Hope Montgomery Scott, Ardrossan, and The Philadelphia Story
Sunday, February 1, 2009
I had every intention, yesterday, of staying home in a state of mini-collapse (hey, I thought, I'd earned it), and besides, it was still so cold outside, and besides, my car was iced in. But the sun was brittle bright and therefore the sky was interesting, and by 3 PM, having at last cleared my desk of work, I was out on my hunt for photographs.
By 4:15, I was here, at Ardrossan. Hope Montgomery Scott (recreated on the stage and on film as The Philadelphia Story's Tracy Lord) lived here. Cole Porter, Cecil Beaton, Katharine Hepburn came to visit. Black cows took their time on the hills. Horses were ridden, and loved. And while much of the original 750 acres of the estate has been parcelled out to modern wealth and tall deer fences, there is still this view, which had to have been Mrs. Scott's view, of the land beneath a setting sun—the ice turned blue and the trees black and missing an apparent dimension.
There is something to letting history stay where history was made. Something to the way land contains a person's essence. Something to turning a corner and being stopped by the kind of beauty that the land alone can yield.
