Each month of this 125th-anniversary year, COUNTRY LIFE illustrates a period in the development of the English country house. In the 11th of this 12-part series, John Goodall looks at the early 20th century

ON September 7, 1918, the critic and biographer Lytton Strachey wrote to his cousin Mary Hutchinson from The Bird in the Bush Inn at Elsdon, Northumberland.

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Strachey had acquired literary celebrity earlier in the same year with the publication of Eminent Victorians—four irreverent biographies of notable figures from the period—and he was enjoying the novelty of being lionised by the wealthy. Hutchinson, a denizen of the Bloomsbury Group, had particularly requested a report about his recent stay of several days at Lindisfarne Castle.

His host at Lindisfarne was a London businessman, the founder of COUNTRY LIFE, Edward Hudson, who hoped Strachey would write for the magazine. Hudson had bought the castle in 1901 and employed his friend, the architect Edwin Lutyens, to remodel it. The project was a labour of love for the two men, both of whom relished the romance of the spot. As the work was nearing completion in 1906, Lutyens even brought a tame raven to Lindisfarne, a bird that—after the example of the Tower of London—he clearly thought no self-respecting castle should be without. It proved a mischievous pet.

Strachey must have travelled north by train —the evening before his arrival at Lindisfarne he had been dining in Gordon Square, London—and in his letter he marvels at the change of scene. For the final leg of his journey, he describes mounting a dog cart at sunset and crossing ‘3 miles of sand, partly underwater, with posts to show the way—rather alarming to the nervous—then a vision of an abrupt rock with a building on it (Fig 1