A La Ronde performance/walk (2007)

Phil Smith

(I am dressed in a cream suit, wearing dark glasses, which I

remove as the audience approach. I have two suitcases at my
feet.)

1/

Well, hello, everyone. My name is Phil Smith and I’m very

pleased you can join me on this walk around A La Ronde –
this unusual house here, built for – or some people say built,
or at least designed, by - Mary and Jane Parminter, two
cousins. This house was built not only as their home, but also
as a celebration of their European Grand Tour – a ten year
long journey they began more than 200 years ago.

They had set off in 1784 and made a slow but painstaking
progress through France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and
possibly Portugal and Spain. Please note that “possibly” –
because in researching the history of the Parminter cousins
and their house here I have probably turned up more
“possibly” than anything else.

Now, this tour we are going on today will be something of a

celebration of the Parminters’ tour – and at the same time
something of a celebration of the most recent leg of my own
European Grand Tour. In the last couple of years making these
kinds of walks has taken me – sometimes on my own,
sometimes with the artists Wrights & Sites – to the Channel
Islands, to Munich, to Copenhagen, to Naples, to Zurich and I
have just returned from Vienna, a few days ago.
So I’m carrying these cases – you might be able to help me
with them in a while – partly to celebrate my coming home.
And partly to remember the Tour made by the two cousins
who lived here.

(LET PEOPLE TRY THEM OUT.)

If you hold them. You’ll feel that they are quite light, because
I didn’t bring many things back with me from Vienna – just a
couple of things for my children.

(SHOW TO ANY CHILDREN ON THE WALK.)

Mostly I brought back stories and impressions and ideas and

associations. And, perhaps I will have time to share a few of
them as we go along.

But when the Parminters came back from their tour they
brought back many, many things.

And I want to talk about one of these things – and it’s

something which is literally at the very centre of this house.

For those of you who haven’t been inside yet, the central room
of the house runs from the upper ground floor all the way up
to the roof. And down from the very centre of that roof is hung
a long steel wire that reaches down almost to the floor of the
central room. Now, there are two things hanging on this wire –
I shall come to the very lowest thing a little later. But just
above it is a very significant thing.

By the way, “significant” is another of those words you find a

lot of when researching the Parminters.
Now, this thing on the wire is a dove – a stuffed dove – and in
its beak is an olive branch – a small, leafy twig from an olive
tree. The present one is a recent restoration, but we know
something very like it was part of the original design of the
house because it is described in Mary Parminter’s will. And
that will is going to play an important part in this journey.

OK – so at heart of the house is an animal. And a plant.

And what you will find if you look through the house is that so
much of it is decorated with exactly that… with feathers and
shells and with plants – most strikingly with seaweed.

But for the first part of our walk, we’re going to walk around
the perimeter of the Parminters’ garden – just as it’s believed
that the cousins themselves would have done each day.

Of course there have been some changes since the Parminters’

time – you will have to imagine the two milk cows and the
fourteen sheep that were kept here to create the sense of living
in a rural landscape.

And as we go I’d like you to look out for plants and animals,
use your eyes like digital cameras – and store as many images
in your head as you can. Immerse yourself in the natural part
of this garden.

(Then walking anti-clockwise around the perimeter walk.)

2/ View of the house.

OK, well, we’ve arrived at a good place to look back at the A
La Ronde house –

… but before I get you to start looking at this place in a

slightly different kind of way I’d like to share with you one of
my experiences from the Viennese leg of my Grand Tour –
now, I was in Vienna to visit and take part in some walks and
tours made by Viennese artists inspired by the kind of a tour
that we are taking part in today.

And one of these tours began in one of the suburbs of Vienna,

called Kagran, and there we were guided by a rather eccentric
mountaineer and a young shepherdess into the city’s waste
dump – now this is a very unusual waste dump – because
where they once filled the ground with waste now they have
found a way to compress the waste, so it is solid enough to be
built up above the ground – and they have made pyramid,
using the same system of ramps as were used by the ancient
Egyptians to make their pyramids. On the very top of this
pyramid, which takes about an hour to climb, the Viennese
sanitary workers have built their own safari-style lodge, an
open lodge with views all over the city and the countryside
and beside it they have dug a swimming pool. To see all this
would be enough, but to top the day, the manager of the site
crams me into the back of his tiny jeep and we drive to a place
where we enter a scene like that on a mountain top, but
constructed out of what look like huge, rather geometrical
boulders. These are the remains of the former Reichsbrucke –
the old bridge over the Danube that collapsed in the 1970s –
and on the top of these remains were a herd of huge mountain
goats, twenty three of the last 300 of an endangered species.

