We are no strangers to monsters at Eastnor – and we’re not just referring to house guests who finish the Bordeaux and leave the empty bottle on the sideboard. Dragons peer up from the Staircase Hall benches and down from the chandelier overhead; sea monsters swim across fireplaces; and scenes from ancient mythology keep the human residents company. Even the castle's emblem is a dragon: a two-legged wyvern, inspired by those watchful creatures beneath the benches.
There is, of course, something fitting about finding monsters in a castle (the turrets do tend to send your imagination towards the fantastical). But they also make Eastnor feel like an extraordinary world, layered with legends and stories – the kind of place where, after dark, you half expect the carvings to move.
The most emblematic are the dragon benches in the Staircase Hall, carved in 17th-century Italy. They catch the eye because they are so lifelike, gazing up from beneath the seat with peculiar, almost friendly expressions.
‘What I really love about them is that they should be under the bench, but they’re more alive because they’re coming out,’ says castle resident Imo Hervey-Bathurst. ‘They’re absolutely extraordinary because you don’t really see the bench. All you see is these dragons with their tails intertwined. They’re rather magical.’
They, and the dragon-wrapped chandelier hanging above the Staircase Hall, were bought by Eastnor’s 3rd Earl in about 1860, when the unification of Italy led to many palazzo sales, allowing these precious objects to be bought in swathes by fashionable English aristocrats. The chandelier, for example, came from the sale of Palazzo Corsini in Rome.
The 3rd Earl was likely drawn to dragons as an example of meraviglia, the power to astonish, which was common in 17th-century Venetian and Genoese carvings. Originally, there would have been a deeper religious symbolism to the carving (a dragon made to hold up a bench signified evil subdued), although we like to think the 3rd Earl was more interested in the shock factor and the quality of the carving – and how good he thought they’d look at Eastnor.
He may also have been drawn to dragons for another reason: local legend has it that here, in Herefordshire, there be dragons. For centuries, the residents of Mordiford, about 25 minutes from Eastnor, have passed down the story of a young girl called Maud who finds a wyvern – the same kind of two-legged dragon on the benches – in the woods and secretly cares for it, with disastrous consequences for the village when it is fully grown.
Of course, there’s no way of knowing if the 3rd Earl was familiar with the story. Local historians suggest it was dreamed up to explain a painting of a dragon on the wall of the village church, which was lost in 1811 – about 40 years before the 3rd Earl inherited Eastnor. But it adds to the mystique surrounding Eastnor all the same: where other English country houses filled their halls with marble statues of Greek and Roman gods, Eastnor chose dragons.
Even when Eastnor does turn to the ancient world, it goes for the strangest stories. The Long Library, too, is full of myths and monsters – and not all of them are contained in the books on its shelves. The 17th-century tapestries, said to have belonged to Marie de’ Medici, depict episodes from a text celebrating Catherine de’ Medici by comparing her to the ancient Queen Artemisia.
According to legend, the grieving Artemisia drank her husband’s ashes in her wine, then built him the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. Catherine, and later Marie, used the story to cast themselves as loyal widows fit to rule. It’s a fitting tale for a house that is itself a monument to its family’s ambitions, built to look centuries older than it is.
Across the fireplace, a procession of sea gods, nymphs and monsters – putti (plump, winged infants) riding dolphins and the coiling, dog-headed ketos (sea serpent) of Greek myth – escort a shell-framed goddess over the marble waves. It is based on casts taken in the Doge’s Palace, where such scenes proclaimed Venice’s mastery of the sea; in landlocked Herefordshire, it is pure romance (as well as something entertaining to look at when reading beside the fire).
Taken together, Eastnor’s monsters say something about the house itself. Eastnor’s many residents could have lined the halls with the dignified gods and emperors that stand in so many English country houses. Instead, they chose dragons that crawl out from under the furniture, a queen who drank her husband’s ashes and a sea full of monsters over the fire – the strange side of myth rather than the stately one.
And really, it’s all very Eastnor. Not only did someone decide to build a whopping great castle here in Herefordshire, but their descendants then filled it with monsters, myths and legends, too.