A census-taker came up the hill 120 years ago this week to count people on the Sandy Lodge estate. He followed the long drive through the woods up to the mansion house, where he listed in residence that night Arthur Wellesley Peel, Speaker of the House of Commons, his five grown-up children, a butler, footman, coachman and six maids.
Here at the entrance of the estate stands a gatehouse, the original lodge occupied by Peel 30 years before as a mere MP. It had been built for his older brother William, a naval captain who picked up a live cannonball and threw it overboard during the Crimean war. This act of heroism earned Captain Peel the Victoria Cross. Two years of peace followed for him in this Bedfordshire retreat, then war in India took him away to an early death.
The gatehouse is a piece of early Victorian kitsch, a Swiss-style brick building clad with a wooden lattice of white crosses and dark timber rectangles, and a ridiculous but endearing balcony. At the time of the census, the house had been subdivided to provide homes for two gardeners – noted as "domestic servants" – and their families.
Early in the morning, the shutters are closed behind the mullioned windows and no amount of knocking will bring anyone to the door. Only later today will the shutters be opened on the books, binoculars and bird feeders of an RSPB shop. Last summer I was handed one of the previous occupants of the gatehouse, a mummified corpse in a cardboard sarcophagus.
Last night I opened the lid for the first time this year to see my long-eared bat again. Its skull is smaller than a spent acorn, legs and ribs pin-thin. I had half-forgotten the shredded appearance of its spread wings, looking much like decaying leaves from the autumn. Its little body was found during routine maintenance in the roof space. Its descendants live there still and no doubt its ancestors flitted out on that April night in 1891, unseen and unrecorded.