Little Naish Restoration Home

Once we walked through that gate, we were hooked.

When I look at that house, I just think, "Wow".

Every time I see it I'm just like, "Wow".

It's a castle. It's a castle!

How can you not buy a castle?

Wow, that's some fireplace to have.

It's going to be an amazing home.

First day of the rest of its life.

You happy?

We are way, way, way over budget.

I mean I am actually living in a building site.

You have to make sacrifices.

There are days when you just think,

"Have we made the right decision? Are we doing the right thing?"

I want it to look what it looked like when it was first built.

Oh, this is just such a beautiful place.

It's like every romantic part of my brain is just firing.

You don't have any idea how much money this is going to cost you!

I don't think either of us

envisaged quite as big a project as we've actually taken on.

It's still a dream. It's still a dream that we're actually doing it.

I can't wait to move in.

It seems just to take forever.

It's just a nightmare.

I'm telling myself not to worry.

I mean, because what can I do? I've got to finish the house.

This is Little Naish.

It's set in the hills of North Somerset surrounded by

a six-acre walled garden.

The house was once a head gardener's cottage.

It was built in Victorian times to look like a

romantic fairytale castle.

But sadly, its beauty is now only skin deep.

Inside it's a different story.

Little Naish has stood empty for almost a quarter of a century.

The stone work is crumbling.

Rot is eating the wood.

And the plaster is beyond repair.

It's Grade II-listed but no one has stepped forward to save it.

Until now.

Because now it's been bought by retired couple Peter and Anne Hills.

They're determined to turn this ruined fantasy

castle into their dream home.

Originally, it was the massive garden that drew them here.

We were tempted by the garden challenge and then the house,

we fell in love with the house as well, or what there is of it.

We can see the potential.

Yes, it was just, just intriguing.

Once we walked through that gate, we were hooked.

They've already started working on the garden.

Both in their sixties, Peter was divorced and Anne a widow

when they married 14 years ago.

They used to live in Esher, near London, while Anne's daughter

Nicola and her children live in Gloucester, 40 miles from here.

I think we've been down here most weekends

since they bought Little Naish.

I love gardening, the children get to play. It's amazing.

I don't think they thought they could exist for a day without the X-Box,

but it's been great that we can just spend the whole day down here.

So the whole family have fallen in love with Little Naish.

I feel privileged to own it.

It would fall down if somebody didn't take it over now.

The garden would be left and probably lost.

I feel that we're looking after it.

We're going to give it a new lease of life

because it's been empty for 24 years.

Some of the worst decay is in the 20th century kitchen extension.

We're now entering the old kitchen.

It leaks like a sieve.

The wall is beginning to bow

and we'll have to do something about this in a big way.

They're not just going to repair the old building.

They have big plans.

The extension will be demolished and replaced,

creating two new bedrooms in a cedar-clad unit.

On the other side of the tower they plan a steel

and glass kitchen diner.

The tower's ground floor will still be the living room

and the two floors above it will each become an ensuite bedroom.

It's a fantastic plan

but it's going to be a lot of work to turn it into reality.

So now I've come to see if they're ready for the restoration to begin.

Lovely to meet you. What a delightful property.

It's so romantic.

-Oh, romantic, and I'm with the right person.

-Are you?

But you can see Rapunzel hanging her hair out of the window.

Were you looking for a property in this area? No?

No, no. It was a Saturday night.

We were childminding in Gloucester looked at the weekend

property paper and saw the picture.

So the very next day, Sunday,

when we had to drive home in the pouring rain we came and trespassed.

Did you really?

And climbed over the five bar gate and had a look and we thought,

"Yeah, we'll go for it."

Is this the biggest project you've ever done?

-Yes.

-Oh crumbs, yeah.

-Yeah, and it's likely to be the last.

Apart from marrying Anne, this is the biggest.

I'm sure it'll be equally as successful.

I'm sure it will, yes. Ouch!

Inside, their future living room looks bad,

but Peter and Anne have a vision.

We'll have a nice glowing fire and a nice wood burner.

This ceiling will be hopefully covered in.

Yeah, it's a little sparse at the moment isn't it, the ceiling?

And Anne's got the furnishings all lined up, the tartans.

Can you see it already?

Then you've got two big windows into the garden!

We've got a writing desk which will fit perfectly into one of those.

-It's a beautiful shape this staircase, isn't it?

-Very windy.

Really pretty little room.

Oh! Oh, this is delightful, Anne.

This is one of the bedrooms, yes.

Yes, it will be nothing but a bedroom

and a shower room in the corner.

-This is the princess's bedroom.

-I was going to say.

We have a granddaughter princess who's eligible.

I mean it really is, isn't it?

