Family Lessons 157: Caldecott Hall

I called at Caldecott Hall this month on my way down to Shropshire for a pastors’ Study Week. When I say 'called’, I literally drove past, parked up, stood outside the entrance, and sheepishly took modest photographs. Around it were robust fences, yellow signs indicating CCTV, and what might have been electric gates. It appears to be a rural housing complex for the well-heeled, and it certainly appeared to be a pleasant place to live. Not being a guest, nor having any right to enter, I just stood beyond the perimeter, looking in.

Caldecott Hall was likely the place from where a line of my ancestors, the Calcotts hailed from. 'Richard Calcott, gentleman', my 18th x great-grandfather, lived in Chester in the 1440s. Assuming that this manor was indeed the old family residence, to which other sources attest, I was still a stranger peering in from without.

After Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise, the Edenic Mountain of the Lord would still have been visible and prominent in their world, its gate well known and the flaming cherubic sword very much in evidence. “This is where you belonged, this is where you once lived, but from now on, keep out” the sign might have said. It was likely there until the Flood, the great mountain of the Lord a sorry reminder of Man’s exile and eviction. For generations, men must have looked up at it, even standing at the boundary, gazing at what once was theirs. I had no more right to enter that Cheshire residence as anyone else, regardless of whether grandfather Richard lived there and drew income from it. In Christ, however, we have Adam’s legacy restored, and much added to.

Where he displays his healing power

Death and the curse are known no more;

In him the tribes of Adam boast

More blessings than their father lost.

-Isaac Watts