(SHOW PICTURES.)
So - nature in a very artificial and constructed space.

And I want to suggest that this space here, at A la Ronde,

despite the apparently very natural look, is also very artificial
and constructed.

Because where I first asked you to think of the natural

elements that make up much of the ornament of the house –
symbolised by that dove and olive branch at its very heart –
now I want you to think a little bit about the house’s shape –
which is what has made A La Ronde famous – and also,
something of a puzzle.

I shouldn’t really say “shape”, but “shapes” – because the

house is very importantly made up of two key shapes.

The outer walls make up a symmetrical sixteen sided shell –

and inside that, something you can’t tell from the outside – is a
shape that I think is “possibly” the most “significant” – those
words I warned you about! – the central room is eight-sided.
Indeed there are many eights in that central room – it has eight
doors, for example, and the chairs all have eight-sided seats
and eight-sided backs. The octagon seems to have been of
great significance to the cousins.

But why? People have had all sorts of theories: that the shape
is based on a South Sea Islands hut, a Chinese temple, or more
prosaically, on eight-sided summerhouses that were popular in
England at the time. But the explanation which seems to have
gathered most enthusiasm – perhaps because it is both logical,
but also suggestive – is that the cousins were inspired to live
in a house built around eight sides by their visit – on their
Grand Tour - to the Italian city of Ravenna and specifically to
the Cathedral of Saint Vitale.
And here’s a picture of the cathedral at Ravenna…

(TAKE BOOK FROM THE SUITCASE AND SHOW A

PICTURE OF THE OUTSIDE OF THE CATHEDRAL AT
RAVENNA.)

Now, I actually bought this book from a second hand

bookshop in Vienna, but I want you to imagine that this is a
memory that was brought back here by the cousins.

There are a couple of things to point out here – first the key
symmetrical inside shape is not clear from the outside. Just
like here. Also, the outer shell is fairly dour – and if we look at
how A La Ronde first appeared, before the roof was tiled and
the extra windows put in…

(SHOW PHOTO OF THE MODEL OF THE ORIGINAL

APPEARANCE OF A LA RONDE)

… it doesn’t really tell you much about the extraordinary

geometry of what lies within.

So here is the interior of Saint Vitale.

(SHOW.)

And here is the interior of A La Ronde.

(SHOW.)

And what they have most in common is that that they are
constructed around a dome supported on an octagon of walls –
significantly, neither of which is photographed here.”
The dome was the key architectural development of Byzantine
architecture – and the cathedral at Saint Vitale is a very
important example, - begun in 527 and completed in 548 - it is
a model, a message to everyone of the superiority of the
Christian Byzantine Empire, a message sent from the
Byzantine emperor Justinian, telling the world that his empire
is here to stay, that his capture of Ravenna from the pagan
Ostrogaths has secured for him the centre of the Eastern part
of his empire and is now the launch pad for winning back
Western Europe for Christianity and wresting it back from the
northern European pagans.

There are two things to point out about Saint Vitale at this
point – but it will come back later in our journey –

The first thing is the mosaics: the basilica (or dome) and the
rest of the interior are covered – just like much of the interior
of A La Ronde - in spectacular mosaics.

Here is the baptistery mosaic, for example, and right at the

centre of the roof, is our friend the dove. Just like here.

(SHOW THIS IMAGE FROM BOOK.)

Something to note is how many of the mosaics tell stories

from the Old Testament history of the Jews – Abraham and
the (almost) sacrifice of Isaac, Moses and the Burning Bush,
the prophecies of Isaiah, representatives of the twelve tribes of
Israel – and just to drive the point home, the roof of the
presbytery rises to a crown that encircles Christ portrayed as a
lamb – remember the sheep that were once here – and above
the arches are two angels holding a single disc or globe, and
beside them are two cities – Jerusalem and Bethlehem – the
first representing the Jewish city, the second the Christian city
– and the disc representing the utopian coming together at the
end of time of these two divided people and two divided
religions with their common origin.

