DORNEY COURT.
Sir James Palmer, Chancellor of the Garter, who married the heiress of Sir William Garrard, and thus founded the Palmer family of Dorney, was a younger son of the Wingham Palmers. He died in 1657, and was succeeded by his son, Sir Roger, created Earl of Castlemaine, who died 1705, without acknowledged children, and left the property to his nephew, Charles, from whom the present family are descended.
Dorney Court is a picturesque mansion, chiefly of the period of Henry the Seventh. It was once much larger, as appears from old drawings preserved in the house, in which it is shown as groups of buildings surrounding two large courts and one smaller. The construction is largely of oak framing filled with brick nogging, disposed sometimes in herring-bone fashion, and in other places in ordinary courses. There are no elaborate and beautiful verge-boards to the gables, such as those extremely fine examples seen at Ockwells, but, if a distinction may be drawn between the two houses, Dorney Court is especially attractive in the fine pictures it gives from almost every point of view. It forms a strikingly picturesque composition seen from the north-east, a grouping in which the great gable of the entrance-front and its two remarkable flaunting chimneys come well with the three equal-sized gables of the north front, the church-tower rising in its proper association in the background, emphasising the ancient manorial connection.
A good deal of work has recently been undertaken, in the direction of correcting the tasteless alterations made at some time in the eighteenth century, when sashed windows here and there replaced the original leaded lights. The plan adopted has been that of acquiring such old oak timbering as could be picked up from houses demolished in neighbourhoods near and far, and of setting it up in the reconstructed doors and windows. If it may be permitted to speak of the interior, it can at any rate be well said that it does by no means belie the exterior view. The panelled and raftered rooms are in thorough keeping, and the hall, neglected for generations, has been brought back to something of its ancient appearance. From those walls the panelling had disappeared, but it has now been replaced with some genuine old work of the same period, acquired by fortunate chance at Faversham in Kent, from an old mansion in course of demolition. The hall greatly resembles that of Ockwells; but whatever heraldic glass may have been here has long vanished, leaving no trace. Here, among the many family portraits, hangs a fine example of a helmet brought from the church, an unusually good piece of funeral armour, removed from the church to prevent its rusting away. The family portraits include some Lelys, Knellers, and Jamesons, and a number of early-eighteenth-century pastel portraits, many of them displaying a facial characteristic of the Palmers, constant through the successive generations: that of a somewhat unusually long nose.
DORNEY COURT: THE GREAT HALL, SHOWING THE MODEL PINE-APPLE.
The seventeenth-century sampler hangs on the panelling.