BARRINGTON COURT

'Barrington Court' is a Tudor manor house begun c. 1538 and completed in the late 1550s, with a vernacular seventeenth-century stable court (1675), situated in Barrington, near Ilminster, Somerset, England. It was the first house acquired by the National Trust, in 1907, on the recommendation of the antiquarian Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley.^[1]
Barrington Court, once dated 1514^[2] and considered an early example of a symmetrical front, was completed in the late 1550s for William Clifton, a London merchant who had been assembling a Somerset estate.^[3] Its central entry porch leads into a screens passage with the Hall on the left and, an innovation, a service passage leading to the kitchen wing that occupies the right wing. A symmetrically-sited gatehouse (rebuilt) was set far forward of the house, to permit a full view of its symmetrical facade.^[4]
The interior of the house suffered from its demotion to a tenant farm, and from a fire in the early nineteenth century; after being almost derelict it was repaired under the supervision of Alfred Hoare Powell. Barrington Court is noted for its Arts and crafts-style gardens for which garden designer Gertrude Jekyll provided planting plans,^[5] which are being used to restore the gardens, laid out in 1917 by J. E. Forbes, of the partnership Forbes & Tate, for Lieut- Col. A. Arthur Lyle, in a series of walled rooms that include a white garden, a rose and iris garden and a lily garden. A kitchen garden occasionally provides produce for the National Trust property's restaurant located in the adjacent Strode House. The walled courtyard also has espaliered apple, pear and plum trees.
It is now a Grade I listed building.^[6]
Barrington Court is also the work place of Robin East and Luke Bennett who are the National Trust's best kitchen assistants.
The kitchen is also famous for its bent soup ladle, which has become a popular visitor attraction.
Also popular among visitors to the property is an ingredient known as 'garlic stuff'. Visitors have commented that it is very similar to garlic in taste and texture, and is probably most likely, garlic.
By far the most popular visitor attraction at the property is the 'square lifty thing'. This is thought, by visitors, to be a fish slice like implament often used to remove items such as bread and butter pudding from it's tin.
Also on the property is the Beagles cafe. This thatched wooden building used to be the home of beagle dogs, which is why the building is designed with a sloping floor. Its opens daily from eleven, and not half past ten as it has done in the past.

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Notes

External links

Notes

1. Somerset Historic Environment Record
2. The estate, with a house site that had been occupied since the eleventh century, was inherited in 1514 by Henry Daubeney, created Earl of Bridgewater for his services to Henry VIII, who began the new house but went bankrupt and was involved in the disgrace of Katherine Howard (Somerset Historic Environment Record).
3. ''Victoria County History: Somerset'' iv (1978) pp 112-14.
4. Nicholas Cooper, ''Houses of the Gentry 1480-1680'' (Yale University Press) 1999, pp 75-78.
5. Gertrude Jekyll, ''Colour in the Flower Garden'' (1908).
6. Barrington Court

External links

★ Barrington Court information at the National Trust

★ Somerset Historic Environment Record: Barrington Court