Peculiar Ground

Author/Guide: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Why a Booktrail?

1663 onwards: Wychwood is a microcosm of the world, history and war…inside and out.

ISBN: 978-0008126544
Genre: Fiction

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What you need to know before your trail

A wall is being built around a great house. Wychwood is an enclosed world in the 17th century, its ornamental lakes and majestic avenues planned by Mr Norris, landscape-maker. A world where everyone has something to hide after decades of civil war, where dissidents shelter in the forest, lovers linger in secret gardens, and migrants, fleeing the plague, are turned away from the gate.

Three centuries later, another wall goes up overnight, dividing Berlin, while at Wychwood, over one hot, languorous weekend, erotic entanglements are shadowed by news of historic change. A little girl, Nell, observes all.

Nell grows up and Wychwood is invaded. There is a pop festival by the lake, a TV crew in the dining room and a Great Storm brewing. As the Berlin wall comes down, a fatwa signals a different ideological faultline and a refugee seeks safety in Wychwood.

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Travel Guide

Oxfordshire

The estate is fictional but somewhere in the county of Oxfordshire…

“Lord Woldingham’s fancy to enclose his park in a great ring of stone. Other potentates are content to impose their will on nature only in the immediate purlieus of their palace. They make gardens where they may saunter, enjoying the air without fouling their shoes. But once one steps outside the garden fend one is in, on most of England’s great estates, in territory where travellers may pass and animals are harassed by huntsmen, certainly, and slain for meat, but where they are free to range where they will.”

“Not so here at Wychwood. My task is to create an Eden encompassing the house, so that the garden will be only the innermost chamber of an enclosure so spacious that, for one living in it, the outside world, with its shocks and annoyances, will be but a memory …. Lord Woldingham’s creatures will live confined within an impassable barricade. ….”

“I wonder are we making a second Paradise here, or a prison …. or a fortress.”