beckford's footsteps

''only some two months before these lines were being written i took the opportunity of being in lisbon to make an expedition to cintra in search of relics of beckford's residence there. after some degree of search the quinta de ramalhao emerged out of the plethora of names with which the map of cintra is beset and the villa turned out to be only some few yards off the highway to lisbon.

''it is utterly deserted; there is a huge suite of rooms looking on to a garden, ... room after room led into each other, all bare of furniture save a truckle-bed, once every twenty yards, and a few miserable chairs. these rooms were bare of ornament and seemed to date from the very end of the eighteenth century, ...

''eventually six rooms were reached that could be thrown into one vast room, and at the very end of these, some hundred yards from the staircase, a locked door led into what had been beckford's dining-room, ... the walls painted all over to represent an arbour and alive with painted flowers and birds had the illusion that they suggested made complete by the huge round grotto dining table and the grotto chairs, each in its place at the bare table. ...this room brings you very near to beckford, nearer than you get at fonthill where there is practically nothing left, and you feel the whole of the quinta da ramalhao was like this before beckford took it over, ...

''a curious desolation seems to have thrived in his footsteps, ... not only his houses but the buildings that he admired have been left empty; and the grande chartreuse is as deserted, now, as were alcobaca, batalha and thomar, in the year he published his letters, ... hamilton palace, to which beckford's papers were removed after his death is as deserted now as mafra or fonthill. ... the huge palace, the mausoleum, the building in the park known as the chateau de chatelherault, all these are deserted now, ...

''this we may take as our final instance of the decay which has set in upon all the buildings with which beckford's life was concerned; and we can only hope that the dramatic doom which has overtaken these palaces and convents, and which began with the fall of the great tower at fonthill, will leave the ruins in a desolation which may draw more attention to the very live and vital remains that beckford left in that other and less material side of his life.''

sacheverell sitwell, beckford and beckfordism.