United Kingdom: Buckinghamshire – West Wycombe Park

🏛️ Brass Bands and Bad Baronets: A Summer Visit to West Wycombe Park, Buckinghamshire

We’d been meaning to visit West Wycombe Park for years. It sits just off the A40 in the Chiltern Hills, about 30 miles northwest of London, and every time we drove past the signs we said “we really should go one day.” One sunny summer afternoon, we finally did. Karen, being from the north of England, was quietly sceptical that anywhere south of Birmingham could offer a proper day out. She came round fairly quickly, though she did point out that the car park was a bit of a faff. She wasn’t wrong, but we got there in the end.

West Wycombe Park is a National Trust property, and it’s quite a remarkable place, with a history that ranges from the respectable to the genuinely scandalous. Which, as far as we’re concerned, is exactly how it should be. If you want somewhere perfectly polished and a bit dull, there are plenty of those about. West Wycombe isn’t one of them.

🎶 A Brass Band on the Veranda

We weren’t expecting it, but when we arrived, there was a brass band playing on the south veranda of the house. It was one of those moments that makes you feel like you’ve wandered into a period drama, which is fitting really, because the house has actually appeared in quite a few of them over the years, including Downton Abbey, Cranford, Bridgerton, and several Agatha Christie adaptations. The combination of that glorious Palladian façade and a brass band rattling through something cheerful was genuinely lovely. The band sounded cracking, the sun was out, and there were people sitting on the lawn with ice creams. It was a perfect English summer afternoon of the sort that, honestly, doesn’t happen very often. We stood and listened for a good ten minutes before we even thought about going inside.

The ground floor of the house was open to visitors that day, which was a bonus on top of an already pleasant afternoon. No photography was allowed inside — a rule enforced politely but firmly by the National Trust volunteers — so any photos you see in this article were borrowed from the internet. We’ll do our best to describe what we saw, though in truth some of the rooms really do need to be experienced in person to get the full effect.

🏰 The House and Its Rather Colourful Owner

The house was built between roughly 1740 and 1800, and what you see today is almost entirely the creation of Sir Francis Dashwood, 2nd Baronet (1708–1781). The estate has a longer history than that though. The Domesday Book of 1086 records the manor of West Wycombe, and by the 17th century it was in the hands of the Dormer family. In 1643, Robert Dormer, Earl of Carnarvon, was killed fighting for the King in the Civil War, and his son, deeply in debt, sold the estate to a London merchant called Thomas Lewis. The Dashwood family acquired it in 1698, and it’s essentially been theirs ever since — a good three hundred years of the same family rattling around the same estate, which is either admirable or alarming depending on your point of view.

Sir Francis the 2nd Baronet was, to put it politely, quite a character. He did the Grand Tour of Europe in 1726, and didn’t stop there — he visited Italy multiple times, as well as Greece, Asia Minor and Russia, at a time when travelling to those places wasn’t exactly straightforward. He came back absolutely obsessed with classical architecture and culture, and with a lifestyle to match. He was a founding member of the Society of the Dilettanti in 1732, which was set up to promote classical art in England, but was also, by all accounts, a very good excuse for wealthy gentlemen to eat and drink extravagantly on a regular basis. Sir Francis threw himself into both aspects with equal enthusiasm.

He transformed what had been a fairly ordinary redbrick house into something that looks like it ought to be sitting on a hillside near Rome. Each of the four façades is different — the north front is Palladian in style, the south front has a dramatic double colonnade with Tuscan columns on the ground floor and Corinthian columns above, the east front has a tetrastyle Doric portico with frescoes, and the west front has a grand Greek Ionic hexastyle portico designed around 1765 by Robert Adam and carried out by architect Nicholas Revett. You can walk round the outside of the house and it genuinely looks different from every angle, which is unusual and rather pleasing. He also had an Italian artist, Giuseppe Mattia Borgnis, brought over from Craveggia in Italy in around 1751 to paint elaborate frescoes on the ceilings. Borgnis and members of his family ended up staying, and the results of their work are still there to be seen today.

Sir Francis was also the founder of the notorious Hellfire Club, formally known as the Order of the Knights of St Francis, or sometimes the Friars of St Francis of Wycombe, which met from 1745 in the caves he had excavated beneath West Wycombe Hill. The caves were partly dug to provide chalk for improving local roads, and partly — one strongly suspects — to give Sir Francis somewhere suitably theatrical to host his friends. Horace Walpole, who knew him, once remarked that Sir Francis was seldom sober during his time in Italy, so you get some idea of the man. Contemporary accounts of what went on in those caves involve mock religious ceremonies, heavy drinking, and various other activities that the National Trust leaflet tactfully declines to go into. We’ll leave it to your imagination too.

Inside the house, the rooms we were able to see on the ground floor were genuinely impressive. The Music Room, which has always apparently been used as a ballroom rather than a music room despite the name, has a magnificent painted ceiling by Borgnis depicting the Banquet of the Gods, copied from the Villa Farnesina in Rome. The fireplace and pedestals in this room were carved by sculptor Henry Cheere, and the overall effect is of something quite grand without being overwhelming. The Dining Room, also known as the Palmyra Room, has walls painted to look like jasper and a ceiling based on the ruins of Palmyra in Syria. The Blue Drawing Room has an elaborate ceiling painting of the Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne, again by Borgnis, dating from 1752. The Yellow Drawing Room contains one of the oldest and largest Axminster carpets still in use anywhere, with lovely views down over the lake through the windows.

Portraits of Sir Francis hang throughout the rooms, including one rather memorable image of him dressed as the Pope, which tells you quite a lot about the man’s sense of humour, or possibly his opinion of organised religion, or possibly both. Also on display are cannonballs that were dredged from the lake — Sir Francis used to re-enact sea battles on the water as entertainment for his guests, which does rather make modern dinner parties seem unadventurous by comparison. The dining table itself was added by Pinewood Studios in 1994 for a filming of The Importance of Being Earnest, and Sir John Dashwood liked it so much he kept it when they were done. We thought that was rather good. A nice bit of household pragmatism.