We visited Calke on the way back up North a few weeks ago, stopping off the A50. Lingering taste of weirdness. You go in through a fairly normal country house hall, maybe a few more stuffed trophy heads on the walls than usual. Mild eccentricity in the the 'cartoon room' where someone in the C18th pasted humorous prints all over the walls and on to a fairly conventional dining room, though apparently this was hardly used and has been spruced up by the Trust, and through to a massive room, formerly the main hall, completely stuffed with furniture and collected things. Portraits of ancestors stare down at crocodile skulls, archeological bits and pieces, cabinets of geological curiosities, shell collections, pebble collections. More rooms follow, carelessly scattered with paintings picked up at local pubs and the like (the Harper-Crewes were no aesthetes) and a certain dusty oppressiveness makes itself felt. More glass-eyed animal heads stare down. 'Sir Vauncey's bedroom': a four poster heaped with ancient junk, more glassy eyed heads, more cabinets of collected things. Disused nurseries: a room containing 23 miniature chairs and nothing else. Two libraries. Another bedroom, this time full of stored stuffed birds, some hung upside down. Boxes of birds eggs. Coins. Insects. Stamps. Wax seals. More stuffed animals. Another room of stuffed birds. An ancient kitchen, abandoned in favour of smaller kitchens, to be filled full of things (a complete spare set of dining furniture ..) and abandoned in turn. Even the small rooms near the kitchens seem to be full of things - a collections of oil-lamps, all covered in dust. Another full of gas-lamps. Walking sticks. Tin trunks. For a room to exist in this house was for it to be filled with a collection of something. Sir Vauncey (the 10th baronet) and his descendants were posh versions of Mr Trebus, the Polish pensioner who became an obsessive collector of everyday detritus and was featured in a BBC docu entitled 'A Life of Grime'.

I wonder of Mervyn Peake ever visited here - in the 30s Calke would have been pretty much like this, already too large for its occupants - like many country houses, the number of servants dropped dramatically after the First World War. Peake's Gormenghast comes irresistably to mind, that huge ancient edifice inhabited by a reclusive and failing dynasty, filled with forgotten rooms and a sense of forboding and gloom. Sepulchrave, the 76th Earl, spending his life in his library, emerging only for the trials of necessary ritual. Servants parade before him every morning, un-noticed. Sir Vauncey regularly sacked servants for failing to stoke the fires to keep his collections at a constant temperature, but since he couldn't distinguish between them it rarely made any difference...

Gormenghast, that massive pile jumbled together from many sources, has many aspects of the deteriorating c19th English country house inside, with its faded prints on the walls, its walnut furniture, its carpets and oil-lamps, its jumbling together of the grandiose and the domestic

'Steerpike uncoiled himself of the rope, and looped it over a nail in the wall. Then he glanced around the dark room. The walls were covered with glass-fronted showcases, filled with every kind of moth. Long thin pins impaled these insects to the cork lining of each box, but careful as the original collector must have been in his handling and mounting of the delicate things, yet time had told, and there was not a case without its damaged moth, and the floors of most of the little boxes smouldered with fallen wings.

'Steerpike turned to the door, listening a moment, and then opened it. he had before him a dusty landing, and immediately on his left a ladder leading down to yet another empty room, as forlorn as the one he had just left. There was nothing in it except a great pyramidal stack of nibbled books, its dark interstices alive with the nests of mice. There was no door to this room, but a length of sacking hung limply over a fissure in the wall, which was broad enough for Steerpike to negotiate, moving sideways. Again there were stairs, and again there was a room, but longer this time, a kind of gallery. At its far end was a stuffed stag, its shoulders white with dust.'

from 'Gormenghast' by Mervyn Peake

Calke is built on the ruins of a c12th priory as well, and some of the stones and brickwork linger in the gloomy main courtyard and the underpass used by servants to get into the main building without spoiling the view. The Priory was sold in the Reformation, and converted into the domestic house which became the foundation of the current building, so it has good Victorian gothic credentials.