If there's not a pink frock in here quite soon then something's

wrong with the world.

With four bedrooms there'll be plenty of room for Nicola

and the family to come and visit.

And she believes living at Little Naish will help her mother

move on from difficult memories.

She's really strong, but then my father being ill and dying

and her having to raise two small children, that was stressful.

But she did it, she coped, she did really well.

And again, sort of nursing my brother through cancer

and then losing him too.

My brother died in the cottage in Esher.

The three of us were there with him.

You can't but help remember and live with that.

But here they can remember him and think about him

but be removed from the actual, traumatic day.

Little Naish is a peaceful place to begin a new chapter,

though with just over six acres of land,

Anne and Peter won't have much time to put their feet up.

Friends have come here and they've looked

horrified at the upkeep of this but I think it's not that daunting.

It's mostly grass.

Pete can handle grass with his sit-on mower.

Are you excited about it?

Oh, ecstatic. Just can't wait.

Mind you, we're looking at that

there's nothing that's going to go wrong.

It'll all go to plan.

Of course it will. Of course it will.

-Why wouldn't it?

-What is there to go wrong?

-Absolutely.

Exactly. What could possibly go wrong?

The biggest worry with any build is finance.

Peter and Anne sold their old house to buy Little Naish for £665,000.

But the restoration budget of £400,000 will be coming

out of their life savings.

Being on fixed pensions means they really can't afford to go

a penny over.

By the end of May, it's time to turn plans into action.

The restoration build starts with clearing the ground

and demolishing the extension.

Today is just magical.

To see that digger doing the first bit of scraping, magic.

Inside, the bad plaster needs to be removed.

I can see changes happening. It's already drier.

And some of the 20th century concrete floors have to go.

Really, it's got a buzz of excitement about it now so,

yes, things are moving forward.

Wonderful.

As rubble is removed, there's a discovery.

It's an old water tank.

Pete Brumsden is the contractor in charge of the build.

On a job like this there's lots of unknowns.

There'll be unknowns right the way

through from start to finish, I would think.

But when you're breaking the ground

you don't know what you're going to come across.

In the days before mains water, rain from the roof was

stored in this tank, then used for washing in the old kitchen.

It will have to be filled in and made safe,

which will be an extra job for Pete.

Inside, as the plaster comes down,

more worrying discoveries have come to light.

We've got two areas of rotten timber here.

One we've got in the base of the tower,

this piece here is just crumbling away, woodworm, rot.

Earlier on today, we were looking at this lintel to the kitchen

and we can see that it's quite rotten and it's damp,

so obviously has got to be renewed.

So this means this has got to be repaired, restored.

We've got to Acrow it, pull this out, put a new one in,

re-build the brickwork behind it.

I can see the noughts going onto the build cost as we speak.

We've also got to drop the ceilings to allow the services through it,

so that was another expense we didn't expect.

But, hell!

Peter was an engineer in his working life.

It's given him a good understanding of the tower's structural

issues and made him want a hi-tech heating system.

I'm interested in green energy and the way we can use that

for new builds and restorations, and this really lends itself.

Peter's opted for a ground source heating system.

If it works, it'll produce heat very cheaply,

but it's an ambitious scheme given the tight budget.

Peter and Anne are desperate to find out as much as possible

about their new home.

Who built it, when was that and why does it look like this?

We're going to do all we can to solve these mysteries

and discover the story behind Little Naish.

Our historian, Dr Kate Williams, will be delving

into the archives to track down the people and events from its past.

While architectural expert Kieran Long

searches for clues in the building itself.

Oh, this is just such a beautiful place.

It's like every romantic part of my brain is just firing.

Kind of these high, beautiful rubble stone walls,

roses blooming to one side, and in the distance you can just see

through the trees, the most perfect little Gothic tower.

Half-church tower, half-castle tower, so really what it is,

is just a kind of Gothic confection, brought together

and placed in the most romantic landscape you could imagine.

We do know a few things about Little Naish already.

There used to be a country mansion here called Naish House,

but Peter and Anne's tower is all that's left of that grand estate.

And we can date Little Naish to some time in the Victorian era

just by its style.

It's pure Gothic revival, at least on the outside.

You come through this beautiful door, and you come inside

and it's pretty, pretty plain in here, really.

Flags on the floor of irregular sizes and different shapes,

so this is a room for coming in with muddy boots on,

kicking them off and so on.

This is not a fine decorated place.

This tells us something very important about this building.

All of the effort, decoratively and architecturally,

is on the exterior, and inside it's pretty functional stuff,

and that tells you that was all about the building being seen in the

landscape by the important people who probably lived somewhere else.

Not being used by them inside.

The people who built this

probably never really came inside and used this building.

