The only visible relics of the old Abbey are the monastic fishpond in Judy Astor’s garden, a few carved stones which turn up whenever the present Bruern Abbey has building work done on it (the stone having been thriftily refaced and re-used), and an interesting room described by Pevsner as a ‘groined vault of three bays’, in Judy Astor’s house. Too small for a chapel, even for fourteen monks and an abbot, but conveniently close to the fishpond, it may once have been an ice-house to keep the Lenten fish fresh in.
In 1947, Bruern Abbey and its estate were bought by Michael Astor (1916-1980), the third son of Waldorf, 2nd Viscount Astor and Nancy, his irrepressible wife, a Virginian born and bred, who was the first woman Member to sit in the House of Commons. He did not consider Bruern particularly grand; rather modest if anything compared to Cliveden where he grew up, but nevertheless in Bruern’s heyday there were eleven household staff and thirteen men in the woods, the carpenter’s shop, the garage and the gardens. There was an estate cricket team and an estate club in the Abbey courtyard.
By his death the horses had long since left the Stable Yard, although the stables (the present day Aintree and Newmarket) still existed, immensely high ceilinged, with cream tiled walls and blue stone cobbled floors. Between them, in Samuda’s day, was the carriage house, now Sandown, and above that, the hayloft (Cheltenham). Epsom and Goodwood housed the groom and the cowman, and Saratoga the cow. Part of Aintree was used as a bothy – a dormitory and kitchen for bachelor gardeners, with an outdoor privy tucked away behind the archway entrance to the walled garden, then the source of cut flowers and vegetable for the house.
A short distance from the stable yard were the outbuildings. Shipton was converted from an old stone barn, which housed tractors in one half and the Bruern electrical sub-station in the other, and the Laundry, Shop and Games Room were conjured from a long low line of sheds. Cope, the most ancient of all the buildings, had been a mill for centuries since monastic times; it was near collapse with a tree growing out of one wall when work started on it in 1999, although the mill wheel, half buried, was still in place. After three feet of earth had been excavated, the full six foot diameter of the mill wheel stood proud, and the old stone threshing floor was revealed. Having been quarried long before the technology existed to saw stone into slabs, the huge boulders had been bedded into the earth and their upper surface painstakingly chiselled flat.
The stream which once turned the mill wheel had to be piped underground from the weir to the bridge outside the Games Room; from there, it makes its way under the road, through the park to the monastic fishpond, and thence to the Evenlode and the Thames, as it has been doing since the 12th century.
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