Yesterday morning I followed a woodland path alongside Bushcliff Beck up beyond the top end of the lake at Newmillerdam but a tree had fallen and I diverted through the undergrowth, dodging between some old elder bushes.
I’d walked into an area of ruined buildings marked as The Menagerie on Victorian maps.
I came across the remnants of this structure; perhaps these are the walls of two outbuildings built against the estate boundary wall. They’re not indicated on the 1891 map.
This hatch, which is a little over 2ft square, gives access from the outside. Beyond the vegetation is an arable field.
On inside edge of the slab at the base of the opening you can see the remnants of a layer of plaster or cement.
From the outside it appears that the opening originally had a stone lintel.
I couldn’t see any trace of where a frame for a door might have been fitted, but presumably there was originally some way of closing the gap. Perhaps the opening was used when mucking out the animals kept in the Menagerie enclosures.
I’d always thought that these ruins were the remains of an entrance lodge to the Chevet Estate but the map from 1893 shows what look like animal enclosures – kennels perhaps – alongside a small reservoir.
Birds and Bulldogs
Twenty years after the map was published, in 1913, a visitor wrote that Lady Kathleen Pilkington of Chevet Hall was ‘a fearless rider’ with the Badsworth Hunt and ‘a splendid rifle shot’.
She is fond of racing and is specially devoted to birds and her collection of foreign birds is one of best in England”
Charlton Jemmett-Browne, writing in ‘The French Bulldog’, USA, September 1913
Lady Kathleen’s favourite breed of dog was the French Bulldog. I’m guessing that she kept them closer to Chevet Hall but perhaps at that time she kept foxhounds or even some of her foreign birds at the Menagerie. The Menagerie was marked on an earlier Ordnance Survey map in 1841.