Guy’s Cliffe, Warwickdetails

“The Coventry road to Guy’s Cliffe is a royal and a literary road. Kings, queens, princes, poets, painters and authors have trodden it; also that luckless King’s favourite, Piers Gaveston, whose comely head fell from his shoulders upon Blacklow Hill, a few yards from the Cliffe, on 27th June, 1312, by order of that grim Earl of Warwick whom he in sport had called the ‘Black Hound of Arden’. And this is not all. [...] And there, looking westward down a long avenue of Scotch firs, forming a picture-like theatre almost unexampled in England, is the romantic abode of Guy’s Cliffe – the ancestral seat of the Greatheeds, the Berties, the Percys, and now the possession and home of Lord Algernon Percy, brother of the Duke of Northumberland.” (pp 28,29)