Petworth House

I love so much of what this country is, but I feel hungry to experience what it was. In the great houses and castles, I try to find the past, to feel it there, as if looking long enough will make it surface. I listen for the servants' voices echoing off the flagstones in what would have been their quarters; I look at the grand staircases and wonder if anyone ever took them two at a time to get somewhere in a hurry, and who was it, and why; I look for the tracks of their carriages in the gravel; I walk the grounds and wait to feel transported back in time, wait for the past to reveal itself to me.

Yet there are no voices echoing except those of the tourists and employees; the only people on the staircases are distracted school children. Any carriage tracks are long since erased in the gravel. I stood on the Petworth House lawn and looked up at the windows with a vague hope that I might catch a glimpse of a former inhabitant, still lurking on earth. But the ghosts aren't there.

There is no feeling of being watched, no raised hairs on the back of my neck. And, strangely, I find this unsettling. These manors and castles feel uninhabited, abandoned, empty. Despite the painstaking restoration, preservation, re-creation, they present a facade of the past but cannot produce the past itself.

Of course that is the case, but I keep hoping--for what, exactly, I don't know. For Mr. Darcy to come striding around the corner? Not likely. I suppose I'm hoping to feel some kind of connection or realization or understanding of what life really was like. I'll keep hoping, hoping and pursuing. And it is this dogged pursuit of the past that is making me fall more and more in love with this country. Because I'm sure at some point I'll find it.

Petworth House

Playing in Petworth House

Adorable Penny!