Which fits in with the idea that

this was once the head gardener's cottage.

These windows are more or less the only decorative

thing in the whole interior.

Everything else is very functional and very basic.

But this kind of style window is something that was very

important of course to the Gothic revival.

These mullions would in the medieval period have been used

because large sheets of glass were not possible to make.

Clearly by the Victorian period it was possible to make those,

but they still have this mullion window

just because it has all of that medieval character.

For the Victorians that was the point of the Gothic revival,

to make everything look like something from the Middle Ages.

The style here goes right to the top of the tower,

with a lead roof and battlements.

Yeah, so fantastic to be up here. So beautiful.

Such an amazing commanding position from the kind of little

platform with its battlements.

And what's really exciting is we can get kind up close and personal

with some of the details of this building,

which are these amazing bits of carved stone.

These are grotesques, of course, familiar to lots of people,

from the great Gothic cathedrals.

You know, opinion differs on what actually their meaning was,

but what they certainly were, were beautiful

moments of craftsmanship, of expression of a stonemason's art.

And in the 19th century when this building was built,

they were kind of discovering and enjoying all of that detail

and reproducing it in their own buildings.

But who was it that had Little Naish built in this style?

In order to find out, we need to discover who lived at Naish House

the country mansion at the heart of the estate.

It may not be easy, because today there's no sign of it.

To try to find out what happened,

Kate's gone to Clevedon Library to search the local newspaper archive.

Houses don't just disappear, fly off into the middle of nowhere.

There had to be a reason why Naish Estate had gone.

I found this fascinating report that makes everything clear.

A huge fire that ravished the estate in 1902.

In its great moment of grandeur it was wrecked and ruined.

Looking further, along with the newspaper clippings,

Kate's found two photographs of Naish House.

This is how it was left after the fire on Christmas Day 1902.

At that time, the big house was being rented by the Spencer family.

Just as Mr and Mrs Spencer were about to sit down to lunch

with their three children, a maid told them there was

smoke in one of the upper bedrooms.

And Mrs Spencer promptly telephoned to the volunteer fire

brigade in Clevedon.

They set out just before two o'clock and this manual engine,

they didn't have an actual steam-powered engine at the time,

it was a horse drawn cart set off to try and fight this fire.

And it says here the north-east angle of the building was

doomed, the roof was already off and it said the west wing was saved,

but all the rest of it was absolutely wrecked and destroyed.

Now Kate's searching further to find out what happened at Naish House

before 1902.

She's found a name, James Gordon.

He made a fortune from sugar plantations in the West Indies

and bought Naish House in 1785.

To the average British man, a sugar plantation owner was

rich beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

These men returned to Britain with huge fortunes and what they

wanted to do was create themselves into the local aristocracy.

The bought big aristocratic seats, big houses, huge

parcels of land to show themselves off as men who had arrived.

But James Gordon died years before Little Naish could have been built.

He did, however, have a son, James Adam Gordon.

He became High Sheriff of Somerset and made big changes at Naish House.

This is vital.

I've found here it says that Naish House was much enlarged

and decorated by James Adam Gordon in the florid

pseudo-Gothic of his time.

To me this is an absolute reference to the tower to Peter

and Anne's house, that Gothic look.

So now we know who built Peter and Anne's house, James Adam Gordon.

But when exactly that was is still unclear.

We need to dig deeper.

While Little Naish is restored,

Peter and Anne are living in a rented house nearby,

with most of the things from their old house still packed.

But almost every day they come to Little Naish.

Not just to keep up with developments,

but also to do what they can to help the work go smoothly.

The new extensions are to be faced with local stone

by mason Farrell Cooper.

But the heritage authorities have insisted he build a sample

wall first, so they can make sure it really will blend in with the old.

It's to show the colour of stone, the quality of stone,

the pointing, the mortar

and how well it matches the original building.

It's quite important to get the look right

and not make it look too modern.

They may be committed to the ideals of restoration,

but they still have to wait for their test wall to be approved.

Meanwhile, in the field next door...

..it looks as if Peter has recreated the Battle of the Somme.

This is all for his hi-tech ground source heating system.

It will collect heat from underground by circulating

water through a network of buried pipes.

When you weigh this up, it's a green solution.

It's a very cheap ongoing form of heat,

but the size, the actual involvement has quite startled us.

The problem is the network needs to be huge.

So far, it's taken a digger two

and a bit days to excavate 600 metres of trench at a cost of around

£5,500, which is far more than Peter budgeted.

We did expect it to be a large undertaking.

However, the amount of machinery required has been far

exceeded expectations, and therefore the cost has gone spiralling.

We have literally sunk our savings into this trench.

With a tight budget, Peter

and Anne will have to cut something else to pay for this overspend.

