In its recent past, the diminutive Scotney Castle has featured in a Squeeze music video and been a bolthole for Margaret Thatcher during the 1970s and 1980s. But Scotney has witnessed 700 years of tumultuous history from its cosy seat in Bewl River valley in Kent, now inspiration for a graphic novel written by Jamie Rhodes, a mop-haired Yorkshireman with a penchant for historical documents. “I find it so beautiful to look at the handwriting of someone who has been dead for 300 years,” he says wistfully. “What a personal connection, to hold that letter in [my] hand.”
Spanning the middle ages to the Edwardian era, A Castle in England documents the families that lived in Scotney, with each story illustrated by a different, upcoming UK artist – Isaac Lenkiewicz, Briony May Smith, William Exley, Becky Palmer and Isabel Greenberg.
It is not Rhodes’s first book based on an archive: he also wrote 2014’s Dead Men’s Teeth and Other Stories, a collection inspired by documents in the British Library – a project he found unexpectedly emotional. “I welled up at just the thumbprint on the side of a letter, written by a double agent in the 1700s who was working for the Jacobites,” he says. “That’s his thumbprint! And letters always smell like smoke because, back then, you lit a fire for light. To someone 300 years in the future, the smell makes it feel like they’re there, too. Ah, I love archives!”
For someone so smitten with old papers, getting support from the National Trust and Arts Council England and living in a castle for almost four months (“I overstayed my welcome a little bit, to be honest”) seems too good to be true. Rhodes spent his days exploring the Victorian “new” castle, going through the archives and studying the manor’s many treasures and curios, such as the mounted hyena heads on the walls and bottles that had spent centuries in the moat. He wandered the grounds and the ruins of the old castle, talking to rangers, gardeners and sometimes the artists at work on his book’s illustrations. Then at night, he’d “drink whiskey and get writing”.
The intimate history of Scotney is relatively unknown, as the National Trust had only gained full access in 2006 when the final heir, Elizabeth Hussey, died. When Rhodes arrived a decade later, staff were only starting to tackle the archive, which he describes as “hundreds of years of aristocrats going: ‘Oh, stick it in the loft’.” Diaries, letters from the days of the English empire, maps outlining who owned what: “You’d think land disputes would be boring,” says Rhodes, “but there was this one birch tree two families were fighting over. Just let it go, guys!”
Some of the stories in the collection use the castle as a jumping-off point to delve more broadly into English history, including The Labourer, which follows a man who leaves the newly built castle to join the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt. “There is a record of a riot happening at the castle in 1380, in this book called the Knightly Families of Kent and Sussex,” says Rhodes. “The Peasants’ Revolt started in that area and I thought, a riot is a good place to start. Maybe the two are connected?”
Other stories are rooted firmly in the history of the castle – such as The Priest, which tells the tale of the Jesuit priest whom the Darrell family hid for seven years during the English Reformation. Or The Smuggler, which features 18th-century contrabander Arthur Darrell, who is thought to have staged his own funeral by filling a coffin with rocks (a discovery made years later when his coffin was unearthed).
The Darrells are Rhodes’s favourite Scotney family: “The gentlemen seemed to be quite roguish, always getting into debt and spending money on things they couldn’t afford. Different generations of Darrell men solved [their debt crises] by marrying rich old women – I imagine them as a bunch of handsome guys, with a knack for wooing heiresses.”
With his assignment in the castle over, Rhodes is on the hunt for other singular writing experiences. He has completed a two-week stint in the Finnish wilderness for a graphic novel about Elämänmäki, the site of an early 20th-century sanatorium that has since been reclaimed by nature. But Scotney holds a special place for him. “I was sad to leave,” he says. “It was like: ‘Ah, I’ve got to go deal with fucking real life now.’”
