Talk:Ightham Mote
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I was fortunate enough to work at this beautiful house a few years ago. It therefore falls to me to challenge the idea that the skeleton of a woman was found at the house.
It turns out that the skeleton was found by builders carrying out work in the Great Hall, one of the most important and often-used rooms in the house. While unbricking a cupboard to the right of the fireplace they discovered a skeleton of a young woman, believed to be Dame Dorothy Selby, a 17th Century owner of the house, who was murdered as punishment for uncovering the Gunpowder Plot.
Sadly, there are holes in the story.
1) Dame Dorothy Selby died an old woman some 36 years after the plot was disclosed, and is buried in a nearby churchyard (in fact, a rubbing of her tombstone is hanging in the hallway just beyond the Great Hall).
2) If you are going to wall someone up, here's a tip- use a room people are unlikely to use.
3) If the rumours are to be believed, the skeleton was found on Boxing Day. Boxing Day was a traditional day for playing practical jokes in Victorian times. And two of the gentlemen staying in the house that year were medical students....
4) Dame Dorothy was a notoriously prolific seamstress. Her memorial says that she was a woman 'whose art disclosed that Plot' which might have started the whole "walling-up" story, but in 17th Century English it means simply that it was depicted in her needlework.
5) The skeleton was found seated in a chair. If you were walled up, would you sit calmly, waiting for the end, or would you claw desperately at the walls, trying to loosen a brick?
6)It has also been suggested that she was found in the dungeon in the base of the tower. Well, there ISN'T a dungeon in the tower, but there IS a really spooky cell-type room accessible only through a trapdoor... Sadly, it's just a building void left after work done on the tower in the 19th Century, a little after Dame Dorothy's day!
The prosecution rests.
(But there are plenty of other ghosts at Ightham Mote... go and visit this summer. It is a breathtakingly beautiful house!)
