Ripley Castle

I called at Ripley Castle this summer, over in North Yorkshire. It has a nice, late medieval gatehouse, a substantial Tudor tower and a large area of Georgian buildings. The tour of the house and grounds was rather expensive at over seventeen pounds, as most of the house was off-limits. Curiously, the Ingleby family’s plans to sell the castle were reported by the BBC this summer. This would end a 700-year connection, begun by Sir Thomas Ingleby who acquired it in 1309.

As someone with a decidedly conservative outlook and a fondness for the past, the concept of a landed family flogging the family home strikes me as bizarre. Nevertheless, I am not privy to the estate’s profits and loss, nor the workload of attempting to make it pay at a time when the economy is no longer based upon landed wealth, and when death duties stalk the prosperity of our once noble families. Some future Ingleby may well lament the loss of so great a house- and its tourist revenues, which its current occupants are certainly keen to exploit.

Our father Adam was the greatest and richest man to live; he had the whole earth and called the best section of it his own home. Yet his progeny inherited aches, pains, disease and decay. Their estate became hostile and dangerous, and whatever pleasures it yielded they were unable to keep. Thankfully, Christ Jesus came to reverse this, adopting into God’s family all who would come by faith, and sharing with them His vast inheritance. Adam made us paupers, but Christ makes us princes. The Inglebys were known for their Roman faith even after the Reformation, but Christ is no respecter of persons and will save to the uttermost all who will come to Him: rich and poor, healthy and diseased, educated and ignorant, noble and common.

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