A brief history

The present Georgian period house was rebuilt by the Ashe à Court family (Baron Heytesbury) in the 1780s, based upon a much earlier structure(s), with alterations carried out in the 1820s.

There is evidence of Roman and pre-Roman settlement locally. A freshwater spring runs beneath the main house suggesting possible occupancy during the Neolithic period in combination with the numerous other local features associated with early human habitation in Wiltshire.

Notable former residents include William à Court, 1st Baron Heytesbury, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland during the Great Famine. The war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, bought the property in 1933 and lived there until his death in 1967. His only child, George Sassoon, was forced to sell the estate in 1994 following extensive losses at Lloyds of London.

The main structure was eventually divided into apartments by the purchaser following an unexplained fire in 1996 which entirely gutted the main building interior.

George Sassoon was my stepfather, but was effectively my father for most of my life until his death in 2006.

The Archive

I remembered the black enamel metal trunk from the chamber. Beneath Heytesbury House there were extensive, vaulted, cellars reaching out into the blackness, but this underground chamber had its own separate entrance door. A green wooden door, green for servants only, accessed from the servants’ corridor with a stone winding staircase leading to what resembled an armoured safe door in a bank vault.

The door was rusted shut. Or rather, permanently ajar, neither locked nor open, but you could peer through a gap with a torch into the darkness and light up a facing brick wall, whitewashed with mould. I had no idea what was in there as no one had ever been in there, according to George Sassoon.

In 1993, with the house up for sale and crawling with antiques expertise, tweedy estate agents and skips full of books, George and I decided to take a final look into the sealed room.

Trying to force the vault door open, we applied physics first, along with a couple of cans of WD40. Ever increasingly long and thick solid metal levers were used to pry through the door gap into the chamber, but neither leverage nor lubricant could shift it. The vault door’s hinges had been welded shut by decades of rust.

And then we tried pickaxes and sledgehammers thinking that if we couldn’t go through the door then we’d go around it. The brute force answer was to demolish the side wall and crawl in through the gap created. Which we did. Or rather I did, because I was younger, thinner and more disposable.

Original image of the cellars at Heytesbury. Following 1996, the entire network of chambers was filled in and sealed. ///intrigues.appealing.building

The box was older. An officer’s military steamer trunk. But instead of being inscribed with the owner’s name, it was roughly hand painted on the top with five white circles, formed as a five of dice, four joined together by a circle within another larger circle.

The box was from the 1920s. There were newspaper cuttings dating from the time of the General Strike separating various original drawings and formal plans of Heytesbury House, one hand drawn sketch was dated 1781. The contents formed an archive of Heytesbury House dating from the major reconstruction of the house by the Ashe à Courts in 1782 but also some, highly peculiar, items from quite some time beyond the eighteenth century.

The sometime beyond is where all of this begins…

PRETERNATURAL