South Burlingham Old Hall

South Burlingham is a small village which lies just to the east of Lingwood. The poet Peter Scupham (1933 - ) lives at the Old Hall (an Elizabethan manor house) - which he lovingly restored with Margaret Steward. The work was carried out by the Perry-Lithgow partnership as part of a grant aided programme.

 

 

Scupham moved into the hall in 1990 and in his 1994 collection The Ark - there are a number of poems which deal directly with the work he undertook. In particular, he discovered a number of fascinating paintings on the hall's lime mortar - including some hunting scenes.

 

Sadness, too, writes white:

Skin upon skin of lime,

nine skins to the long unmaking

for hunters lost in the snow.

Hammocks of dirt and frost

rock from the ghosts of trees

in cold Broceliande.

The room is a dark lantern

and something bays at the moon.

 

Peter Scupham's partner is a drama teacher and the grounds of the hall are sometimes used to host productions of Shakespeare.

 

In his sonnet sequence Backwaters: Norfolk Fields the Hungarian-born poet and translator George Szirtes (see Wymondham) also describes the revelation of finding murals in the hall.

 

A fifteen-eighties mural. A hunting scene

runs right around the room. A trace of Rubens,

Jordaens, a touch, even, of Chinese

in the calligraphic line. Experts clean

the powdery limewash, two PhD students

from the university, anxious to please.

 

A strange dome appears, out of period

somewhere near the top. Even here

there's something far flung in the code

of a different language, another God

extolling other virtues, a pioneer

morality just waiting to explode.

 

Flemish brickwork. Devastation. Riders

exploring hidden walls with snails and spiders.

Done