So they certainly can't afford any more surprises.

So far, our investigators Kate

and Kieran have discovered Naish House burnt down in 1902.

Its neo-Gothic style dates Little Naish to some

time in the century before that.

Now Kieran's come to the Somerset archives to try to get a more

accurate idea of when it was built.

He's found a map of the estate from 1824.

This map is really exciting because it's the earliest map we've found.

What we don't have is any evidence of Little Naish.

We've got Naish House, Naish Estate, but we don't have any Little Naish.

And so what we need to find next is a map where we can see it.

This is a map from 1872, so we now can see a building

outlined on the spot of Little Naish.

We know it is because it's surrounded by a very,

very beautifully drawn walled garden, so now we can

confidently date that Little Naish was built between 1824 and 1872.

There's more.

We already have pictures of Naish House after it was burnt down.

Now Kieran's discovered an earlier photograph.

At last, we can see what it looked like before the fire.

There's no other information with the photo,

so Kieran needs to decode the building.

This is obviously a Regency or Georgian house with this

kind of distinctive five bay and stone-dressed windows.

Now we know these houses from the late 18th century,

early 19th century, but it's been gothified.

Got a large monumental octagonal tower at one end,

complete with battlements,

and those battlements have been extended all the way across the

front of the facade and we end up with this bizarre, frankly, hybrid

of a country house which is half Regency Georgian and half Gothic.

While Naish House was being converted into Gothic,

Little Naish was being built from scratch in the Gothic style.

It might be that Little Naish was in fact the most beautiful

and purest architectural piece of the whole complex.

It's the beginning of September, and the heritage authorities have

approved Farrell the stonemason's test wall.

Now he can crack on.

This isn't the first time he's worked here.

I've been a stonemason for 20 years now.

My first job was up here with a local mason called Simon Cosnett,

and we came up here and we started restoring all the tower.

Quite strange coming back here, really.

Now, building a new wall to match the old is a different

kind of challenge.

This is a freshly quarried stone, so because of that, it's all been

guillotined to roughly the same size shapes.

Trying to match the size of stone.

You can break it and shape it.

It's called dressing the stonework, see,

making it match in and just dressing it into a certain shape.

It's like a jigsaw puzzle and you're trying to make a nice face

out of it, but you just learn by your mistakes and, you know,

when you start laying walls and you start getting into a style

and you know what stone you want to pick up, basically.

And then it just comes, it's like anything, like cutting hair or

writing a book, you just get into it and, you know, you get used to it.

It's your mark on the landscape, isn't it, so you want to

do as best as possible and it's your reputation on the line, you see.

Kate discovered that Little Naish was built by James Adam Gordon as a cottage for his head gardener.

To find out more about the role of a head gardener on a great estate,

she's come to the Royal Horticultural Society library in London.

Ideally I'd like to find out who was the gardener of Little Naish,

but that will be very difficult

as these kind of men don't always leave records behind them.

But what I find from here is what his job would have been like,

what his responsibilities were like and what an important

position it was to be the head gardener.

The library holds a large collection of Victorian gardening magazines.

The articles and advertisements show what was of interest back then.

Looking at all this, you can

see how vital gardens were to the Victorians.

They wanted beautiful flowers, wonderful vegetables

and they were willing to pay a lot of money for it.

An aristocrat ideally wanted two things from his garden.

Number one, beauteous landscapes,

so he could take people around on a lovely walk.

Number two, marvellous exotic fruits

so when everyone sat down to dinner he could whip out a pineapple.

So you really needed to get a good gardener onside

and people would poach them and fight over a good gardener.

Without records, we may never know the names of the head gardeners

who lived in Little Naish.

But Kate's still got one name to follow up, James Adam Gordon.

Back at the build, there have been some more unforeseen costs.

The structural engineer insisted on extra steelwork

to go into the foundations of the new kitchen.

And the rotten wooden beams they found need to be replaced

with steel joists.

Working from home, Peter is trying to keep a close eye on the invoices.

He's getting more and more worried.

Must have been a few weeks ago

and I did wake up in a cold sweat thinking, "What have we done?"

The nub is the unknown spending.

Peter, the builder, is getting things done which need to be done.

Just run the tape on it.

Right, what have you got?

But is it in the original budget? Is this extra?

How do I know?

Is he keeping an eye on my expenditure?

To that end we actually put together a list, gave it to Peter and the

nub of it is that if you're going to spend extra money, let us know.

Even when budgets are tight,

listed buildings have to be restored in accordance with strict rules.

Little Naish's new plasterwork must be put up with lime

plaster in the traditional way.

So we put a bit on that side, put a bit more on that side

and with the trowel, you bend it round.

Bill Flood has been working with lime plaster

since the age of 15 when he was an apprentice to his father.

