• Calke - Built on Limestone.

A glorious drive from Melbourne leads to this quiet place with a handful of dwellings beside the great park. Two miles we go up and down the rolling hills of the Leicestershire border, above a valley where a new reservoir has been made into a beauty spot, with fine woods for a background.

The story of Calke goes back to an Augustinian priory founded about 1130, whose site was acquired by Henry Harpur in 1621. He made it is home,and the family home it has been ever since. Sheltered by the rising ground about it,and hidden from the road, it was re-built on a grand scale in 1703 and given the name Calke Abbey, keeping some of the old masonry in walls six feet thick.

Also in the beautiful wooded deer park is the church, rebuilt in 1826 and containing the fine monument of Sir John Harpur, who died in 1741 and of his wife. Calke Abbey is now in the possession of the National Trust, and is known as 'The house that time forgot', because it was used by the reclusive Harpur-Crewe family to hoard their plentiful possessions in a most unusual manner...when one room was full, they simply opened another! Nothing was ever changed or thrown away.

It is a most unusual house to visit...but that that is well worth while. The Harpur-Crewe family had a distinctive idiosyncrasy which spanned not just one or two generations, but in fact two centuries. It was a trait which first appeared in the eighteenth century with Sir Henry Harpur who was known as 'the isolated Baronet' and ended in 1985 when the Nationla Trust acquired Calke Abbey. It was not reclusiveness on the scale of hermits, it was more of an extreme version of traditional English reserve...the ultimate in unsociability. The Harpur-Crewes, with perhaps one or two exceptions, like to keep themselves to themselves...in one case, as an example, it even meant that father and daughters would only communicate by letter, even though they all lived in the same house! When Sir Henry moved into Calke Abbey he moved out of society (literally and figuratively) because he took with him a lady's maid as a mistress and later (and for the 1790's worse still) actually married her. He spent the rest of his life in seclusion, emerging occasionally to landscape the park, to raise a troop of yeomanry during the Napoleonic wars, and to take his wife on holiday to unfashionable resorts like Aberystwyth.