The Park
As you leave the picturesque village of Wraxall, you enter a wooded park. At the end of a long tree-lined drive, there is a series of broad balustraded terraces, which overlook the valley. A path leads off to the rose garden, with its parterre and pretty tiled summer houses. There is also an aviary, a lake and many specimen trees. In time you will be able to discover a network of woodland walks linking a rustic summer house and the sawmill.
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The Kitchen Garden
The walled kitchen garden has an extensive range of glasshouses and frames, a large classical orangery, bothies, seed rooms and accommodation for gardeners.
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The House
Finally, you face Tyntesfield House. Largely built of Bath stone, Tyntesfield is highly picturesque, its irregular composition emphasised by a bristling silhouette and elaborately styled roofs. Tyntesfield House, including the servants' wing and chapel, was listed Grade II* in 1973, but this has now been upgraded to Grade I.
Walking through the front door, you're struck by a strong church-like atmosphere. Some of the main rooms are richly fitted up with carved stone and woodwork, tiles, stained glass and marble inlay. The principal rooms include a library with massed blue and white oriental porcelain above the bookcases, a great vaulted drawing room and a billiard room with a complex hammer-beam roof. There is also a huge dining room with marble columns and a grotesquely carved sideboard by Crace. Perhaps the most impressive interior of all is the chapel itself. Lofty and stone vaulted, it is replete with the full panopoly of Victorian church art - including glass by Powell and Wooldridge, mosaics by Salviati, and ironwork by Hart, Son, Peard and Co.
The kitchens, which are still in use, are surprisingly intact and atmospheric, while the nether regions of the house present an almost endless succession of household offices, in varying stages of dereliction. Most of the original furnishings have merely been displaced and still lurk in the basements and box rooms. Even the drawing room chimneypiece, overmantel and light-fittings are reputed to survive in the basement in packing cases.
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