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Follow the literary legacy of Britain's stately homes with the Historic Houses Association's new trail

Some great historic houses are famous for their art; others for their gardens, or the architectural initiative of their patrons. But at Knebworth House in Hertfordshire, the Hon Henry Lytton-Cobbold has a house famous for its folk tales.

“Knebworth is very much a treasure house of stories,” Lytton-Cobbold says. “Every corner of this house tells a story, and a lot of them have been interpreted into works of literature.”

In this, Knebworth is not alone; it is one of 45 houses to feature on the Historic Houses Association’s (HHA) literary trail, which launches next week. The collection – the theme of which was chosen to coincide with Visit England’s Year of Literary Heroes, itself chosen because 2017 is the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death – will guide visitors around the country to houses of bookish importance.

At Knebworth, Lytton-Cobbold explains, the “main literary chap” is his great-great-great-grandfather Edward Bulwer-Lytton, one of the 19th century’s bestselling novelists. A friend of Charles Dickens, he coined such phrases as “the pen is mightier than the sword” and “it was a dark and stormy night”.

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Born in 1803, Bulwer-Lytton later married Rosina, also a writer. “Their marriage was a disaster,” Lytton-Cobbold says. “They fought tooth and nail. Every time he wrote a book, she wrote one satirising him.”

HHA literary trail puff

Bulwer-Lytton’s marks on Knebworth are more than literary. When his mother died in 1843, he took over the running of the estate, building on the Gothic alterations that she had made to the house, owned by the family since 1492. “It was around the same time that the Houses of Parliament were built, and it had a Pugin-inspired style, with high towers and arabesques and gargoyles,” Lytton-Cobbold says. “It’s the contents of his very elaborate mind.”

Foreign visitors’ impressions of this country are what they’ve read in English literature. We are custodians of a really crucial part of Britain’s cultural history

For 15 years, Lytton-Cobbold has been the facilitator for Lit Houses (lithouses.org), a group dedicated to looking after the interests of houses connected to literature. “Our experience is that foreign visitors’ impressions of this country are, second to the Royal family, what they’ve read in English literature,” he says. “We are custodians of a really crucial part of Britain’s cultural history.”

Not all the houses on the HHA’s trail are vast piles, but what they have in common is their location in some of the most beautiful parts of the country. “Nowadays we call them ‘Hardy country’ or ‘Brontë country’,” Lytton-Cobbold adds. “That just shows how much we associate these parts of Britain with the authors that really brought them alive.”

In North Yorkshire there is Norton Conyers, believed to be the inspiration for Thornfield Hall. Charlotte Brontë visited the house in 1839, and its attic – along with the legend of the mad woman who was confined to it – inspired Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre.

Highlights from the HHAs Literary Trail

The trail also includes Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, alma mater of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and where JRR Tolkien wrote part of The Lord of the Rings; Restoration House in Kent, the model for Miss Havisham’s Satis House in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations; and both Glamis Castle and Cawdor Castle in Scotland, respectively the actual home of Macbeth and the setting used in Shakespeare’s play.

It’s not only the classics of yesteryear that have made the cut. Author Alan Garner believes that without his medieval abode, The Old Medicine House in Cheshire, which is included in the HHA’s trail he could not have written the children’s classic The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. “Can you remember when you were a kid, you had a favourite place? It’s that. I feel I’m safe here,” he says.

Garner has written all of his nine books from one room, the former buttery. From the 600-year-old window, he looks out over the Jodrell Bank observatory, with its enormous telescope. “I’ve spent 60 years in a medieval work of art looking at one of the world’s great modern works of art,” he says.

The literary legacies of many of these properties have become entwined with the family histories of the people who live in them.

Take Madresfield Court in Worcestershire, the home of the Lygon family since 1260 and the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited.

In 1931, a young Evelyn Waugh met Lady Sibell, Lady Mary and Lady Dorothy Lygon, sisters of his friend Hugh, with whom he had been at Oxford. While Hugh died young, Waugh retained a friendship with the Lygon sisters, and constructed life at Brideshead around the family.

We call them ‘Hardy country’ or ‘Brontë country’, which shows how much we associate these parts of Britain with the authors that really brought them alive

His first impression of Madresfield would have been romantic as he came along the drive, with its neo-gothic gables, brick chimneys and gargoyles. But this might not be the Brideshead of his readers’ imaginations; the house used in the acclaimed 1981 television series starring Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons leaves quite a different impression.

It was filmed at the grand baroque palace Castle Howard in Yorkshire, which, as stately homes go, could not differ more from Madresfield. As the biographer Jane Mulvagh put it in Madresfield: The Real Brideshead, “The Howards’ and the Lygons’ homes stand at opposite ends of the spectrum of English country house living: one, the extrovert, was designed to project to the world; the other, the introvert, to withdraw from it.”

Visitors to the HHA trail will be able to get a better understanding of the Brideshead that Waugh had in mind. The chapel, as described in the novel, had been “redecorated in the Arts and Crafts style of the last decade of the 19th century”, with “a triptych of pale oak, carved so as to give it the peculiar property of seeming to have been moulded in Plasticine”.

The room is a vision of colour, and was, says Sebastian Flyte – the Brideshead character said to be partly modelled on Hugh Lygon – “papa’s wedding present to mama”. The chapel at Madresfield was indeed a wedding present – in 1902, from the wife of the seventh Earl Beauchamp to her husband, who in the novel is thinly veiled as Lord Marchmain.

In a preface to Brideshead written in 1959, Waugh wrote that “it was impossible to foresee, in the spring of 1944, the present cult of the English country house. It seemed then that the ancestral seats… were doomed to decay and spoliation like the monasteries in the 16th century. So I piled it on rather, with passionate sincerity.”

Waugh’s chapel at Brideshead is “unmistakably the chapel in Madresfield”, says Lucy Chenevix-Trench, the house’s present owner. Rarely open to the public, it is “very much a home rather than a museum”, she says. The house, although large, “is not grand and imposing”, she adds. “It has no great ego, but is charismatic and intriguing.”

Chenevix-Trench’s children are the 29th generation of the family to live at Madresfield, in a dynasty stretching back over 900 years. “Waugh used our family as a skeleton from which he created Brideshead. It is a pleasure for us that he has played a part in our history.”