Montacute House

Stand still for a moment and look at the stone. It is not grey, and it is not quite yellow. It is a warm, honeyed gold, the colour of toasted bread. On a sunny afternoon it seems to hold the light inside it. This is Ham Hill stone, quarried only a few miles from here, and it gives Montacute House its glow. Run your eye up the front and you will see glass everywhere. Windows climb the walls in tall, gridded panels until the house looks almost transparent.

That glass was a statement. At the end of the sixteenth century, window glass was expensive, and a wall full of it told every visitor that the owner had money to spend. The man who spent it was Sir Edward Phelips, a lawyer from a local Somerset family. He was climbing fast. The house was built in the late 1590s and finished around the start of the seventeenth century, in the final years of Queen Elizabeth the First. It was designed to be seen from far away.

Phelips did not stay a local figure for long. He became Speaker of the House of Commons, the presiding officer of Parliament's lower chamber. Then, in 1606, he took part in one of the most famous trials in English history. He gave the opening speech for the prosecution against the men of the Gunpowder Plot, the conspiracy to blow up King James and Parliament. Guy Fawkes stood in that courtroom. The lawyer who helped condemn him came home to this golden house.

The name of the village comes from the hill behind you. Montacute comes from the Latin words mons acutus, which mean the sharp or pointed hill. Look for the steep, wooded mound rising above the rooftops. Locals call it Saint Michael's Hill, and a small tower stands on its summit. Medieval legend has it that a holy cross was dug up on that hill long ago. According to the tale, it was carried away and became the treasure of a great abbey far to the east.

Now look along the east front, the side that faces the formal garden. High up, between the upper windows, stand stone figures in shallow niches. They are dressed as warriors from different ages. These are the Nine Worthies, a group of heroes that people in the Middle Ages and the Tudor period loved to depict. The set mixes figures from the classical world, the Bible and the Christian kingdoms. Time and weather have softened their faces, but they still keep watch over the lawn.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. Walk around to the west front, and the stonework changes character. This side was remodelled in the 1780s by a later member of the Phelips family. He did not order new carving. Instead, he bought decorative stonework from an older Tudor mansion in Dorset called Clifton Maybank, which was being partly demolished. The porch, the carved panels and the heraldry were taken apart, carried here, and set into the wall. Part of another house lives on inside this one.

Step inside to the Great Hall, and look up at the far end. A plaster panel runs along the wall, showing a little comic story. A husband is caught drinking while minding the baby. His wife strikes him. Then the neighbours parade him through the village on a pole, to mock him in public. This custom was known as a skimmington ride, a noisy village shaming ritual from rural England. It is a rare, earthy joke inside a very formal room.

Now climb the stairs, right to the top of the house. The whole upper floor is one long room — the Long Gallery. It runs almost the full length of the building, with great windows at each end. It is often described as one of the longest galleries of its kind in England. In Elizabethan houses, a gallery like this was a place to walk and talk in bad weather. Ladies took exercise here. Guests admired the view. Gossip moved slowly down its floorboards.

Today the gallery has a second life. Its walls hold portraits from the Tudor and Elizabethan period, lent by the National Portrait Gallery in London. So as you walk, you pass faces from the age when the house was built. Courtiers in stiff white ruffs. Ladies in pearls and dark velvet. Statesmen with careful, unreadable expressions. Take your time with the eyes. These people were painted to look powerful, but many of them look tired, worried, or quietly amused.

The house did not always do well. Over the centuries, the Phelips family fortunes faded, and by the early twentieth century the family could no longer live here. For a time the house was rented to tenants. One of them was Lord Curzon, a senior politician who had been Viceroy of India, the British ruler there. In 1931 the estate was bought by a benefactor and passed into the care of the National Trust, the charity that looks after it today.

The gardens hold their own quiet surprises. In front of the east side, a walled forecourt is framed by a stone balustrade topped with slender obelisks. At the corners stand two small pavilions with curved, ogee roofs, shaped like an onion or a bell. Further out, the old yew hedges have grown into thick, lumpy, cloud-like forms. Some visitors find them strange. Gardeners have shaped and clipped them for generations, and they now look almost like soft green walls.

If the house feels familiar, there may be a reason. Its golden front and long rooms have appeared in films and television dramas set in the past. A well-known screen version of Jane Austen's novel Sense and Sensibility filmed here in the 1990s. More recently, Tudor dramas have used its rooms. Directors come for the same reason Phelips built it — the house looks exactly like power, money and ambition, frozen in stone at the end of the Elizabethan age.

Before you leave, turn back and look at the house one more time. Notice how the light moves across the stone. In the morning it looks pale. Late in the day it turns deep amber. Listen to the gravel under your feet, the rooks in the trees, and perhaps the church bell from the village. Over four centuries, families rose and fell here. The stone stayed the same colour. As you walk out through the village, look at the cottages around you. Many are built of the same golden stone.