Portrait of a grand lady

The book was clad in a plain brown cover and I forget how I was dressed.

In the intervening years, as old friends do, Portrait has put on a bit of weight and started wearing brighter colours - to the extent that even people familiar with the earlier version should not be put off reading it again!

I learned most of what I know about Highcliffe from Sheila Herringshaw - and now I find there is much more to know from her additional researches.

The first quaint coincidence was an unexpected link between my new home and my old one - the Marquesses of Bute, whose architectural creativity expressed in Highcliffe Castle and the now-departed Bure Homage is just as articulate in the still-to-be-seen Cardiff Castle and municipal buildings; not bad when the gentry's first love was said to be Scotland!

The Bute family occupation of the High Cliff estate lasted, more or less, from 1713 to 1950, but an interruption between the 1790s and the second decade of the 1800s could have severed the connection altogether, except for the determination of career diplomat Charles Stuart, grandson of founder John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, to buy back the estate his father had sold in disinterest.

The "man between" was Mr James Penleaze, whose fortune rested on a cache of bank-notes found in a hat-box. He bought the land and built a modest villa some distance from the site of the original "High Cliff", which had been demolished as the eroding cliff edge moved closer and closer to it.

By 1830, Charles Stuart, by then Lord Stuart de Rothesay, had fulfilled his boyhood vow to "reclaim" the High Cliff estate and over the next five years, with his architect, Donthorn, he proceeded to turn Penleaze's construction into a castle much like the one that exists today.

There would have been even more rooms if Lady Stuart, on her return from nursing her sick mother, had not curbed Donthorn's excesses. However, the pinnacles and ecclesiastic-style decorations of the exterior survived the purge and provide as good a reason as any today for staring upward till your neck aches.

Lady Stuart was less enthusiastic. In her letters, she wrote: "I wish the whole thing had fallen over the cliff and I hope I shall not throw myself over in utter despair."

That would have been a joyless end for ancient stonework which had been ferried across the Channel from L'Abbaye de Jumieges and a striking oriel window said to have lit the room at La Grande Maison des Andelys where Anthony, King of Navarre, had died after the Siege of Rouen in 1562.

Nor would it have benefited furnishings like the old French tapestries and the chairs that had been made for Napoleon 1, the 17th-century Flemish glass, the Louis XV boiseries and the Gobelin tapestries which had come from the Palace of the Knights of St John at Valetta, Malta, together with the marble and the stained glass which had been gleaned during Lord Stuart's postings as envoy and ambassador in Vienna, St Petersburg, Spain, Lisbon, Paris and The Hague.

The elder of the De Rothesay daughters, Charlotte, died of the fever in 1861 and the Castle passed to younger daughter Louisa on the death of her mother in 1867.

Louisa, author, traveller, friend of Queen Victoria and doyen of good works, had married Lord Waterford in 1843 but was widowed by a hunting accident in 1859.

From then on, she divided her time between Highcliffe and Ford Castle, Northumberland, and between rich and poor. She was the most loved of a largely popular dynasty and in 1870, her friends commissioned Sir Edgar Boehme to carve the statue of her that stands again at the castle - after 30 years in the care of Dorset County Council at Christchurch library.

The dedication reads: "From loving hearts to one of love most worthy," and it comes from a poem specially composed for the installation.

In 1889, the Gobelin tapestries went for £3,000 to pay for cliff stabilisation and a drainage system which are still effective today.

Since there were no children of the marriage, the castle passed to Louisa's second cousin, Major General Edward Stuart Wortley, who was himself closely related to the Earls of Wharncliffe and married to Violet Guthrie. Violet, in her leisurely days at the Castle, wrote three remarkable autobiographical volumes, Life Without Theory, Magic In The Distance and Grow Old Along With Me.

She had moved to the Mill House at Chewton Glen when her own last chapter was written in 1953, by which time the Stuart Wortley family connection with the castle was also over.

In the next 50 years, ownership passed from J H Lloyd, a local industrialist with an unsuccessful venture of turning the castle into a children's convalescent home, through the Congregation of the Sons of the Immaculate Heart (the Claretians), with a seminary training students for the priesthood, to three local businessmen and finally Christchurch council.

Today, the name encompasses a village bounded to the east by Walkford, and to the west by Hoburne, both mentioned in mediaeval land documents. But when the castle itself was taking shape, the area around it rejoiced in the name of Slop Pond, the largest of a trio of hamlets which also included Chewton Common and Chewton. Between these settlements lay private estates established at various dates surrounding fine country houses with names like Shelley Hill, Cranemoor, Latimers, Holmhurst, Wolhayes, Amberwood, Culmore, Beacon Lodge, The Hoy, Saulfland and Nea House, most of which survive in name only by housing developments built on their land.

About 1830, a Captain Hopkins of Hoburne bought a field at Slop Pond and built a score of homes, the residents of which quickly became disenchanted with the lack of glamour in their address. Even so, their alternative choice was more functional than imaginative - Newtown.

With at least 20 other Newtowns around England and Wales, four of them in Hampshire a further change was inevitable. But it was anticipated in an October 1891 logbook entry by the local volunteer firefighters. One Francis Latham signed himself, "Captain, HIGHCLIFFE Fire Brigade."

The matter was finalised by a letter from the Secretary of the General Post office in December 1892, which provided "a satisfactory answer to the memorial signed by many Parishioners..... to save letters and telegrams miscarrying..... that the designation of the Post office at Newtown..... be changed..... to Highcliffe."

Kaiser Wilhelm's stay in the area in 1907 created many memories, although recollections changed their hue after events which commenced in 1914 and Sheila Herringshaw's researches record important guests from many of the Royal Houses of Europe, right up to a visit by Queen Mary in 1928.

Veteran villagers are interviewed, church and chapel histories outlined, various tables and accounts scanned and explained as Sheila does her detective digging.

The "Portrait" is a regular pot-pourri of the eccentric, the worthy and the unexpected, from advertisements for old businesses to historic images of departed cornerstones.

This combination of lifework and compendium should be required reading for everyone who deigns to call Highcliffe "home".

A Portrait of Highcliffe, by Sheila D Herringshaw (Natula Press, £5.95)