Skisdon -

Braddon's family home

* Braddon Homepage * Skisdon Homepage*

Braddon said she always regretted not being born at Skisdon, the Braddon family home at St Kew in North Cornwall. (Click here for map.) In her unpublished memoir Before the Knowledge of Evil, she wrote, "I ought to have been born in the cosy old home at St Kew ... Had fate been kind and hastened my arrival by a day or two I should have entered life in that friendly shelter, instead of appearing inconveniently for my mother after a stage coach journey of two days and two nights, in a house where I was not immediately expected" (Before the Knowledge of Evil, pp1-2)

Braddon spent many childhood holidays at the house, which belonged to her paternal grandmother, Sarah Phillis Braddon, who had inherited it from her brother, Major William Clode, in 1807. The family attended services at the "the dear old church at St Kew" (Before the Knowledge of Evil, p83), a few hundred yards from the house.  A stained glass window to the left of the altar is a memorial to the Braddon family.

In 1868 Braddon bought the house to keep it in the family, echoing the ending of her novel The Lady's Mile, in which the heroine regains possession of her much-loved ancestral home in Cornwall.  Braddon kept Skisdon until 1874, when she sold it to her cousin, William Clode Braddon.  (He and his wife and daughter are buried in St Kew churchyard.) Braddon visited her cousin at Skisdon, and in 1893, she bought a house at Trequite, a mile or so away.

In his biography of Braddon, Sensational Victorian, Robert Lee Wolff comments that "All her life, MEB loved Skisdon for its warmth, and for the beauty and abundance of its gardens. Cornwall had a special place in her affections. She rememebered with pride the Braddon who had sat in Parliament for Cornwall under Elizabeth, and the Lawrence Braddon, tried in 1686 by Judge Jeffreys on a charge of treason, who has escaped with his life, paying a fine of two thousand pounds." (Wolff, p 19). (For details of Braddon's family tree, click here.)

The area around Skisdon is the setting for several of Braddon's novels and short stories, most notably Mount Royal, Wyllard's Weird and the later parts of A Strange World. She also wrote a travel pamphlet about nearby Boscastle.

The oldest part of Skisdon dates back to 1350, and many additions have been made since then. It seems that whenever the owners wanted more room they just built another wing or another floor! As Braddon said of Audley Court, it is "a house in which no one room had any sympathy with another, every chamber running off at a tangent into an inner chamber,and through that down into some narrow staircase leading to a do which, in its turn, led back into that very part of the house from which you thought yourself the farthest; a house that could never have been planned by any mortal architect, but must have been the handiwork of that good old builder - Time." (Lady Audley's Secret, Chapter 1)

Like Audley Court, Skisdon is "low down in a hollow, rich with fine old timber and luxuriant pasture," and in Braddon's time the approach was "through an avenue of limes" (Lady Audley's Secret, Chapter 1). Braddon may well have modelled Audley Court partly on Skisdon and partly on Ingatestone Hall, in Essex, where she stayed in the early 1860s.

Skisdon may also have been a model for the Heathcotes' home, Spaniards, in Wyllard's Weird: "... the house, though substantial and capacious, hardly presented the dignity of a mansion. It was long and low and rambling - a house of many small rooms, queer winding passages, innumerable doors and windows, and low heavily-timbered ceilings" (Wyllard's Weird, Chapter 2).

As a child, Braddon particularly loved Skisdon's extensive gardens: "one on the slope of the hill behind the house with a long wall against which fruit grew with a luxuriance I have seldom seen anywere else - egg plums as big as turkey's eggs, apricots and greengages that were sweeter than the finest fruit on Regent Street, [another a garden] perhaps genteeler, ... in front of the drawing room windows, all lawn and pond, [another] full of dahlias, behind which was a terra incognita of shrubbery through which meandered a stream" and two walled kitchen gardens (quoted Wolff, p 31). The house is built into the side of a hill, and the kitchen garden at the back is almost on a level with the roof. There are wonderful views of the gardens from the front of the house. Roses and wistaria grow up the side of the house.

Braddon described Skisdon as "a nest in one of the most fertile valleys of Cornwall - mild as Madeira - myrtles & roses climbing to the chimney-pots, tulip trees growing high on the lawn" (letter to Bulwer Lytton, 1867, quoted Wolff, p 141). Perhaps she was thinking of Skisdon's gardens when she wrote the description of Penmorval's gardens in Wyllard's Weird. "The southern front was curtained with roses and myrtle, and looked upon oneof the loveliest gardens in Cornwall - a garden which had been the pride and delight of many generations - a garden for which the wives and dowagers of three generations of Cornish squires had laboured and thought. Nowhere could be found more glorious roses, or such a treasury of out of the way flowers, from the finest to the simplest that grows." (Wyllard's Weird, Chapter 1).

Skisdon's current owner, Tim Honeywill, is researching the history of the house, and is very interested in the Braddon connection. He'd be interested to hear from anyone with information about Braddon's time at Skisdon.

Part of the house is now holiday apartments. For details contact Tim on Tim580208@aol.com or via http://www.cornwall-online.co.uk/skisdon/Welcome.html. It's a beautiful place for a holiday - you'll see why Braddon loved it!

Chris Willis, 2000
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