You may or may not know that I love rot, abandonment and a general state of dereliction, whatever the style or age of the building may be. However, when there’s an aristocratic bent to the decay — well, then the bread pudding thickens. Hannah of Hello Mr. Fox recently visited Calke Abbey, a 1704 country house and estate in Derbyshire, England preserved in 20th-century decline. The story of this Baroque mansion is that of an eccentric family given to massive taxidermy collections and lots of hoarding. (Drooling. Cannot close mouth. Attempting — to — breathe.)

According to Hitchcock Blonde:

“Calke Abbey is a kind of architectural elegy to the extinction of the rural peer, a giant version of the taxidermist’s tanks that fill its rotting, forsaken rooms. A twelfth-century Augustinian priory (go figure) tucked away in Ticknall, Derbyshire, Calke was inhabited by the ambitious Harpur family from 1622 to 1980, suffering a slow and spectacular decline as its rooms fillled with a marvellous and mundane miscellany of art, fossils, shells, children’s toys, books, butterflies and birds: the fallout of fruitcakes with fulsome funds.

“Calke is a 3D map of mild psychosis, from the collections of Henry Harpur (1789), the baronet with ‘an unhealthy taste for solitude’ who married a lady’s maid, to the christening present bought by Richard Harpur Crewe (1880) for his nephew, a silver-mounted ostrich egg with decorative boars’ tusks.”

This country mansion has since been donated to the National Trust after the family died off and fell into massive debt. I’m so pleased that they’ve allowed it to stay as it was — and that there are tours! Learn more at the National Trust’s website.

[Via Hello Mr. Fox]