It's a long time, 50 years.

Yeah, 50 years, so I'm getting the hang of it now.

These walls will need three coats and each coat can take more

than a week to dry, so lime plaster is not easy and it's not fast.

You can't rush this stuff, cos this lime is a natural product.

It's got its own life. It does its own thing.

It's not like plasterboard. It's a totally different ball game.

There's a big problem with using lime plaster at this

time of year, because as long as it's wet, it's vulnerable to frost.

If the temperature drops, the water in that will freeze.

And then when it does thaw out in summer or spring that will start

cracking, what they call shelling, and then it'll just come off.

That's a no-no.

This is, it's our deadliest enemy actually, frost and cold.

If the frost gets in and the plasterwork cracks,

it will all have to be done again.

There's still no heating in the house

so everyone has to hope the weather doesn't take a turn for the worse.

Kieran found out that Little Naish was built in the gothic

revival style in order to match the renovations done on Naish House

by James Adam Gordon.

As Naish House burnt down in 1902,

it's impossible to know what it was really like.

However, not far away is a house that could tell us that.

It's the neogothic masterpiece of Tyntesfield House.

This house is in fact just like Naish House was - two houses in one.

You've got this amazing Victorian fantasy that we see here now,

but behind it is in fact an older house,

a Georgian house that was the original.

This is well over-the-top compared to what we saw Naish House have,

but it gives you an idea of what they were dreaming of.

The Gothic exterior is just a taste of what lies inside.

I mean, this hall is just crazy.

It's just so huge that the scale of it is almost absurd.

I think that's one thing I love about this style.

When we look at Naish House and the history of it,

we don't know what James Adam Gordon's interiors were like,

and maybe we'll never know that, but this is the kind of thing

that was at the kind of top of the tree of his aspirations.

This was an interpretation of the Gothic,

an interpretation of how to impress the hell out of your friends.

And it's an interpretation of how to do interior furnishings

in a medieval style that James Adam Gordon would have

been thinking about while planning his own home.

The question remains...

..why were the Victorians so obsessed with the Gothic style?

They used it everywhere, from the Houses of Parliament...

..to St Pancras railway station.

Well, I think we have to see the Gothic Revival as a major

intellectual current in Victorian society.

If you were well-read, you would have looked at this style and thought,

"No, there's something in this that speaks to me as an industrialist,

"as a man of the future, as a man of money and of capital.

"I need something that represents another set of values,"

and the medieval style did it for them.

And I think that's an interesting quirk of this neogothic style

that you end up, therefore, with a gardener's cottage

made into something like a medieval castle keep.

But was James Adam Gordon one of those well-read thinkers,

or does Little Naish look like this just

because that was the style of the day?

Kieran and Kate need to find out more.

So far, Anne and Peter's restoration of Little Naish has been

dogged by unexpected problems and costs.

-How are you?

-'When many retired couples might be slowing down,

'they've resolutely been on-site almost every day.

'I've come back to see how they're bearing up.'

When I last saw you, you had no plans to be sort of hands on,

and you're here all the time.

Have you enjoyed that part of the process? Cos you had no intention of doing that.

No, I look forward to coming here every day and I even don't mind making teas and coffees.

-You do that all day?

-All day, three times a day.

For about a dozen people sometimes.

That one's Bill's.

'It adds up to a lot tea bags and sugar,

'with various trades on-site as the work progresses.'

-Has this been a fun place to work?

-Yeah, it's good with all the angles

and the falls in the floors that I've got to get over. It's good. Bit different.

-It's quite unusual, isn't it?

-Yeah, it is unusual, yeah.

Very interesting, though. Interesting old property.

'Peter is rapidly becoming one of the boys.

'Determined to keep the build moving ahead,

'he's lined up a number of jobs for himself.'

So I was talking to the tiler this morning and I'm going to be his mate.

Can't be bad, can it?

Sounds awful to me, I have to say! Can't think of anything worse.

-It's the half past seven starts which worry me.

-Yeah, yeah!

I thought the idea was that you were retired

and you would watch this from a distance with your feet up?

Well, I don't think quite with the feet up,

but yes, we did plan on sort of not being quite

so heavily involved, but it's just caught us and we just get involved

and yeah, you just go deeper and deeper, don't you?

'Peter's approach isn't just about enthusiasm.

'Mucking in hastens the time

'when the couple start the new chapter of their lives.'

You seem to love, I mean, every aspect of this, but I also get

a sense of actually what you really love is making Anne happy.

Oh, yeah. She's my life, period.

She's had a pretty traumatic life

and I want to make up for that for her if I can.

-Psychologically, I feel that the sooner Anne is living here, the better, really.