Now the second thing to note is the dome itself – it seems to

hover…

Now, there are lots of ways that artists and architects can use
shapes to create illusions … and I’ve got a book here with a
few:

(SHOW SOME EXAMPLES FROM BOOK OF

ILLUSIONS.)

Well, it’s the same basic trick at work here – using the
mechanics of our brains and eyes to create illusions.

First of all the arches are designed to look as if they could not
possibly be holding up the dome. To give the impression that
it’s floating in the air. And then to add to this effect the
symmetry of the central form of the cathedral is disrupted by
building the so-called “narthex” off the axis - which is why the
church looks jumbled from the outside.

From the inside this makes the building a mystery. It’s hard to
read the way the building works, to see where the load of the
dome might be supported – indeed the idea is to suggest that
perhaps it is only by the invisible will and action of God that
the dome is supported.

And something similar seems to be at work in the house here

at A la Ronde – not by placing something off-axis, there is no
room for that. But rather in the dome itself – which
incidentally shares with Saint Vitale an ambulatory gallery all
around the top – at San Vitale there is a gallery reserved only
for women, just as was this house - in the dome here there is
something about the shaping of the coving gallery which
seems to suck the eyes of the viewer up into its heights –

Here’s a typical description of the house by an online local

historian who describes the central room as “sixty feet in
height above which is a shell gallery” – so let’s say that makes
seventy feet – well, that is in fact double the actual height.
Clearly, architects have been at work here to create illusions.
Illusions that have a message. About the presence of
something invisible – of the work of an invisible God who
intervenes in architecture as well as in history. Something
bigger than we can touch.

And hovering at the end of a steel wire inside A la Ronde – is

a reflective globe. A symmetrical symbol of a world,
reflecting light...

So, let’s continue on our tour. But this time as well as noticing
the natural world – the animals, the plants – also have in your
mind the very unnatural world of geometry and symmetry…

.. or at least we tend to think of it as unnatural – though it

comes out of our very natural brains.

And in fact there is plenty of symmetry in nature – just about

every animal there is can move, and the best way that nature
has found to aid that movement is something called
dorsiventrality. Basically if you split us from top to bottom
one side looks pretty much like a mirror image of the other.
And this really helps with moving – to have our limbs in
symmetrically balanced positions to move us around.
(SHOW IMAGE OF A DOVE CUT IN HALF.)

And those mountain goats are the same.

And a lot of leaves are the same. Here.

(TAKE A SYMMETRICAL LEAF AND FOLD IT IN TWO.)

So maybe there isn’t such a strict division between nature and

symmetry – after all the Parminters were happy to place a
dove and a sphere together.

So, we’re going to walk towards and then away from the
house now – we’re going to break up our ‘global’ walk around
A la Ronde. After all, the Parminter cousins’ Grand Tour –
despite their placing a globe at the centre of their house – was
very far from global. Though to them it probably felt as if the
had seen the world.

So, then, as we go keep in mind the symmetries you might see

in the house, the ones I’ve shown you that are here and the
ones in Italy, and also any you may see or remember in nature.

Just as you collected animals and plants - this time see how
many symmetrical shapes you can collect in your head.

3/ The big oak

I’m stopping here because of this big oak tree here, because
there is an important story about the older oak trees here.
But first I want to tell you about oak trees and my own
travelling. Because this Easter, for just over a couple of weeks
I followed the route of a walk first made a hundred years ago
by a Manchester engineer called Charles Hurst.

Hurst was appalled by the pollution of the industry that he had

helped to create and so he set out to wander – with no set
destination in mind – carefully planting acorns as he went.
Because he was worried that pollution was killing the oaks. He
wrote a book about his journey. But the book is completely
forgotten – I discovered it entirely by accident in the
underground stacks of Exeter Central Library – no one had
taken it out for twenty years. But I was able to work out from
his story his basic route – sometimes following very closely,
sometimes approximately. And as I went along I was looking
for the 100 year old oak trees that might have grown from his
acorns.

