Agecroft Hall

The Richmond-area winter history blitzkrieg continues!

Last week we went to Agecroft Hall, a huge, beautiful Tudor mansion just west of Carytown in Windsor Farms. I had been there once before, in 12th grade with my Shakespeare class. But over the years my interest in English history, house tours, and over-the-top Elizabethan oil paintings has grown, so I figured it was worth a revisit to ol' Agecroft.

For even the most seasoned house tour connoisseur, this place does not disappoint. Imposing doesn't even begin to describe the massive scale of Agecroft, but compared to its original 60,000 square feet, its current incarnation of 20,000 square feet seems tiny. In the 1920s, a wealthy Richmonder had the house disassembled from its neglected site in England and reassembled here, and we can now enjoy the afternoon sun trickling through the original panes of glass. Though not all of the house's features and furnishings are period, many of them are either spot-on or very close, and you can tell that the work that has gone into transforming the house into an authentic museum has been painstaking. Even though this really isn't my favorite period in English architecture, I was so enamored with Agecroft that it was all I could do to keep from drawing one of the heavy wooden chairs up the fireplace and digging in for the winter.

If you've been on a lot of tours, you know that tour guides are a mixed bag. You can get ones so great that they color the whole experience beautifully, and others so dismal that they forever taint your idea of the place itself. Our tour guide was a bit of a beginner, but you could tell she still had the passion for Agecroft that had drawn her there. Things weren't busy -- snow days are GREAT for having historical sites all to yourselves, folks -- so we meandered through the rooms and leisurely discussed the garb of the people in the paintings, the subject matter of the tapestries, and the possible reasons for a 16th century Englishman having a huge bed carved and painted with images of dragons. The photo below does show the Knot Garden in the spring, but I can't think of a better way to spend a winter day than a visit to Agecroft followed up by lunch at the Lamplighter. It was delightful.