Montacute House is arguably the crowning jewel in the National Trusts’s South Somerset portfolio, placed in close proximity to Barrington Court and Lytes Carey Manor. Set apart by a combination of age and splendour; for a building commissioned in the 1590s it has been impeccably maintained and sympathetically furnished. The eclecticism and layering of the house’s interior doesn’t align with a simple frieze of life and tastes in the 1600s, and Montacute house is made all the more interesting for this reason.

Owned for multiple generations by the Phelips family, the vast expense of the property’s construction signalled the family’s economic prime and subsequent trajectory. Such an immense home would prove challenging to properly maintain or adapt to changing tastes when the funds of subsequent generations of Phelips were more modest. Because of these financial restrictions, Montacute is unusual in having maintained an almost entirely original Elizabethan layout; including its vast gardens and parklands.

By the 1930s, the house was almost empty, its contents sold off piecemeal to keep the building from crumbling. Saved from demolition by private purchase, it was passed to a heritage protection society who in turn transferred it to the National Trust.

Stripped of much of the original Elizabethan furniture and decoration, Montacute’s interior is a melange of lent and donated pieces; a clearly defined strata-segment jumbled by an earthquake, slip-struck but ultimately recognisable as ‘the past.’

Arguably the most arresting item in the house is a fragment of a tapestry titled ‘Knight with the Arms of Jean de Daillon,’ created between 1477 and 1480. Woven densely from wool and silk, the work depicts an armoured knight atop a similarly armoured horse, bearing aloft a fluttering standard and surrounded by a field of flowers. At three by three and a half metres, the enchanting complexity of the work is almost beyond comprehension; its physicality and narrative feel are impossibly romantic and fantastical. After some 1300 hours of intense conservation work, the tapestry has been identified as a mere segment of a larger original piece, which measured more than three hundred square meters.

The intensity, intricacy and depth of labour behind this work is breathtaking. The tapestry is hung in a carefully darkened room, protected from the nuclear ferocity of natural light. The resulting gloom invokes a truer sense of place, and a time in which immense works of craft and art were made by daylight and displayed by candle light.

Walking back into the light from the depth of the tapestry room, you’ll enter the Great Hall. Originally an impressive reception room, the Hall now holds collections of Elizabethan tableware, with the whole room illuminated by high windows; such an excessive use of rare and precious glass was an overt display of wealth in the 17th Century. Phelips family portraits, rendered in oil, hang above the wide ham-stone fireplace, gazing absently back at viewers below.

Beyond the Hall are the house’s Parlour and Drawing Room. The former is one of Montacute’s state rooms, designed with the expectation (one sadly unmet) that Queen Elizabeth I would pay a visit. Retaining its Elizabethan features, the Parlour houses another immense ham-stone fireplace, intricate (if anatomically inaccurate) figurative plaster friezes and another notable tapestry. Continuing the theme of slightly inaccurate wildlife, this tapestry, titled ‘The Hunter’, was created in 1788 and features animals seen by members of the Dutch India Company on their overseas travels.

Opposite the Parlour is the Drawing Room, its high windows offering a rolling view of the North Garden’s undulating topiarised yew hedge and single yew shrubs, long since grown at a slant from wind exposure. All sense of scale in Montacute’s North Garden is disrupted without the anchor of a human figure, creating the sense of a toy-scale space.

The Drawing Room contains more softly lit oil portraits, rendered with a gentle sense of haze and faces of knowing smiles. The Drawing Room is heaven-sent for followers of the English Rococo masters and contains works by both Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds. While the paintings’ subjects likely lived interesting lives, they were taken on one final posthumous adventure in the 1960s, when thieves stole the works in a nighttime raid on Montacute House. According to the House’s own information, the paintings resurfaced in 1971, recovered by police from a left luggage locker in Bristol railway station. They have once again found their home at Montacute, guarded by considerably more advanced security measures.

In the centre of the Drawing Room, a card table holds a half-finished game, watched over by the long departed subjects of Gainsborough and Reynolds’ paintings; a view perhaps more agreeable than the inside of a train station locker.

Moving on From the Library, an unassuming side door leads to two of the most resonant and visually sumptuous rooms within Montacute House: The Crimson Room and the Crimson Dressing Room. Both are now decorated in a shade of the ochre spectrum, a deep and earthen mustard which is again darkened by heavy, drawn curtains. The Dressing Room is notable for its housing of two works of religious art: ‘The Visitation with Saint Paul’, dating from around CE 1500, and ‘The Madonna Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child’, completed in CE 1490. Both pieces predate Montacute House considerably; as visual signifiers of the middle-Renaissance, they seem oddly antiquated even within an Elizabethan house. Yet, suspended in the dark upon rich and roughspun walls, they lend the space an ancient and otherworldly quality.

In the adjoining Crimson Bedroom, with its curtains permanently drawn to shield its contents from daylight, sits an exquisite Exeter bed, carved from oak and rich in dark hues and subdued shine. The enormous piece was created as a commemorative item in 1613, and was donated to Montacute House in the 1940s.

The lack of light in both the Crimson Bedroom and Dressing Room may impede the taking of sharp photographs, but the spaces both retain a kind of darkness and shadow generally lost to history; belonging to a time before electric lighting and synthetic dyes and textiles. If you are able to find the room at an empty moment, a window bench will afford the opportunity to sit and appreciate the full extent of artisanal skill present in the room’s physical elements.

A winding staircase made of more richly lit ham-stone and framed with arched niches turns at right angles, leading to the house’s first floor. The mirroring of carved steps on the ceilings of the staircase create the sense of walking through a surreal Escher painting, but the allure of the floor wins out, with the flow and bend of lithic strata creating an almost molten appearance. Arriving at the first floor, a left turn leads to a reception hallway hung with more full-scale portraits and the entryway to the Library (also titled the Great Chamber) and Lord Curzon’s Bedroom, named for Montacute’s final tenant before its sale to the National Trust. Wreathed in 18th-century portraits of Phelips family members, the room features a striking ‘bath cupboard’ painted a bloody crimson.

Opposite Curzon’s Bedroom is the Library, a room of high formality interwoven with smaller and more personal intrigues. The end of the room is abundant in natural light, with windows looking out upon three aspects. Single panes of glass have been etched with poetic phrases by members of the Phelips family, faintly enough to be rendered almost invisible.

Beyond the Crimson Bedroom and dressing rooms are further spaces housing an extensive collection of historic needlepoint samplers, adjacent to a newer corridor added in the 1780s to allow more convenient passage through Montacute’s lengths. Hung with impressive life-size oil portraits, the corridor’s archaic shape and cavernous gloom create an atmosphere of a place far older. From here, again ascending the same stone stairway leads to the appropriately named Long Gallery. The Gallery runs the entire length of Montacute House, with views over three aspects of the property. As impressive as the space itself is, the immense handwoven reed mat that flows, river-like, from end to end naturally draws the eye; the sheer impossibility of its size is arresting. This singular mat is woven from reeds taken from the banks of York’s river Ouse, and needs replacing once every decade after extensive footfall.

Adjacent to the Long Gallery are smaller rooms housing period-relevant collections from the National Portrait Gallery, illuminating the names and faces that, throughout history and for better or worse, have shaped the trajectory of English and British culture and society.

Montacute house is more than the sum of its parts; a panoply of art, craft and historical constructions of self, and a multi-faceted mirror reflecting the fortunes and aspirations of English high society since the Elizabethan age. Visiting at the quietest hours offers the opportunity for an immersive experience, creating a uniquely rich sense of place.

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The National Trust’s Montacute hub can be found here.