I had many adventures, but almost from the very beginning of

my walk – which was about 200 miles from Manchester down
to a village in Rutland – many of the things that happened to
me seemed to have a symbolic significance. The people I met
would tell me stories of extraordinary things – of tunnels and
underground ballrooms, of prophesies and approaching deaths,
I would be attacked by flocks of birds (twice), I would be
attracted by the shape of shadows in cornfields and discover
they were traces of the Knights Templar, on Archaeological
Way I found endless car wrecks and dumped tyres, as if this
was an apocalyptic, post-petroleum landscape … I met,
completely by accident, someone I hadn’t seen for more than
30 years, an old school friend… and of course, as I’d been
walking across the country many of my thoughts were on
travel, and cars, and pollution, and in the hot sun about global
warning - my old friend turned out to be the new civil service
head of the Ministry of Transport.

Now someone – travelling in the same kind of symbolic frame

of mind as I did while seeking the oak trees – came this way.
His name was Lewis Way and he was a very rich man. But
being rich was not so important to him. For he had come into
his money in a rather odd way. He was given his money by an
old man called John Way. Despite their surnames they were
not related.

John Way had made his money from land. He was a very
devout man and he wished to pass on his wealth so it might be
used for religious purposes, but he was not sure if he could
trust any of his relatives. Finally, he found a distant relative he
thought he could trust and after interviewing the man he was
confident that he could trust him to spend the money well. So
he suggested to his heir-to-be that they settle their agreement
with a small glass of port.

Unfortunately, John Way could not get the cork out of the port
bottle. But the heir-to-be leapt to his aid producing a
corkscrew from his pocket and successfully opened the bottle
of port.

(PRODUCE A CORKSCREW FROM POCKET.)

John Way was pleased and together they toasted the deal.

But later, before John Way had signed the papers, he began to
wonder if his money would be so safe with a man who always
kept a corkscrew in his pocket and he cancelled the deal.
Eventually, in 1804, he gave his money - 300,000 pounds –
many millions in today’s money - to Lewis Way, a barrister –
attracted first by their common surname and then by Lewis
Way’s devout character.

Lewis did as John hoped and spent his money on various

religious and missionary projects.

Some point after 1811 Lewis Way was travelling near

Exmouth and was brought by a friend to see this unusual
house. The friend told Way of a codicil in the will of Jane
Parminter, the older of the two cousins. In this clause it was
specified that the oaks in the grounds were to be protected –
indeed, that “the hand of man shall not be raised against them,
till Israel returns and is restored to the Land of Promise.”
Indeed the friend explained that it was the local belief that the
oak trees were intended for be used as ships’ timbers – to
make the boats in which the dispersed Jewish people,
converted to Christianity, would be returned to Israel.

Lewis was inspired by this story and – no doubt, sensing the

symbolic importance of his stumbling accidentally upon this
story – dedicated the rest of his life, and his fortune, to the
conversion of the Jews to Christianity, in preparation for their
return to Israel, where, at the end of time – symbolised in
many poems and writings by the moment of the conversion of
the Jews – the twin cities of Jerusalem, city of the Jews, and
Bethlehem, city of the Christians, would be united in a single,
shining globe, or disc, the indivisible shape, similar at every
point, the symbol of unity – the unity of the universe.

The irony of the story is that –according to the historian Robin

Bush, who has studied the original Parminter will – there is no
such codicil.
Sometimes symbols don’t need to be accurate to have
power…

… two shapes arise from this story, both from nature and from
symmetry…

First the corkscrew: this form appears in many sea shells – the
key material for the decoration of A la Ronde.

And then the branches of the oak – which might seem to have
no symmetry at all, with their wandering – and yet… and this
is something pointed out first by Leonardo Da Vinci – if you
take a cross section through any part of the tree – bottom of
the trunk, first spread into thick boughs, higher up the spread
of smaller branches – in each case the total cross-sectional
area remains the same. Unity is present symbolically even
when not in appearance.

O, and the corkscrew also occurs in the horns of the goats on

the Viennese wastedump… and in the ivy that winds its way
around the oak’s branches.

Let’s walk now to a secret place – and as we do – think of the

roots beneath us.. for they follow the same principles of
branching as the oak’s boughs… indeed, the same as lightning
forks and river systems.

