'If that's the gatehouse," someone in our crammed rental car said, "imagine what the house would look like." You'd have to guess. The Tixall manor house itself had been reduced to rubble, a few sad craggy stones, years ago. But the Elizabethan Tixall Gatehouse we were approaching on a sunny Mayday, backlit by a midlands British sun, was proudly standing and nothing less than one gleaming artwork. Falling in tiers down its facade, under a rooftop framed by four turret tops, were rows of Doric and Corinthian pillars, glinting oriel windows, and an exuberant party of seashells, knights and angels carved into the stone. Handsome buildings are always commended for their good bones. But Tixall's bones were exquisite.
We would get to know them well. That's because we weren't shooting past on some country drive, or stopping for a few shots. No. We were collecting the key to the Gatehouse, in a locked box under the archway, and about to call the masterwork home for a long weekend.
It wasn't the result of any inside connections. In fact, the doors of the Gatehouse, and many of England's most sublime landmarks, are open to anyone with a little money. They may actually represent the best bargain in England at a time when the pound stubbornly refuses to sink alongside the faltering euro. Thank the Landmark Trust, which rents out a full complement of castles, lighthouses, cottages, towers, and follies across Britain, for three-day weekend stays or four-weekday stays (longer if you like), at a surprisingly reasonable price, especially if you divide up the costs.
My partner and I came armed with a group of Dutch friends, which made the cost of Tixall cheaper than the grimmest B&B. The gentle tab also meant money well spent. That's because the nonprofit Landmark Trust plows all its revenue into reclaiming and renovating other British stately piles and our own Gatehouse was a testimonial to their work. A roofless, windowless wreck used as a shelter for cattle when the Trust took it over in 1968, Tixall had won a second life.
What do you do once you are handed the keys to your own ethereal chunk of living history? What we did, after we divided up the quartet of bedrooms (two with en suite bathrooms), was explore all four stories, running up and down the twisting stone staircase to the fully equipped kitchen, a baroque ballroom, a living room dressed up with antique armoires, and finally the rooftop rimmed by balustrades. That's when we heard the booming voice that seemed to come from out of the Gatehouse's gut, like a thunderous cough, or maybe a welcome.
The best thing about adopting a pedigreed monument for the weekend is inheriting all its secrets and mysteries, too, and the boom, our first enigma, was easily solved. Well, partly. In the Gatehouse's logbook left in the living room, and filled with previous guests' largely poetic comments, the metallic bellow featured prominently.
"The eccentric clock has a mind of its own," one prior renter noted. "Stop all the clocks!" another begged. But we couldn't. Buried deep somewhere in the bowels of the Gatehouse (but where?) the ancient, faceless timepiece continued to call out every hour, though it kept changing voices — sometimes it was a delicate, silvery high note, almost a tinkle, and sometimes it was a brassy echoing boing. Pretty much every morning, though, it was loud enough to wake us up, along with the music of baying sheep.
The first morning, after the built-in alarm went off, we felt compelled to wander a little farther. One of the prime attractions of the Landmark Trust properties is the fact that they carve out distinct pockets of the sprawling English countryside, and allow you to thoroughly map the surrounding shire.
