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May. 29th, 2024 10:17 pmWhile in Wales we stayed at the Baskerville Hall Hotel, which proudly claimed that yes! indeed! Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had been great friends of the Welsh Lords Baskerville, and only moved the action of the novel to Devon out of respect for his friends' privacy so they would not be hounded by Sherlock-seeking tourists!
I of course immediately had to find a copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles to reread to see if the house of the cursed Baskervilles as described bore any resemblance to our hotel and I can honestly report: it absolutely does not in any way.
To be clear, we would not have been at all surprised to stumble across a murder in Baskerville Hall Hotel; it very much was a converted old manor house with a big sweeping grand staircase and we definitely were staying in former servant's quarters on the fourth floor with a cheery sign warning us that the hot water had a long way to travel and we should expect to run the tap for about several minutes before we got it: "This house was built in 1839 [...] when it rains, you are able to hear the results of this Victorian system - remember it was only designed to impress!" The night we arrived there were a bevy of local barflies being served by the World's Oldest Bartender at ye olde pub counter and a troupe of local amateur musicians and their dog jamming in ye olde study and Beth valiantly went down for a bit and played Visiting Yank at all of them while I took a phone meeting and then came back and told me that she felt like one of the jovial 'lady companions' in an Agatha Christie novel. However all of these murder mystery vibes were intensely mid-century and about sixty or seventy years too late for our friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
... and also the introduction to my copy made no mention of the Welsh Lords Baskerville and instead posited that Doyle had gotten the name from his friend's butler. Perhaps We'll Simply Never Know.
Hound actually ended up being relevant to our trip in more ways than one: I'd completely forgotten that part of the Spooky Vibes of the book include characters sheltering in Neolithic huts on the Devon moor! Having now seen many a historic Neolithic site over the course of the past two weeks, I can confidently say that the huts represented in Hound of the Baskervilles do not bear any more resemblance to actual Neolithic ruins than the fictional Baskerville Hall did to our hotel; for one thing, the ruins of Neolithic homes do not have such things remaining as 'roofs'. (In fact we asked several questions about the roofing materials chosen for replica homes at both Stonehenge and Skara Brae and were told that archaeologists have no idea how Neolithic roofs worked and everyone doing replica huts just kind of makes their best guess.)
Fortunately I do not go to Sherlock Holmes for archeological or architectural accuracy, and all this aside it was simply nice to return to the canon for a bit and spend some time with Holmes and Watson and some extremely convoluted murder plots. Can't argue with the classics!
I of course immediately had to find a copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles to reread to see if the house of the cursed Baskervilles as described bore any resemblance to our hotel and I can honestly report: it absolutely does not in any way.
To be clear, we would not have been at all surprised to stumble across a murder in Baskerville Hall Hotel; it very much was a converted old manor house with a big sweeping grand staircase and we definitely were staying in former servant's quarters on the fourth floor with a cheery sign warning us that the hot water had a long way to travel and we should expect to run the tap for about several minutes before we got it: "This house was built in 1839 [...] when it rains, you are able to hear the results of this Victorian system - remember it was only designed to impress!" The night we arrived there were a bevy of local barflies being served by the World's Oldest Bartender at ye olde pub counter and a troupe of local amateur musicians and their dog jamming in ye olde study and Beth valiantly went down for a bit and played Visiting Yank at all of them while I took a phone meeting and then came back and told me that she felt like one of the jovial 'lady companions' in an Agatha Christie novel. However all of these murder mystery vibes were intensely mid-century and about sixty or seventy years too late for our friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
... and also the introduction to my copy made no mention of the Welsh Lords Baskerville and instead posited that Doyle had gotten the name from his friend's butler. Perhaps We'll Simply Never Know.
Hound actually ended up being relevant to our trip in more ways than one: I'd completely forgotten that part of the Spooky Vibes of the book include characters sheltering in Neolithic huts on the Devon moor! Having now seen many a historic Neolithic site over the course of the past two weeks, I can confidently say that the huts represented in Hound of the Baskervilles do not bear any more resemblance to actual Neolithic ruins than the fictional Baskerville Hall did to our hotel; for one thing, the ruins of Neolithic homes do not have such things remaining as 'roofs'. (In fact we asked several questions about the roofing materials chosen for replica homes at both Stonehenge and Skara Brae and were told that archaeologists have no idea how Neolithic roofs worked and everyone doing replica huts just kind of makes their best guess.)
Fortunately I do not go to Sherlock Holmes for archeological or architectural accuracy, and all this aside it was simply nice to return to the canon for a bit and spend some time with Holmes and Watson and some extremely convoluted murder plots. Can't argue with the classics!