4/ The secret garden

Well here we are in a part of A la Ronde that is not seem by

most visitors. For this is a little secret garden made by the wife
of one of the previous National Trust curators of A la Ronde.
And here you will see that the passion for patterns that so
informs the house has been an inspiration here too.

I have no idea if there is any story or belief that informs these

patterns – so I will leave you to enjoy them for a moment, and
maybe find your own meanings …

(ALLOW PEOPLE A FEW MINUTES TO ENJOY THE

GARDEN.)

….before we move on I want to point out to you a rather

special space here that – for me – seems to float in the same
way as the basilica of Saint Vitale:

It is this space here – (SHOW FORMER SPACE OF

STUDIO) – where the curator’s wife had a sort of studio-cum-
summer house. I saw it before it was knocked down. It was
raised up on a sort of raised platform. And, for me, it still
seems to hover there now.

For there are other things missing from the story.

Jane Parminter’s diary of the Grand Tour breaks off after only
a few weeks, when the party reaches Dijon. Nothing of
Ravenna and what it might have meant to the cousins,
unfortunately.

But perhaps the most devastating disappearance is that of the

Parminter family papers – papers which might have settled
many of the mysteries about this place – “who really designed
it?” and “what significance its patterns and symbols might
have had for the cousins?”
These papers were destroyed by German bombing during the
second world war – along with the county records of
generations of Devonians. Such records – now online – are
used by the Mormon Church as information for services in
which dead people who did not have the chance to convert to
Mormonism in their lives, are offered the chance in the
afterlife. They have already performed this service for many
millions of people. But not for Devonians, who must now
make up a good percentage of the occupants of Mormon hell.

5/ The feet of the statue

I’ve brought you to these stone feet – all that remains of a

statue that was stolen some years ago – not a very significant
loss, the statue was a fairly recent and relatively inexpensive
(and not particularly appropriate) addition to the garden – but
I’ve brought you here to think about walking. And feet.

Jane and Mary, though the longer parts of their Grand Tour
were made by coach, would have made far more of the Tour
on foot than modern tourists. And from what we have of
Jane’s diary we know that they visited many sites in any one
day.

So we have a walking tour. Visiting places many had visited

before.

And we have my re-walking of a tour of a man planting

acorns.

And then there is a different kind of walking – something we

have heard a reference to in that mosaic in San Vitale
portraying the miracle of Moses and the Burning Bush. In the
story the bush is in flames and yet it does not burn, similar to
the architectural illusion of weightlessness in the Basilica.

In the story Moses finds the Bush while tending sheep –

bringing us back to the sheep here. God speaks to Moses
through the Bush – talking first to Moses about his feet – he
tells Moses to remove his sandals, for the place is holy.
Nothing man-made must come between the man and the
material of the place. And then God tells Moses about another
holy place – he offers him a new land for his people, at that
time enslaved and in exile in Egypt – and to Moses, God
describes this new place as “a land flowing with milk and
honey”.

At this point I was going to take from my case a jar of honey

and offer you all a spoonful, and then a sip of milk. But as
something equivalent I’ve brought you chocolates from
Vienna.

(HAND ROUND CHOCOLATES)

So we have another kind of journey – an exodus. Which is

both an escape. And a journey to a place we have already been
told about.

But rather than learning from a guidebook about somewhere to

be visited, this is hearing from God about a place to live
forever.

And in some ways, it is possible, “possible” you hear, that this

journey – this exodus – is the most significant, “significant”
you see, in the design of this house.
So let’s make our own little Exodus – and escape from the
house and the gardens – and heading for the Promised Land of
our own story – somewhere beyond the hot desert of Summer
Lane is Point In View. And when we get there we can maybe
find out what is the Point of all this, and why it is In View.

But before we leave on our Exodus, just take a view back to

the obelisk – a recent replacement (and re-siting) of an obelisk
placed by the Parminters here in the garden. Obelisks seemed
to first appear in ancient Egyptian architecture – though I
don’t remember any on the waste dump pyramid in Vienna –
they symbolised the sun god Ra – and, interestingly, it is
possible – “possible”! – that the Pharoah from whose slavery
Moses led the Jews was the reforming Pharaoh Akhenaton –
who was said to be a petrified ray of the Aten, the sundisc. Of
course, what unites Akhenaton and Moses is that both of them
sought to convert their people to belief in a single god, rather
than many. And how significant it is that the symbol of unity
at St Vitale and in the heart of the building here – is a kind of
an Aten, a sundisc, I am not sufficiently qualified to say.

