My name is Elizabeth Rita Browne; I am a native of Birmingham and my husband, John Alexander is the rector of a small parish near Wolverhampton.
In the summer of 1900 my husband, who had long been ailing, never having properly recovered from an attack of typhoid, was obliged to take a holiday, engaging a locum to do his work.
Like the majority of clergymen, his stipend was not very large and we could not, consequently, afford to go to any expensive place. An advertisement in a well-known fashion gazette attracting our attention, we at once made inquiries, with the result that Wolsey Abbey became ours for three months at a practically nominal rent.
Of course it was in an extremely out-of-the-way spot; there was no railway within six miles and the neighbourhood was dull, flat and uninteresting; still we might have marvelled at getting it so absurdly cheap, had we not heard that money was of no object to the owner, who was a semi-millionaire.
We arrived early one evening in July; the sun was yet visible in the sky and its dying efforts would have enhanced the meanest rural beauty.
I cannot say we were comfortably impressed with the building; it was of course simply colossal compared with our own little home, but so grim and grey, so forlorn and forbidding, and withal so inhospitable, that a momentary fear seized me lest its leaden hued and crumbling walls should prove our winding-sheets.
The grounds, overgrown with every imaginable kind of weed that here attained Brobdingnagian dimensions, gently shelved down to the house, which lay in a minute valley, dank, damp and dismal; the funereal aspect being further augmented by clumps of giant pines and elms, the shadows from which were already beginning to wave phantastically on both walls and gables.
To our right, almost hidden by the thick foliage of the trees and luxuriant herbage, we espied the twinkling surface of a sheet of water which we subsequently learned was a tarn or lake of almost unfathomable depth and darkness.
The principal feature of the mansion seemed to be that of antiquity, of excessive antiquity, more particularly the Gothic monastic dome which, resting on Norman columns, formed the termination of the left wing, the right and central portion of the house dating back I believe to Henry VIIth’s reign—though of this I have no positive proof.
The lapse of ages had wrought much discolouration, added to which was the disfigurement caused by lichens and minute fungi that, spreading over the whole exterior, hung in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. But apart from this there were no very great dilapidations, the masonry remaining intact, whilst the woodwork, save for a few deep rents and indentures, seemed to be in an extraordinarily good state of repair.