-Oh, yeah.

-Do you think that?

-Yes, yeah, very much so.

The sooner we're living here, the better all round, from relaxation...

-Peace, yeah, yeah.

-..peace, quiet, just enjoying the space.

-Yes, yeah.

Despite the inevitable surprises and extra costs of restoration,

Peter and Anne seem well on the way to living in their new home.

In mid-November, there's a shocking setback

for everyone at Little Naish.

In the dead of night, thieves have broken in.

Anne and Peter are devastated.

He's come to check the damage.

The burglars' target seems to have been

the lead on the roof of the tower.

Basically, what they've done is they've lifted the flashing,

they've taken the whole surface of this area.

Once they've stripped it and peeled it, they pushed it over the parapet,

we think, and it went, and it clipped this stone as it went.

That fell below and then on the way down it clipped

the edge of the roof on the lounge bay, which is the only stone bay

which is of value, and done the damage down there.

It's now got a waterproof membrane on it to protect the building,

but had water started getting into the tower through this roof,

they'd have had thousands of pounds worth of damage.

The thieves weren't just after the lead.

Pete has lost hundreds of pounds worth of equipment.

I'm not very happy that we've got to replace tools, cos no matter

what insurance you've got, you never get it covered, and this, we lost

a complete day, three blokes lost a day having to try and make security.

And we've got a container there now that we've got to put stuff in.

It's just appalling, really, why somebody thinks

they can just have your stuff,

they're entitled to take your stuff, it's just totally frustrating.

The problem now is that we fear the second visit,

because they will think something's been fixed.

They've seen what's in the building, they've seen the copper work,

they've seen all the electrical wiring installed.

We've put in security measures now, high-degree security measures.

We know they're going to come back on another visit, and have to wait and see.

It's a terrible blow, and living in fear is anything

but the new chapter Peter hoped for.

Kate found out that James Adam Gordon was the man

responsible for building Little Naish in the Gothic style.

She also discovered he held the position of High Sheriff

for the county of Somerset, which is why she's come to the Houses of Parliament.

I'm here in the Parliamentary Archives

because we know James Adam Gordon was a high sheriff, and this is a

place in which records about people of power and influence are stored.

Well, this is great, because for the first time

from this 1841 census, I know he was living at two houses.

He was also living in Hertfordshire.

And what I found here is not only that James Adam Gordon was living

there, but also that apparently he was a friend of Sir Walter Scott,

the great Victorian novelist, and that Scott visited him there.

Gordon's friendship with Scott makes Peter

and Anne's house more significant than we thought.

Because Sir Walter Scott was hugely influential.

In fact, the entire Gothic Revival began on the pages of his novels.

The Victorians idolised Scott.

His monument still dominates the centre of Edinburgh.

He was made a baronet and became the first multi-millionaire novelist.

He used his fortune to build himself a great Gothic mansion - Abbotsford,

in the Scottish Lowlands - currently undergoing its own restoration.

Walter Scott is critical to the Gothic Revival.

If you think of a novel like Ivanhoe which still today is

probably our dream of the medieval, courtly kind of life, but then

just as it is now, that formed people's idea of this medieval life.

And it was an idealistic world, it was a beautiful world,

it was a just world, and in a way, he was forming those ideas here.

And he was conversing with the great intellectuals and powerful

men of the day to try and communicate those ideas, not just

as a style but as a whole way of seeing the world, a whole idealised,

political structure as well as an architectural and design mode.

So if James Adam Gordon was one of that group,

what does it mean for Little Naish?

There are two ways to look at the Gothic.

One is it's dressing up in medieval clothes.

The other one is a much more serious, deep intellectual

enquiry for which medieval sources are the inspiration.

I think James Adam Gordon's link with this place shows that he was serious about those ideas.

You don't come and visit Walter Scott without participating

in the discussion about what those medieval sources really meant.

To me, this is like the wellspring of the ideas that generated Little Naish.

At Little Naish, the entire team has rallied round after

the shock of the burglary.

It's coming up to Christmas.

The site is a hive of activity, and Anne's on tea duty again.

-The tea lady...

-There you go.

-Oh, thank you, darling.

There's a really good mood on the site.

Everybody's really, really purposefully doing stuff,

and it just takes lots of cups of tea to keep them going.

There's a serious reason behind the frantic activity.

Since the burglary, everyone's been worried the thieves could come back.

The thing now is we've got two weeks until the Christmas build break

starts and that's two weeks' holiday.

So everybody's trying to seal the building.

The glass arrives next week to seal the back bit, and we'll all

feel a lot easier then, cos I mean they're putting cabling up,

plastering up, skilful jobs, and it could all be ripped out by a vandal.

So everybody's really pushing on now to seal and secure the building.

