Every second year I return to “The Bungalow”, the Earl of Lonsdale’s former shooting lodge in Martindale. The valley is peaceful enough that you could forget the Red Deer stags, who spend their nights in noisy rutting contests. October is when nature stops whispering.
The name misleads and suits the place at once. “Bungalow” comes from the Gujarati ‘bangalo’ and describes a one-storey house, usually ringed by a veranda, so it came to mean a “house in the Bengal style“.
Hugh Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale, built the lodge in 1911 for shooting. The original décor survives, if Edwardian hunting paraphernalia and dark wood panels deserve the word, and the cobwebs vouch for its age. The lodge once had electricity from its own hydro plant, and the present owners have chosen the 1911 experience without it. You may pretend to summon the servants with a push-button bell and feel cast in a period drama, but keep clear of the wiring. It is solid copper wrapped in rubber that perished long ago, which would give the evenings a little danger if the hydro plant still worked.
Soon after it was built, the Kaiser himself stayed. He had been the Earl’s guest before, but this time, so the story goes, the Earl arranged a farce. The Kaiser liked shooting rabbits, a very continental taste, so the Earl had hundreds of the poor creatures trapped and released as he arrived. The Kaiser shot with the glee of a man who had at last found an enemy he could beat. Perhaps the talk by the fire stayed with game and gallantry, or perhaps it touched on the deteriorating situation that would swallow them both four years later. If only walls could talk.
Leave a Reply