But we should notice this – A la Ronde is designed so that the

cousins could rise in the morning with the sun streaming into
their bedrooms and then follow that sun from room to room,
round the house, until it set as they ate in the dining room.

O, and then finally, before we leave look over there where we

began. Remember how we stood there some forty minutes ago
– can you see our forty minute ghosts? Can you see what tiny
changes have already happened to us in that short time? What
changes there have been between us?
I say this – because if the guidebooks are right and this house
and gardens are inspired by Saint Vitale then it is intended as a
generator for changing people.

OK, let us go on our miniature Exodus around the remains of

the perimeter walk, walking in the footsteps of Jane and Mary
Parminter. Then up Summer Lane and to the Point-In –View.

6/ The Plinth.

I’m afraid I haven’t been able to decipher what appears to be

an inscription on this plinth.

So, perhaps you would like to suggest who it would be good to

put up a to statue in these gardens?

(LISTEN TO SUGGESTIONS.)

And would you like to model the pose that you would like
them take?

(VOLUNTEERS TO MODEL POSES.)

On the Exodus from Egypt, while Moses was on Mount Sinai

receiving the tablets of the ten Commandments from God, the
Jews constructed a calf from gold and began to worship it –
we should be careful about making too much of that “gold” –
the calf was a holy animal of El, the god of the local people
whose country the Jews were passing through. So this was an
alternative religion, rather than wealth, being worshipped.
So maybe we could think of any of our idols – perhaps ones
that attract us, maybe ones we have got from other people, but
who we are not supposed to worship?

Are there any forbidden idols you would like to put up there
on the plinth?

(ACT OUT.)

Well, now I should play Moses and tell you all off and burn
your idol and crush it into powder and mix it on water and
force you to dink it… but I think we’ll just keep going –
heading for the desert of Summer Lane.
Just before we go – so we can reach the climax of our story –
literally the climax to all our stories – maybe I should tell you
one last tale from my own Grand Tour – because it involves a
statue. Preparing for one of my walks in Naples and looking
up I suddenly realised that I was looking straight into the eyes
of the great Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico- who
died 50 years before the Parminters began their Grand Tour –
although they visited Naples at a time when the memory and
influence of Vico would still have been very strong.

Vico had a theory for the beginning of civilisation – and it all

began in a great forest that covered the earth – blocking out
the sun disc – the Aten – after the great Flood that was
escaped by Noah.

I don’t have time to tell you the whole of Vico’s imaginary

history of everything, but we will come back to that flood in a
minute.

But let’s go now – keep your eyes peeled for the re-emerging
of symmetry.
7/ The View

Well here we are – the whole complex around us here – the

chapel that we’ll visit in a moment and the little dwellings
places around – and the manse over there – this complex was
called Point In View – and clearly there is a Point that is In
View.

And there it is, the remnants of a 300 million year old desert –
the sandy outcrop of Langstone Rock.

(TAKE SOME SAND FROM A CASE.)

And here is some sand from the beach on the bay of Naples –
the bay which the Parminter cousins are reported to have said
was recalled to them by seeing the very sight you are seeing
now.

Sand – along with seaweed, and the shells and feathers – is a

key ingredient in the cousins’ decoration of A la Ronde.

For we may be looking at a view which has not changed much

from the Parminters’ day, but – thanks to global warming,
may be about to change profoundly.

A new flood may be coming.

And is that what the cousins believed too – remember all those
shells in the house? Were they imaging it underwater? A
world once more underwater? Remember the seaweed in the
house?
And that key central room – look at this wallpaper (SHOW
PHOTO OF WALLPAPER IN THE CENTRAL ROOM) first
installed during the cousins’ time – does it represent, as the
official guidebook suggests, an undersea cave covered in
seaweed and lit from the shell grotto above?