Anne was particularly upset by the burglary,

so now she's doing what she can to hurry the work on.

There are hundreds of things you could do at home in the warm,

but making tea here seems a bit more important at the moment.

Where have they gone?

If there's any coffee left in this cup by the time I finish, it'll be amazing.

Peter is also busy on-site.

He's volunteered himself to paint wood preservative

on the cedar that will become the exterior cladding.

And there's lots of it.

This is my third day.

Yeah, so it's all valuable time saved on the build,

cos if I'm doing this, they're doing something else which is more beneficial to the end product.

Farrell the stonemason is now tackling one of the most

skilled parts of the restoration.

When Peter and Anne bought Little Naish, one of the bay windows

had the original stonework, but the other was a UPVC replacement.

It had to go, and now the masons are busy carving new windows.

To match the old windows, they must be done in Bath stone.

I love Bath stone. Definitely is one of the best building things.

It's durable, flexible, you get a great finish on it,

it gets better with age, I think.

Bath stone is relatively soft.

It can even be cut with a wood saw.

But there is a downside to that.

You can make a mistake quite easy if you're not careful.

You've got to know what you're doing,

cos otherwise, all your hard work can be damaged in seconds.

And now the masons are working against the clock.

Like everyone else, they're determined to get the house

safe and secure in time for Christmas.

Our investigation into the Gothic Revival style has revealed

Little Naish is the real deal.

It was built by James Adam Gordon, a man of taste and intellect,

in touch with the people and ideas behind the whole Gothic Revival movement.

But it seems there was a darker side to his character.

Kate has dug up the records from when he was High Sheriff of Somerset.

The Lord High Sheriff was essentially in charge of law and order

and decreeing what was fair and unfair and administering the law.

And it was a position that wasn't paid,

but it gave you a huge amount of power.

While he was High Sheriff, James Adam Gordon made one

judgment in particular that has gone down in history.

I found this incredible account of the last public

execution at the scene of the crime in Britain.

The Kenn Hangings of 1830.

This was a big scandal about illegal cider selling.

Essentially, selling cider without a licence.

Six men were given the death penalty at the local jail and

they weren't just given the death penalty, it would be much worse.

In those days, the judge had complete freedom when it came to sentencing.

James Adam Gordon chose an outdated punishment that went back centuries.

On the morning of the execution, the men travelled with their coffins

for six hours back to the village of Kenn, where the crime took place.

Normally, scaffolds were erected with a drop trap, but in this case,

James Adam Gordon said that a farm wagon should be used instead.

The difference was that with a drop trap, you got a broken neck, so it was a pretty swift death.

With the farm wagon, it was death by strangulation.

It was long, it was drawn out and very painful.

When I was first looking into James Adam Gordon, it seemed very likely

he was just another rich man of his time,

but this now shows us a man who was very different.

The story tells us a lot about James Adam Gordon.

He's not a man of mercy. He's not a man of kindness.

He's taking the law to the absolute extreme.

So James Adam Gordon believed in punishments that,

like his taste in architecture, went back to the Middle Ages.

Back at Little Naish, things are going well.

The house remained secure over Christmas,

and even though the weather has deteriorated,

the lime plaster was finished and dry before it changed.

With the plaster done,

Daryl the carpenter can get on with the skirting board.

The plasterer's rounded corners pose a challenge.

What we don't want to do is that, really.

That ain't going to work.

So what we have to do,

we try and get the curvature with regards to the skirting.

We've kind of got to guess the angle, and it's a bit of trial and error.

So I've made several cuts there.

It's pretty close, it's not perfect,

but a little bit more fiddling around and I'll get that spot on.

The interiors may still look rough,

but this restoration is now in the home straight.

It's still a dream. It's still a dream that we're actually doing it.

Is that Ian? Where would you like your drink?

Intravenous!

One finger.

'It looks like a home already.'

Yeah, I'm quite happy with that now.

Once that's painted up, that'll just look like a sweeping curve.

Before we discover whether Anne

and Peter have managed to give Little Naish a happy ending, they're

going to find out all that we have about their fairy tale castle.

It's been a really exciting journey for me.

There's this huge fire in Naish House on Christmas Day, 1902.

Oh, yes.

That's fascinating.

KIERAN: What we found were some photos of the house before the fire.

-Ours is quite tiny compared to that huge mansion.

-Yes.

And the most exciting thing we found out of all

about James Adam Gordon is that he was friends

with Sir Walter Scott, the great Gothic novelist.

They visited one another's houses.

It's just unbelievable.

I'm absolutely amazed at the link with Sir Walter Scott.

Your mind will drift now.

If you had Sir Walter Scott and his enclave coming along, who else went?

-Yeah.

