Thus it was with some relief that I found myself, alone among the many passengers, alighting in Retford, an occurrence so unusual that it brought station employees to the windows, and walking into town through a clinging mist of rain. Retford, I am pleased to report, is a delightful and charming place even under the sort of oppressive grey clouds that make far more celebrated towns seem dreary and tired. Its centrepiece is an exceptionally large and handsome market square lined with a picturesque jumble of noble Georgian buildings. Beside the main church stood a weighty black cannon with a plaque saying 'Captured at Sevastopol 1865', which I thought a remarkable piece of initiative on the part of the locals it's not every day, after all, that you find a Nottinghamshire market town storming a Crimean redoubt and bringing home booty and the shops seemed prosperous and well ordered. I can't say that I feltlike spending my holidays here, but I was pleased to have seen it at last and to have found it trim and likeable.
I had a cup of tea in a little shop, then caught a bus to Worksop, a place of similar size and tempo (and which, by the by, does get an entry in the AA Book of British Towns). Retford and Worksop apparently had had a contest to see which of them would house the headquarters of Bassetlaw District Council, and Worksop had clearly lost since the offices were there. They were predictably hideous and discordant, but the rest of the town seemed agreeable enough in a lowkey sort of way.
I had come to Worksop not because I was aching to see it but because near by there was something I had wished to see for a long time: Welbeck Abbey, reputedly one of the finest homes in that curious compact region known as the Dukeries. The seats of five historic dukedoms Newcastle, Portland, Kingston, Leeds and Norfolk are all within twenty miles of each other in this obscure corner of the North Midlands, though Leeds and Portland are now extinct and the others, I gather, have mostly gone away. (The Duke of Newcastle, according to Simon Winchester in Their Noble Lordships, lives in a modest house in Hampshire, which I trust has taught him the folly of not investing in bouncing castles and miniature steam trains.)
Welbeck is the ancestral home of the Portland clan, though in fact they haven't lived there since 1954 on account of a similar unfortunate lack of prescience with regard to adventure playgrounds and petting zoos. The fifth Duke of Portland, one W.J.C. ScottBentinck (18001879), has long been something of a hero of mine. Old W.J.C., as I like to think of him, was one of history's great recluses and went to the most extraordinary lengths to avoid all forms of human contact. He lived in just one small corner of his stately home and communicated with his servants through notes passed to him through a special message box cut into the door to his rooms. Food was conveyed to him in the dining room by means of a miniature railway running from the kitchen. In the event of chance encounters, he would stand stock still and servants were instructed to pass him as they would a piece of furniture. Those who transgressed this instruction were compelled to skate on the duke's private skatingrink until exhausted. Sightseers were allowed to tour the house and grounds ' so long,' as the duke put it, 'as you would be good enough not to see me.'
For reasons that can only be guessed at, the duke used his
considerable inheritance to build a second mansion underground. At its peak, he had 15,000 men employed on its construction, and when completed it included, among much else, a library nearly 250 feet long and the largest ballroom in England, with space for up to 2,000 guests rather an odd thing to build if you never have guests. A network of tunnels and secret passageways connected the various rooms and ran for considerable distances out into the surrounding countryside. It was as if, in the words of one historian, 'he anticipated nuclear warfare'. When it was necessary for the duke to travel to London, he would have himself sealed in his horsedrawn carriage, which would be driven through a mileandahalflong tunnel to a place near Worksop Station and loaded onto a special flatcar for the trip to the capital. There, still sealed, it would be driven to his London residence, Harcourt House.
When the duke died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the duke's commode. The main hall was mysteriously floorless. Most of the rooms were painted pink. The one upstairs room in which the duke resided was packed to the ceiling with hundreds of green boxes, each of which contained a single dark brown wig. This was, in short, a man worth getting to know.
So in a state of some eagerness I strolled out of Worksop to the edge of Clumber Park, a neighbouring National Trust holding, and found what I hoped was a path to Welbeck Abbey, some three or four miles away. It was a long walk along a muddy woodland track. According to the footpath signs I was on something called the Robin Hood Way, but this didn't feel much like Sherwood Forest. It was mostly a boundless conifer plantation, a sort of farm for trees, and it seemed preternaturally still and lifeless. It was the kind of setting where you half expect to stumble on a body loosely covered with leaves, which is my great dread in life because the police would interview me and I would immediately become a suspect on account of an unfortunate inability to answer questions like 'Where were you on the afternoon of Wednesday the third of October at 4 p.m.?' I could imagine myself sitting in a windowless interview room, saying, 'Let's see, I think I might have been in Oxford, or maybe it was the Dorset coast path. Jeez, I don't know.' And the next thing you know I'd be banged up in Parkhurst or some place, and with my luck in the meantime they'd have replaced Michael Howard as Home Secretary so there wouldn't be any chance of just lifting the latch and letting myself out.Things got stranger. An odd wind rose in the treetops, making them bend and dance, but didn't descend to earth so that at ground level everything was calm, which was a little spooky, and then I passed through a steep sandstone ravine with tree roots growing weirdly like vines along its face. Between the roots, the surface was covered with hundreds of carefully scratched inscriptions, with names and dates and occasional twined hearts. The dates covered an extraordinary span: 1861, 1962, 1947, 1990. This seemed a strange place indeed. Either this was a popular spot for lovers or some couple had been going steady for a very long time.
A bit further on I came to a lonely gatehouse with a machicolated roofline. Beyond it stood a sweep of open field full of stubbly winter wheat, and beyond that, just visible through a mantle of trees, was a large and manyangled green copper roof Welbeck Abbey, or so at least I hoped. I followed the path around the periphery of the field, which was immense and muddy. It took me nearly threequarters of an hour to make my way to a paved lane, but I was sure now that I had found the right place. The lane passed alongside a narrow, reedy lake, and this, according to my trusty OS map, was the only body of water for miles. I followed the lane for perhaps a mile until it ended at a rather grand entrance beside a sign saying PRIVATE NO ENTRY, but with no other indication of what lay beyond.
I stood for a moment in a lather of indecision (the name I would like, incidentally, if I am ever ennobled: Lord Lather of Indecision) and decided to venture up the drive a little way just enough to at least glimpse the house which I had come so far to see. I walked a little way. The grounds were meticulously and expensively groomed, but well screened with trees, so I walked a little further. After a few hundred yards the trees thinned a little and opened out into lawns containing a kind of assault course, with climbing nets and logs on stilts. What was this place? A bit further on, beside the lake, there was an odd paved area like a car park in the middle of nowhere which I realized, with a small cry of joy, was the duke's famous skatingrink. Now I was so far into the grounds that discretion hardly mattered. I strode on until I was square in front of the house. It was grand but curiously characterless and it had been clumsily graced with a number of new extensions. Beyond in the distance was a cricket pitch with an elaborate pavilion. There was noone around, but there was a car park with several cars. This was clearly some kind of institution perhaps a training centre for somebody like IBM. So why was it so anonymous? I was about to go up and have a look in the windows when a door opened and a man in a uniform emerged and strode towards me with a severe look on his face. As he neared me, I could see his jacket said 'MOD Security'. Ohoh.