Farringford - Lord Tennyson's residence - c1910 - Project Gutenberg eText 17296

Farringford House, in the village of

Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight Freshwater is a large village and civil parish at the western end of the Isle of Wight, England. The southern, coastal part of the village is Freshwater Bay, named for the adjacent small cove. Freshwater sits at the western end of t ...

, was the home of the poet

Alfred, Lord Tennyson Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892) was an English poet. He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his ...

, from 1853 until his death in 1892. The main house dates from 1806 with gothic embellishments and extensions added from the 1830s. Of particular historical importance is the second library built by his wife

Emily Tennyson Emily Sarah Tennyson, Baroness Tennyson ( Sellwood; 9 July 1813 – 10 August 1896), known as Emily, Lady Tennyson, was the wife of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and a creative talent in her own right. Emily was the oldest of three daughte ...

in 1871 with a play room below connected by a turreted winding staircase. The grounds are laid to lawn, rose borders and informal planting. Evidence remains of Tennyson's planting schemes together with a section of the walled garden and wooden footpaths. The house and grounds have undergone a programme of restoration having been a Pontin's hotel since they left the Tennyson family's ownership in the 1940s. Martin Beisly and business partner Rebecca FitzGerald bought the hotel in 2007. They closed the hotel in 2009, and reopened it 2017 as a historic house/museum following renovation. Guided tours are available to book April to October. Group visits, writers' retreats, creative workshops, concerts and exhibitions are part of the offering. On the estate there are ten self-catering cottages which are available all year round, there is also a tennis court and children's play area. The estate is located on Bedbury Lane, Freshwater Bay, on the western tip of the Isle of Wight. Some of the surrounding houses, particularly those in Middleton at the start of Moons Hill are connected with Farringford's history, once forming part of the estate. The houses at the end of Queens Road, the junction near the farm used to be stables where

Fred Pontin Sir Frederick William Pontin (24 October 1906 – 30 September 2000) was the founder of Pontins holiday camps and one of the two main entrepreneurs in the British holiday camp business in the 30 years after World War II, alongside Billy Butlin. ...

's horses were kept. Southern Vectis' Needles Breezer open top bus has a stop outside Farringford and this is the only bus that goes down Bedbury Lane towards Alum Bay. Tennyson wrote of Farringford: Tennyson rented Farringford in 1853, and then bought it in 1856.''The Home of Tennyson''
, Rebecca FitzGerald
Farringford: The Home of Tennyson
official

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and W ...

He found that there were too many starstruck tourists who pestered him in Farringford, so he moved to "Aldworth", a stately home on a hill known as Blackdown between Lurgashall and Fernhurst, about 2 km south of

Haslemere The town of Haslemere () and the villages of Shottermill and Grayswood are in south west Surrey, England, around south west of London. Together with the settlements of Hindhead and Beacon Hill, they comprise the civil parish of Haslemere in ...

West Sussex West Sussex is a county in South East England on the English Channel coast. The ceremonial county comprises the shire districts of Adur, Arun, Chichester, Horsham, and Mid Sussex, and the boroughs of Crawley and Worthing. Covering an ...

in 1869. However, he returned to Farringford to spend the winters.

References

External links

Farringford holiday village WebsiteFarringford House, Freshwater, Isle of Wight
BBC,

h2g2 The h2g2 website is a British-based collaborative online encyclopedia project. It describes itself as "an unconventional guide to life, the universe, and everything", in the spirit of the fictional publication '' The Hitchhiker's Guide to ...

, 8 September 2004. {{Isle of Wight box Alfred, Lord Tennyson Country houses on the Isle of Wight Hotels on the Isle of Wight Tourist attractions on the Isle of Wight Country house hotels

See also

References

External links