The house is built of sandstone to a double-pile plan, and is of two storeys with gables above. The eastern, entrance, front may once have been symmetrical with a northern wing matching the southern one. Historic England's listing states that the wing was constructed but later torn down, while Pevsner suggests that it may never have been built. The windows are mullioned and the roof has an "impressive row of six diamond-shaped red brick chimney stacks".

The interior is retained as it was in the time of the Kiplings. The study is almost as Kipling left it, although without the "pungent aroma" of his forty-a-day Turkish cigarette habit. The house contains a significant collection relating to Kipling, amounting to nearly 5,000 individual pieces, including his Nobel Prize, his Rolls-Royce Phantom I, many oriental items he purchased while living in India or touring in the East and paintings he collected by Edward Poynter, Edward Burne-Jones and James Whistler.

The garden was created by Kipling from 1907, using the prize money from his award of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The house is a Grade I listed building, the highest grade reserved for buildings of "exceptional interest".

Rudyard Kipling's home at Burwash, powered 10 light bulbs for lighting of his private home - all powered by a dynamo driven by a watermill adaptation.

Bateman's is a 17th-century house located in Burwash, East Sussex, England. It was the home of Rudyard Kipling from 1902 until his death in 1936. The house was built in 1634. Kipling's widow Caroline bequeathed the house to the National Trust on her death in 1939. The house is a Grade I listed building.

It’s easy to see why Kipling fell in love with Bateman’s. This is a quietly stunning corner of Sussex. The surrounding silence and undulating views are reminiscent of sleepy days gone by and the house and its grounds have an air of melancholy. The team at Bateman’s are keen to impress on you that it feels as if the family are just in the other room. And it does. But not just because it is laid out exactly as it was when the family lived here. There’s just something about it that hangs heavy with all the romance, elegance, uncertainty, and sorrow of the Edwardian era and WWI.

The house is set in 300 acres within the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It’s an area that is pretty much as it was at the time and it was the setting and inspiration for some of Kipling’s work. There are a series of walks you can do within the estate which are all about 2 to 2 ½ miles and include Puck’s Walk in celebration of Puck of Pook’s Hill, the Ironmaster’s Walk and a walk to Burwash village via Dudwell Farm. Dudwell River runs through the grounds.

The gardens stretch over 12 acres and include the orchard and vegetable garden which greet you on arrival as well as the walled Mulberry Garden. In early June, sweat peas, clematis, daisies and rudbeckia wave as you pass and the arched dome of a pergola frames the sky.

ABOUT KIPLING

Kipling was born in 1865 in Bombay where he lived until he was sent home to an unhappy period of schooling aged 5. He returned to India in 1882 where he worked for local newspapers and began his writing career. He left India in 1889 and travelled via Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and America (where he met Mark Twain) before settling in London.

In 2018, Burwash Parish Council commissioned a bronze cast statue of Kipling by Victoria Atkinson which you’ll find in the village.

A water turbine was installed side by side with a water wheel, the installation being far less demanding than the wooden wheel, but gravity providing the potential difference as height. The energy being released through a turbine, thence to a shaft that went through the wall of the adjacent shed. The shaft turning a pulley and belt system, that finally turned the DC dynamo, that powered up to ten light bulbs inside Rudyard Kipling's house.

WATER MILL

There is a water mill on the estate, powered by water from the River Dudwell. The earliest reference to a mill relates to its construction between 1246 and 1248, and first mentioned with the name 'Park' in 1618. The present mill was built between 1751 and 1753, and extended in the 1830s. It became part of the Bateman's estate in the late 19th-century. By Kipling's time, the mill was no longer in operation and he installed an electric turbine in the mill to provide power for the house. The mill was restored by the Trust in 1975, and again between 2017 and 2020. The mill is itself Grade II listed.

RUDYARD KIPLING

By the early twentieth century, the house had descended to the status of a farmhouse, and was in a poor state of repair. The Kiplings first saw it in 1900, on returning to England from America, following the death of their daughter Josephine in 1899 and a disastrous falling-out between them and Carrie Kipling's brother, Beatty Balestier. Enchanted by the house, they were too slow in making an offer and it was let for two years. In 1902, they were able to purchase it, with 33 acres of land, from a wealthy stockbroker, Alexander Carron Scrimgeour.

In 1900, Kipling was the most famous author in England, and was earning £5,000 per year; the cost of Bateman's, £9,300, was thus entirely affordable. Kipling wrote some of his finest works at the house including: "If—", "The Glory of the Garden", and Puck of Pook's Hill, named after the hill visible from the house. The house's setting and the wider local area features in many of his stories. Kipling's poem "The Land" is inspired by the Bateman's estate.

Kipling's only son, John, was killed at the Battle of Loos on 29 September 1915. Kipling died on 18 January 1936, of peritonitis. Carrie died three years later, in 1939. Under the terms of her will the house passed to the National Trust.

The Bateman’s estate consists of 300 acres of beautiful High Weald Countryside. Set within the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, this landscape is classically medieval; full of small fields, hedgerows, old trees, abandoned iron ore pits, hidden ponds and magical deserted trackways. The River Dudwell runs through the valley and there are seemingly endless magnificent views, making the Bateman’s estate the perfect place for a daily walk. 

WHAT HAS BATEMAN'S IN COMMON WITH THE GENERATING STATION AT HERSTMONCEUX - They are both on the same monument protection programme with Historic England.

When Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, the dig was not much to look at. A lot of sand and a small entrance, amongst a desert of dunes. But once inside, the small chamber, the Egyptologist realised that the monument was intact. Hence was a treasure trove.

The old Generating Works in Lime Park is not of outstanding design or construction, seen above in 2013 and 2016, re-roofed. The astonishing fact is that it remains extant, where others have been demolished by property developers, or rotted away. Indeed, many former residents in Lime Park, and two recent newcomers, have not grasped that this is all that is left as evidence of our transition from coal, to electricity. The only example surviving anywhere on the planet of its kind, including load levelling via a giant battery store proportional to the enterprise, comprising roughly half of the building, with substantial shelves where weighty glass lead-acid batteries were stored, to power the whole village of Herstmonceux, and Lime Part estate, overnight. 

The buildings have no reasonable or beneficial use, the local authority appear to be doing all they can to prevent conservation. Placing manifold obstacles in the way, where they should be helping those interested in restoring the historic asset, to achieve that ideal - as part of their duty to protect local heritage.

Rudyard Kipling's Batemans, is included (with Herstmonceux Generating Station) on Step 4 of a Monument Protection Programme (MPP) undertaken on behalf of English Heritage (now Historic England) - for East Sussex.

You can visit the record at TheKeep, in person or via their online search service. Or see HER, the Historic Environment Record of East Sussex County Council.

LINKS & REFERENCE

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