-Now, why we felt that it was a magical place, it makes sense now.

-Yes, that's right.

We walk in the steps of history, darling.

THEY LAUGH

Anne and Peter began restoring their crumbling miniature castle

in May 2012,

and now I can't wait to see how they've got on.

When they bought Little Naish, it had stood empty for 24 years,

with disastrous consequences.

Plaster was crumbling...

woodworm and rot were destroying vital timbers...

..and water was penetrating.

But now...

..it's been saved.

-Hello.

-Hello.

-Hi.

-How are you?

I can't quite believe how different this place is!

THEY LAUGH

The place is looking so beautiful.

-Thank you.

-It's amazing, isn't it?

The last time I was here, this was like the Somme.

Everything was covered in mud and water.

-Thanks for the memories!

-Yeah! Does it feel like a distant memory?

-It does.

-Yes, it does.

We could be in an Italian courtyard.

-We can't afford the fountain!

-THEY LAUGH

-I mean, this stone work is a triumph, isn't it?

-Yes.

-Yes.

He's done this marvellous job in producing this stonework to

match the original, just astonishing.

It's a transformation, isn't it?

Yes. It's a rescue as well.

Anne and Peter's sitting room was a barren void of rafters and peeling walls.

The concrete floor had to come up, and the original stone window

had been replaced with an ugly modern plastic version.

Now things couldn't be more different.

Yes!

Oh, it's lovely!

It's really good.

It's very simple and relaxing, isn't it?

It is. This is such a comfortable room.

Ah, look what I've just seen.

It's a perfect little desk.

-Are you going to write your memoirs here?

-I am, actually.

-"Dear Mr Darcy..."

-THEY LAUGH

And the window is a triumph, isn't it?

Yes, it's idyllic.

Stonemason, Farrell, dedicated himself to ensuring Little Naish

looks good once again, with stunning results.

To watch that skill and craftsmanship,

you don't get that very often.

And now they're part of your house, those wonderful trades.

-It'll always be here.

-That's right.

In the tower bedroom,

the plaster had long since given up on the walls.

It took weeks of craftsmanship to replace it.

Oh! It's lovely.

It's much bigger than I thought.

Surprising.

The plastering is exceptionally good, isn't it?

It is. And I love the way he's got the curves.

It is sill the princess's bedroom, isn't it, this?

I think so. She's spent a lot of time up here rearranging things.

It's indisputably a romantic building, this.

It's just unique.

The tower is the piece de resistance, isn't it, really?

-It's just magical.

-Yeah.

The second bedroom in the tower is a haven for visiting grandchildren.

And there's more.

The decrepit extension is gone.

In its place is a new unit, clad in the cedar

so painstakingly treated by Peter.

It houses two further simple but stylish bedrooms for Anne

and Peter and for their guests.

Outside, where First World War-like trenches were dug to

accommodate eco-friendly heating, there's now level ground

and plans to make a beautiful meadow.

But...

..the most ambitious part of the whole plan was an entirely new

kitchen/diner built from steel and glass.

And this is...perfect, isn't it?

Absolutely beautiful.

And this really is what this house is about, isn't it?

The new, the old...

..the inside, and then the great outdoors.

Really, the dream was sort of to live in the garden, wasn't it?

-It is amazing how much vision you have.

-Yeah.

What I really love is that you've got this huge, open,

modern glass expanse.

And then you look back here,

and you can pass underneath the beautiful old arch.

-I mean, it's really wonderful, isn't it?

-It is.

Will you ever move out of this house?

-No.

-I don't think we will.

I think we've saved the property, but it has done us a huge favour in return.

-We've kept this building going for another 100 years or so.

-It's kept you going.

-Kept us going!

-It has.

And how do you see the next few years?

We have a three-year plan to get the garden back to nature

and bring it to a Victorian-type style.

-Doing it together?

-Yeah.

I get a real buzz out of growing things and dividing them

and getting the seed and getting all this for nothing.

We invested most of our life savings in the property,

but what an outcome.

-Yeah, we're very happy.

-Yeah, I'd go along with that.

-Yeah, very happy.

Everything about this place is like a fairy tale.

A beautiful castle built by a rich and powerful man,

now in ruins and in desperate need of rescuing.

Enter our two valiant heroes,

battling the odds to achieve their dream.

Peter and Anne have poured everything into this fairy tale

to try and make it have the happy ending it so richly deserves.

Now, it's time for them to sit back and enjoy themselves.

Or not.

On the next Restoration Home,

an old Scottish school house falling to rack and ruin.

It was not going to be long before it started coming apart at the seams.

Once the heart of a small rural community,

now two friends are giving their all to save it.

It just takes over your life.

Completely and utterly takes over your life.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd