Overlooked Britain Wellesbourne Bath House, Warwickshire Lucinda

Overlooked Britain If you go down to the woods today...

lucinda lambton ... you’re in for a Georgian surprise. Wellesbourne Bath House is a grotto wrapped in a temple, by architect Sanderson Miller

As you drive along a long, rough woodland track in Warwickshire, it is a surprise and a half to come upon Wellesbourne Bath House.

It is a little, elegantly neat, neoclassical building in the midst of the trees. Graceful and temple-like, it was created in 1748.

Step through the door and you are surrounded by surprises. Rocks are fashioned into pillars and arches. They seem to drip from the ceiling in abundance, too.

Those rocks are designed, if you please, to show off a handsome yet icy plunge pool.

Your next surprises are the great sweeps of an octagonal, domed ceiling with a wealth of plaster icicles, radiating from a central cluster. On the walls hang eight-foot-long thick swags of larger shells, tied up with plaster bows.

You then descend yet further to the bottom of a narrow, circular staircase. At the bottom, you find a stone grotto surrounding the pool.

This is all the fanciful conceit of Sir Charles Mordant of Wollaston Hall. He was following the 18th-century grandees’ fashion for beautifying their estates with exotic and judiciously sited buildings.

Bath houses, with their classical associations with ancient Rome, were considered to be particularly cultivated contributions to the landscape. Sir Charles was plagued with gout, for which there was no better cure than to plunge one’s feet into cold water.

The architect of this little building is thought to be Sanderson Miller, a renowned protagonist of first the Gothic and then the neoclassical style. A ‘gentleman architect’, he was said to be a most engaging and likeable man.

Famed particularly for his sham castles, he designed the great hall at Lacock Abbey and wrote copious diaries. An expert stonemason, he is assumed to have created the grotto.

The shell work was probably designed by Mary Delany (1700-88). She was famed for such fanciful decorative delights, as well as for exquisite botanical drawings, fine needlework, plasterwork and ceramics. She was most renowned for paper pictures, made from the most delicate cutting-up of umpteen layers of paper. Having worked at the art from an early age, she became famous for it at the age of 72.

Most appealingly, she called them ‘paper mosaiks’. The art of découpage, as it was also known, was already fashionable with the ladies of the court, to which she had connections.

Yet her versions had no equal, with their detailed and botanically accurate depictions. The composer Joseph Haydn was a most surprising admirer. ‘For these mosaiks,’ he wrote, ‘are coloured paper,

Rural rustication: Wellesbourne Bath House, Warwickshire, built in 1748 representing not only conspicuous details but also contrasting colours or shades of the same colour so that every effect of the light is caught.’ She had many notable friends. One of particular interest to me was the Dowager Duchess of Portland, who lived at Bulstrode, only a few yards from my house. There Delany would go to relish the company of such illuminati as the naturalist and explorer Sir Joseph Banks. He gave her particular delight by showing off his samples and drawings from his travels with Captain Cook. The great Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander – who circumnavigated the globe with Banks – also stayed in the house. What august company! They all

hugely developed her skills as a painter of flowers. How I delight in the thought of them all gathering together in Buckinghamshire, just up the road from me.

Delany created 985 of her ‘paper mosaiks’ after the age of 71 – until, in her eighties, her eyesight failed her. Haydn tells us more: ‘With the plant specimen set before her, she cut minute particles of coloured paper to represent the petals, stamens, calyx, leaves, veins, stalk and other parts of the plants.’ HURRAH!

In 1734, Delany wrote most poetically of this bath house, ‘The stucco is meant to represent a wall worn by water drops, with icicles sticking to it. The festoons of shells are additional ornaments – or how could they could have come in that form, unless some invisible sea nymph or triton placed them there for their private amusement? I should not wonder indeed that so pretty a place allured them.’

This rare little building survives thanks to the Landmark Trust, who rescued and restored it between 1987 and 1991. The ceiling had fallen in, most of the plaster icicles had gone and only a shadow of the shells remained. The whole building was starting to slide down the hill on which it had been built.

Earlier photographs had been taken, some shells had been saved and a few icicles were found under the floorboards – from which moulds for new ones were made. The architect was William Hawkes. Diana Reynell, with her expertise in decoration with shells, was the Mrs Delany of our day.

The Trust’s founder Sir John Smith – my hero for a long time – was responsible for saving umpteen buildings at risk. They were historical structures with which neither the National Trust nor English Heritage was concerned.

The Landmark Trust came into being in 1965. Today, the Landmark’s collection is a cavalcade of some 200 remarkable structures.

The 1880s classical temple of a pigsty at Robin Hood’s Bay in Yorkshire is one. Then there is the 18th-century Gothic salmon coop at Netherby in Cumbria.

What, too, about the ornate 1730 music room in Lancaster, with its baroque interior that took 6,000 hours to repair? And Nicolle Tower in Jersey is worth a mention, with a third floor added in 1943 by the Germans as an observation point.

Many of these buildings are of superlative beauty. They would no longer exist were it not for The Landmark Trust.

Last – but by no means least – are the tremendous charms of the Wellesbourne Bath House.