Bolsover Castle, topped with turrets, sits at the crest of a hill with the best view in Derbyshire. You could be forgiven for thinking it must be the home of a medieval knight, if not a wizard. But really itâs a gothic, chivalric, romantic recreation of a medieval castle, constructed by a 17th-century aristocrat. He was so pleased with his ânew castleâ that he took it for his title, becoming Duke of Newcastle.
The castle seems pretty wondrous to me, not least because it determined my choice of career. As a teenager, I read about it in a book describing a treasure hunt undertaken in the 1960s by the architectural historian Mark Girouard. He was looking for traces of the lost houses designed by the Smythsons, a talented family of master masons and designers in Elizabethan England. Their work at Bolsover formed the climax of his quest, and through several lucky breaks I ended up working there myself in my first proper job as assistant inspector of ancient monuments for English Heritage.
One of the castleâs oddest buildings is its Riding House, where each morning the Duke trained his wildly expensive horses in the art of horse ballet. This strange sport was popular at the court of Charles I, and you can still see something like it at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna.
At first sight it seems pointless, and yet the repetitive discipline required to teach a huge beast to leap through the air involved what we would now call mindfulness. To be good at it, you need to be completely calm, and alive to the possibilities of each given moment, qualities needed by any leader. A rider in superb control of a powerful animal was supposed to represent a person capable of taming the unruly animal passions that lie within us all.
The castle is a very English wonder, because it fuses arcane symbolism and architectural ideas from the ancient fortresses of northern England with the then very modern ideas from Renaissance Italy. The Renaissance as it arrives here in Derbyshire looks a bit dodgy to expert eyes familiar with the ârealâ Renaissance of southern Europe. The castleâs style used to be known, patronisingly, as âArtisan Mannerismâ, the work of artisans rather than artists. Or, in other words, a bit of a bodge.
The famous statue of Venus in the garden, for example, climbing from her bath, has one leg much longer than the other. But thereâs an intriguing argument that quirky âmistakesâ like this were quietly but deliberately introduced by the local craftspeople who thought that even Chesterfield lay practically in a foreign country. By making the Bolsover Venus so flawed, and funny, perhaps her sculptor was secretly laughing at his master for coming home from his Grand Tour of Italy so full of pretentious, new-fangled ways.
Bolsover itself â a town so deeply associated with the 1980s minersâ strike â seems an unlikely place for avant garde art and elite sport to have been practised four centuries ago. But, in fact, the castle is a reminder of why the mighty are fallen.
It has an air of failure. When the British civil wars (1642-51) broke out, the Duke of Newcastle became a Royalist general and sent his great leaping horses from the Riding House to the battlefield. However, he lost the key battle of Marston Moor because he had a hangover and didnât turn up on time. The king himself ended up losing both the war, and his head. The buildings at Bolsover were plundered by Cromwellâs troops, and narrowly escaped demolition.
Today they survive largely as a roofless ruin, the few remaining rooms empty and echoing. But still they retain a whiff of decadent magic.
Series two of Lucy Worsley Investigates is on BBC Two, Fridays at 9pm, and on BBC iPlayer
