Unreliable Geographies by Aeneas McHaar
No. 7: Blandfield, Essex Co., Virginia, USA
37º 59’ N, 76º 56’ W
Looking east across Blandfield, the scene resembles many other peaceful backwaters of rural Essex. Almost deserted, gently rolling fields dotted with spinneys lead down to marshes and the calm expanse of an estuary.
It is an idyllic spot seemingly designed by a beneficent deity for the safe landing of illegal immigrants and the traffic of drugs.
However, this is not the County of Essex in East Anglia, but Essex County in the Commonwealth of Virginia, USA, where in 1683 Major Robert Beverley was granted by patent a parcel of land comprising 118,469 acres. (That’s right, 118,469 acres, or 185 square miles.)
A descendant of Major Robert built Blandfield between 1769 and 1773, naming it after his great-grandmother Elizabeth who, one assumes, was neither strikingly beautiful nor horrendously awful, just ... sort of ... quite nice.
Despite the name, the Blandfield building is an elegant, redbrick mansion modelled on designs by the architect James Gibb, and – according to experts even more expert than the McHaar – perhaps influenced also by Drum House (between Gilmerton and Old Dalkeith Rd near Edinburgh).
Palladian ‘dependencies’ (extensions) on either side originally contained the kitchen and other service areas, and were connected to the main building by single-storey corridors known as 'hyphens'. By this dignified punctuation, the likeliest sources of conflagration were distanced from the main house and would not cause disturbance.
The Beverleys were evidently happy with the arrangement, for they continued as landowners here for 9 generations until 1983 when the property and its remaining 3,500 acres were sold to the Wheat family. Since then, it has been sensitively restored to its 18th-century appearance inside and out, and is marketed on the internet as a great place for weddings and shooting parties.
From the moment you enter the Blandfield website and struggle to find the prices, you know a stay at Blandfield won’t come cheap.
Rummaging through the ‘Photo Gallery’, you come across various aerial shots before admission to the building’s immaculate interior. Here a number of deserted tables and chairs are shown beside an unlit fire, perhaps preparing us for the sight of a pristine and rather bony 'bride' who wanders in white from one empty chamber to another looking for her groom. She appears increasingly grumpy and then sits by a window staring out. She has clearly taken the huff.
One can only assume that the object of her affections has abandoned her for a duck with one of the wedding guests, for Blandfield’s grounds include 600 acres of freshwater tidal marsh on the Rappahannock River, farm fields and plant-and-flood impoundments. These welcoming expanses attract numerous migrating bird species over Winter and Fall, where 'experienced and entertaining guides' will put fowl ‘“in your face” with world-class calling'. ‘Fast flying naturalized birds’ fleeing from ‘multiple explosive covey rises’ pose a challenge to the ‘wingshooting skills’ of even the most seasoned hunters,' the website froths at the mouth, just managing not to add And they enjoy it.
Blandfield's Chef Paul will also put fowl in your face. He, apparently, does mouth-watering things to game birds each night.
Where is all this leading?
There is about Blandfield’s marketing an intoxicating mix of carnality and reserve; appetite and coolness; an understated, rapacious, East-coast snootiness unusual in American commercial prose. I was rather taken with it for a while, began to fancy myself in my Barbour with baseball cap, relishing the site’s promise of ‘completely comfortable accommodations ... reminiscent of the gilded age’.
And then I remembered. For all its attractive, winter Englishness, we are not talking about dear old Essex, home of lovable badger baiters and retired pornographers.
This is Essex County, Virginia, home of tobacco. This is not Blandfield House but Blandfield Plantation. It is not bland at all. The pleasures of a ‘gilded age’ – selectively recalled here with comfy armchairs, bourbon and sporting bags for today’s moneyed elite – are founded upon displaced natives, indentured labour, imported slaves.
Those elegant lines, that measured tone, the firebreak hyphens – exclude nightmares.