Autorotation - Jesus Bolts EP

Link to a review for Live Music Scene: http://www.live-music-scene.co.uk/cd-reviews-content.asp?id=405

Tyntsfield: A Modern Ruin

The Clayton family does not do normal days out. So, instead of going to Pizza Express or Wookey Hole, we decided to explore the newly opened Tyntsfield (pronounced ‘Tintsfield’) Estate, on the other side of Bristol. Owned until 2001 by the Gibbs family, the property has since been bought and renovated by The National Trust. In many ways, it is a typical aristocratic home, with beautiful vaulted ceilings and neo-Gothic architectural affectations. However, there are some likeable eccentricities which perhaps mark it out from your standard Sunday-afternoon white elephant. The billiard room, for example, features a centrally-heated table and a bafflingly complex automatic scoring machine. And the handsome library, containing first editions of Dickens novels and French anatomical dictionaries, also has John Le Carré novels and Sotheby’s catalogue from the 90s shelved indiscriminately next to each other. The most charming aspect of the place, however, is that the renovation is still very much a work in progress; in one room we are shown the painstaking task of cataloguing over 140,000 objects left by the Gibbs family. And frequently the visitor comes upon rooms or hallways that contain miscellaneous objects, random possessions, which perhaps say more than anything else about the state of the place until very recently.

In effect, Tyntsfield was a bachelor pad for the last twenty years of its private existence. Many of the treasures now on display were boxed or covered, simply because they were never seen, and the last in the family line, Richard Gibbs, had no use for them. His quarters, on the top floor of the house, are sparse in comparison to the splendour on the two floors below: a bed, a bare bathroom, and some paintings of long-forgotten military campaigns on the walls of his drawing-room. When Gibbs died in 2001, his only remaining asset was the house, and having never married or had children, it was acquired for public use by The National Trust. It is a sad, strange story. When I enquire whether Gibbs was ever likely to marry, a typically discreet Trust employee stage-whispers to me: “They say he had girlfriends up here. But I wouldn’t know anything about that. He kept himself to himself.”