And what of that dove and olive branch? Isn’t that the dove
that brings exactly this evidence of dry land and trees to Noah
while at sea in his ark? Trees, that according to Vico, will
grow into a huge forest, blotting out the Aten, the sun disc,
and destroying the unity of humanity, reducing people to
lonely wanderers?

So what flood did the Parminters think was coming?

Perhaps a social flood?

The King Louis and the Marie Antoniette, whom they had
observed from a distance in France, had been swept away by
revolution. They might have known of Nancy Perriam from
Exmouth, a woman who fought in some of the major sea
battles against the revolutionary French and who, unlike most
of the invisible women of the navy became well known. They
would have seen the French prisoners of the war marched
along the lanes.

Was it time to prepare for the end of their world?

Surely is too wild and exotic for two spinster cousins, often
described in the guidebooks as “eccentric” – but we should
beware of stamping them with our own stereotype. In Jane’s
diary – that part of it we have – it is the bizarre and exotic that
seems to have appealed: the cabinets of curiosities, the
rhinoceros and pelicans… and an interesting sensibility, for
while writing appreciatively of formal French gardens, with
fountains and cascades, she expresses her preference of a
natural landscape… and it is this combination of the natural
and the abstract we find in all that the Parminters do.

8/ The Point

Well let’s have a look at the buildings over here – called

“Point In View” by the Parminter cousins.

Now, I’ve suggested that the house of A la Ronde might

possibly signify a kind of story: that its natural components –
sand, seaweed, feathers and shells – and its symmetrical
shapes – of octagon and disc – and its orientation to the rise
and fall of the sun – that these point to a story of a people –
the Old Testament Jews - - portrayed in the mosaics of
Ravenna as without a land, and in Jane and Mary Parminters’
time equally in exile.

The cousins – inspired by that image of unity at Ravenna, of

the city of Jews and the city of Christians united in a single
disc – create here a machine, an architectural, symbolic
machine for bringing that into being.

For The Point – which the cousins believed was swinging into
“View” – was shortly to come about – and that was the
conversion of the Jews to Christianity and their return to a
Christian Israel.

Indeed, Ravenna may be even more significant – and sinister –

for that figure of Emperor Justinian in the mosaic in the
cathedral – it was Justinian who passed the infamous Novella
146 laws, granting Jews the right to read their scriptures, but
sentenced to death any Jew found denying the Resurrection or
the Coming Judgement. So Ravenna, and perhaps here,
celebrates conversion by force.

And these buildings before us, which are like a shell around
that small chapel in the centre, were specifically created to
house Jewish widows who had converted to Christianity. And
for the Christian education of their children… this complex is
a generator, a practical thing, for bringing about the final days.
The end times.

Now remember these “significances” are only one “possible”

interpretation.

And you should ask yourself how much you should accept
from me, dressed in this cream suit and shades, looking like a
third hand Jonathan Meades?

But, if I’m right, then the Parminters were no alone – for in

1809 a group of prominent of Christians – including William
Wilberforce – set up the Anglican Church’s Ministry Among
Jewish people. Lewis Way gave huge amounts of money – as
a result of the oak trees here – to the London Society For
Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews.

But money does not always talk. And for all the pamphlets
and missions conversions were few, rarely significant and
sometimes fraudulent.

For a moment, let’s got into the Chapel remembering the text
which once used to decorate the door here:

“O Israel, Though Shalt Not Be Forgotten By Me”

But mostly to look at the memorial stone to Jane Parminter,
presumably arranged by Mary - for both cousins are buried
under the organ in here.

(INTO THE CHAPEL. AT THE MEMORIAL. READS THE

INSCRIPTION.)

“Here sleep, no noise shall break thy rest

Till the last trump proclaim thee wholly blest,
Then shall thy former partner claim each dust…”

Does this suggest that Mary expected “the last trump” to be

sounded in her lifetime?

“And join in one made perfect join the just.”

And so it is with an image of unity to come that we end.

A unity of what has yet to come. And possibly – only

“possibly” – part of a set of images and ideas, which two
highly motivated, sophisticated, hard-travelling, hard working,
voraciously interested, intelligent and acquisitive cousins
MAY have patterned into this complex of house, gardens,
chapel, manse, school, almshouse and vista.

Thank you.

Let’s return now to A la Ronde.