,Inscribed with title and signature on the back.
Copyright Simon Marsden / Marsden Archive.

'Thomas Becket was cruelly murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 by four knights. One of this knights was William de Tracy, who owned estates at Sudeley and Toddington.

Built by Charles Hanbury, the first Lord Sudeley, in 1820 it replaced an earlier mansion of the Tracys, who had lived here for almost one thousand years of uninterrupted succession. He had no doubt of his family's guilt, even commissioning statues of the murder to be placed above the main doors, and he covered the rest of this fantastic building with horrifying figures and grotesque gargoyles, many now fiendishly staring from beneath intricate spiders' webs.
This house of horror is said to be full of secret passages below eerie halls and magnificent stained glass windows. The fourth earl was bankrupted and forced to sell the estate in 1901, and it then changed hands several times before becoming and exclusive school for children until its eventual closure in 1985.

A local story tells of the nightmarish figure of a man, half flesh and half skeleton, which is said one night to have terrified two robbers who ran screaming from the grounds - interestingly, legend says that Sir William Tracy died of leprosy during a crusade of repentance in the Holy Land and tore the rotting flesh from his own bones. Having obtained permission to photograph the outside of the building from the warden I found that I did not want to stay too long: this is the monument to a haunted lineage and a unique memorial to the Gothic Genre.'

Extract from Simon Marsden, 'Phantoms of the Isles. Further Tales from the Haunted Realm', 1990, P.125.