My dear Henry
I send you another Thalictrum from Chequers <1> where I have been staying with the Franklands <2> – it is a delightful place & put me much in mind of Lacock on high land surrounded with beautiful beechwoods & fine trees of all sorts – & vast thickets of box & juniper I found there Epipactis ensifolia which is not a common plant, & a straw coloured variety of Helianthemum – Sambucus Ebulus, & a singular looking large black mushroom or fungus cup shaped with netted gills & like a mushroom turnd over – The house is full of curiosities especially Cromwelliana & seems to have been a repair[?] of roundheads being in Pym <3> & Hampden’s <4> country There is a long gallery made into a library with large bay windows – curious old books & papers.
Tell me what you have in flower – Is a good Camera obscura expensive – I have a great mind to try Photography. I like Valletorts <5> specimen of a sea piece drawn on purpose with slits &c –
Yr Aff
W F Strangways
Notes:
1. A 16th c. house between Prince’s Risborough and Wendover, Buckinghamshire. The Cromwell relics belonged to a grandson of Oliver Cromwell.
2. Sir Robert Frankland-Russell, 7th Baronet Russell of Thirkleby (1784-1849), and his wife Lady Louisa Anne Frankland, née Murray (d. 1871), sister of WHFT’s aunt the Countess of Ilchester.
3. John Pym (1584–1643), parliamentary leader and statesman.
4. John Hampden (1594–1643), parliamentary leader.
5. Letter datable to 1839 between the announcement of WHFT’s photographic process in January and Lord Valletort’s succession as Earl of Mount Edgcumbe on 26 September. The reference to the large fungus suggests a date in late summer; Epipactis flowers in August.