Long live Lord Berwick! The appeal of an absent aristocracy

Attingham Park is everything a stately home should be: an imposing pile at the centre of a 4,000 acre estate with a history of aristocratic endeavour and profligacy. Today it's a thriving centre for tourists and local visitors.

Staying for a few days at the National Trust property that's been created from one of its lodges, we wondered whether the constant clatter of cars on the cattle-grid outside, starting at eight in the morning, meant there was a rock festival that day. But no, it was just the locals coming to walk their children and their dogs, as they do every day - making Attingham the third most visited National Trust property in the country.

The 'visitor experience' is beautifully organised by an army of mostly older volunteers doing everything from cutting down the rhododendrons to collecting tickets or just standing around in case anyone has a question. There's a cafe and a gift shop of course, and a large secondhand bookshop too.

Car park

Gift shop

Was this what the eighth Lord Berwick had in mind when he left Attingham to the National Trust on his death in 1947, as one of the earliest and largest gifts the Trust has ever received? Well, probably yes. His widow, Teresa, Lady Berwick, continued to live on the estate until she died in 1972 and in the intervening years saw it being used as an adult education college. Perhaps the Berwicks might have been surprised by the size of today's car park and the sheer number of visitors but let's hope they would have approved.

Instead of being the seat of a baron for whom many of the locals worked, Attingham is still supported by the local population, except now they work for other enterprises and contribute voluntarily to its upkeep. It's £10 per person to visit the grounds, or £127 a year for membership of the National Trust for a couple.

Visitors are assigned the equivalent of a membership of the lower orders, with their operations centred on the stable block, a discreet distance from the main house. There they can buy their souvenirs and eat their lunches, the separation from the big house subtly maintaining the myth of the old aristocracy. They are welcome to visit the house itself (for an additional £5) but only to walk through.

The picture gallery

The stables

To appreciate the past, we need to be able to imagine it in space but also in time. When the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne visited England in 1853, he records that his ancestor had emigrated in 1635. He said he felt he was "returning" 218 years later, “as if I myself had been absent these two hundred and eighteen years”. 

The visitors' book at the lodge where we are staying records the same kind of regression - from an American family who had recently visited from Utah. They write that:

The wood fire with snow falling outside transported us back in time. We almost expected Lord Berwick and the family to be at the gate as they arrived from their long trip from London.

You don't need to be a visiting American to enjoy such fantasies: in our democratic times, the elderly couples with their dogs on the well-trodden paths around the great house don't act as if they own the place  - although, in a sense they do because the National Trust couldn't support it without its members. Rather, there's a feeling of stepping out of time, that the house is where it has been for centuries, and where it should always be. 

And strangely, the presence or absence of Lord Berwick may not be the critical factor. When Harriet Beecher Stowe, another American novelist, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, had visited Warwick Castle, she was impressed with the same sense of community involvement many years before anything like the National Trust had been thought of: 

The influence of these estates on the community cannot but be in many respects beneficial, and should go some way to qualify the prejudice with which republicans are apt to contemplate any thing aristocratic; for although the legal title to these things inheres in but one man, yet in a very important sense they belong to the whole community, indeed, to universal humanity. It may be very undesirable and unwise to wish to imitate these institutions in America, and yet it may be illiberal to undervalue them as they stand in England. A man would not build a house, in this nineteenth century, on the pattern of a feudal castle; and yet where the feudal castle is built, surely its antique grace might plead somewhat in its favor, and it may be better to accommodate it to modern uses, than to level it, and erect a modern mansion in its place.

As the elderly couples and young parties with children pour through the gates next to our cottage, they can still enjoy a sense of continuity at Attingham, even as they look for a parking space and emerge from the cafe with a latte and sandwich in the stables.