Fountains Hall

Fountains Hall, near Ripon and situated on the Studley Royal estate, looks like the perfect late Elizabethan or Jacobean mansion. After the Wars of the Roses and the interminable medieval squabbles, rich men built homes with large windows and the latest comforts, not just impregnable castles and fortified houses to guard against their neighbours’ violence and inclinations to robbery.

Fountains, however, despite belonging to the National Trust, opens but three of its rooms to the visiting public. Some of it has been converted to holiday lets while some of the rooms may be storage, full of mops and boxes of turgid estate records. Or are they, perhaps, just locked up, their contents draped in white dustsheets? Those three rooms were quite interesting, but they were but a fraction of the whole. People like me who are fond of old houses are likely to be disappointed by the Trust’s parsimony; there is much more to see if only the doors were opened.

The scriptures are all we need for light, life and salvation, yet they reveal only a soupçon of eternal reality. The unsearchable riches of Christ are not currently ours to hold, or even to know, but one day the Father’s mansions will be ours to explore and savour.