks gang aglcy. One would be prepared to bet that there will not be much more nesting 'in the trees of Agecroft Hall. It was not difficult, as one ap. proached the hall, to see why it was going. . It is too reproachful a jewel to leave in that ruined landscape. Hereabouts must once have been an agreeable tumble of country. It has been treated with contempt, subjected to every conceivable indignity. Its trees and herbage are mostly gone. The bleak bones of the place show like an overworked horse's. The wheels of the pithead machinery revolve against one another; the colliers come clattering up the cobbled road, all wearing- the conventional clogs, cap and muffler, and carrying the conventional tea can. Under the edge of the estate lies a big, ugly lake, caused by colliery subsidence. An outjutting pip e slowly spits dirty' water into it.

Surely the Pilgrim Fathers, as they stepped into the Mayflower at Plymouth, mingled with their apprehensions a sigh of relief at leaving a community which seemed no more to want the peculiar things which they could give. One can almost imagine such a sigh coming from -the white, wood packing-cases that will settle into position. on the Ship Canal today.

It is no use to sigh over Agecroft now. The hammer and chisel have begun their irrevocable work. The beautiful littl e oriel standing on the not less lovely corbel over the court. , yard entrance is still "in position, but it looks down on piles of bricks and plaster, timbers and panels, glass and daub and wattle. Wonderful to pick up a piece of that daub and crumble in your fingers stuff that was laid on five hundred years ago. Just mud clinging round stalks of i corn, and here in this piece is a ' head of corn—corn that ripened when Henry VII. was on th G throne of England. There it has stood all this time, binding into place the wattles which are riddled with the borings of bottles, and interspersed every* foot or so among the wattles are uprights of split oak. They knew how to build and what to build with! You can take up any one of those uprights, not half an inch thick, and perhaps 3ft. long, and you can throw it down on the cobbles and get out of it the clean, hard ring of tough, undamaged substance. Centuries old, they would last for centuries yet. And then here and there the beams are uncovered. The huge tie beam is still in place, an age.defying monster of a beam, untouched by worm or beetle, and exposing where the skin has been scratched by the workmen, a wholesome flesh that holds no threat of decay. How many things go to make a home! Ther e is that tie beam, the roughhewn mainstay of the house that calls for a saga; there is the delicate oriel that asks for a lyric; there is the linoleum which someone has put over an oak floor. That needs damnation. Panels arc leaning now against the exposed ribs they beau, titled; gaps smashed /' through the walls let us see into the long neglected gardens that look singularly forlorn on this March day; the man with his stencilling outfit goes on remorsely inscribing the destination of this supremely English thing: "Norfolk, Va." All that is sound and whole must go—windows, wood, slates, and stones. There is not much that is not sound and whole. That tie beam now—who shall put a term on its survival? It goes now across the Atlantic. One's fancy goes the length of seeing it, in, say, another five hundred years, crossing the Pa. cine to gratify the whim of some Japanese connoisseur, and taking the rest of the building with it. And perhaps five hundred years from then our national' conscience will prompt us to buy it back. One thing is certain, short of fire that tie beam will b G there then to complete its circumnavigation of the globe.