Field Place
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| In 1792, Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at
Field Place, a broad-fronted country house
set on an estate/working farm in Sussex. As a
child, Shelley freely roamed its several
farms and heavily wooded grounds. Although
Field Place was "improved" by successive
owners over the years, the house has now been
meticulously restored to its
eighteenth-century condition by Kenneth
Prichard Jones, a past president of the
Keats-Shelley Memorial Association. The house
is composed of several architectural elements
(for a thorough analysis of the architecture,
see K. Prichard Jones, "The Influence of
Field Place and its Surroundings upon Percy
Bysshe Shelley" in the Keats-Shelley
Review [8 (1993-4): 132-50]). The
original thirteenth-century medieval section
held the kitchen in Shelley’s
time. |
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| There is also a fourteenth-century
central addition (seen here between the two
chimneys in the ground view), |
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| and a late-sixteenth/early-seventeenth
century brick wing which holds the room in
which Shelley was born. |
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| The views from the house are lovely and
open, partly due to such eighteenth-century
landscape innovations as the haha fence. |
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| Although we did not have access to the
interior of the house, a watercolor of the
drawing room done by Elizabeth Shelley in
1856 gives a good sense of its light and airy
quality. |
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| To the north of the house is a lovely
walled garden, |
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| and to the northwest is the stable area;
here stands the tree under which young Master
Shelley pretended to play cards with the
groom. |
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| Further on is the pond where the farm
horses would stop for a drink after a long
day's work, |
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| and a lane leading to the farm
buildings. |
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