Finding Wyld Hall

For me, everything seems to begin with a story. That’s certainly how I found Wyld Hall. 

In 2017, I travelled overseas with my eldest daughter. We based ourselves at a friend’s house in London and set out on day trips from there. Towards the end of the trip, we took a train to Bristol with plans to hire a car, drive through the Cotswolds, and then head up to visit family in Cambridge before flying home. The idea was that we’d just get lost soaking up the beautiful English countryside. 

Unfortunately, for reasons I still can’t quite explain, I was alarmingly fixated on the possibility of actually becoming lost, and also driving in a foreign country. It felt as though I were about to embark on the most difficult thing I’d ever attempt. By the time we exited Temple Meads Station and walked to the car hire place, I was wound tighter than a new clock. It didn’t help matters that they’d assigned me a brand-new Mercedes-Benz. Nothing says confidence-building experience quite like being handed an expensive luxury vehicle and pointed toward Bristol traffic.

Still, I eased myself into the driver’s seat, set the navigation system, straightened my spine into the rigidity of a steel rod, and slowly exited the Hertz lot with my fingers blanched white around the steering wheel. My poor daughter sat hunkered in the passenger seat under strict instructions to watch the GPS screen and warn me about anything approaching in advance — particularly roundabouts, which I regarded as less a traffic feature and more a form of psychological warfare.

For a few glorious minutes, things were fine.

Then Bristol traffic swallowed us whole and the navigation woman became trapped in an endless rerouting loop. Chaos immediately announced itself. Horns blared. Cars accelerated around me. I barked panicked questions at my daughter while she responded with increasingly exasperated instructions. Traffic picked up speed. My blood pressure followed suit.

Finally, I just ended up yelling: “Shut that woman up! I'm just following the car in front!" 

Irrational? Absolutely! 

But in that moment, it genuinely felt like the safest available option, so I committed wholeheartedly. I simply latched onto the car ahead and pursued them through Bristol with the intensity of Cruella de Vil chasing dalmatians (at this point, let me say that if you were that driver on a sunny April day in 2017, with a slightly frantic woman in a blue Mercedes glued to your rear bumper—please accept my sincerest apologies. I hope you recovered emotionally). 

At some point we crossed over (or around—I was too flustered to properly register which way) the Avon Gorge, and I remember thinking I really needed to pull over, reset the GPS, and regain control of the situation. But before I could, a large brown sign flashed past. I didn’t catch the wording, but I recognised the National Trust logo — perhaps the only UK road sign I fully understood. 

Let me just say, I think I took that corner on two wheels let out a whoosh of breath as moments later I found myself toddling along the long drive of Tyntesfield Manor enjoying not so much the scenery as the effects of a lowering blood pressure. And just like that, everything shifted. It felt strangely serendipitous, as though all that chaos had delivered me exactly where I was supposed to be.. 

I had never heard of Tyntesfield before, but as we paid our tickets and entered the house I discovered it had once been the home to the Gibbs family. My maiden name was Gibbs. Honestly, it was enough to send me wandering the house with a completely unearned sense of belonging, as though I possessed some distant claim on the place. The entire afternoon became an exercise in imagining my alternate aristocratic life: drifting through rooms and histories that absolutely did not belong to me. 

Then I reached a staircase lined with ancestral portraits. 

At first, it was all harmless imagination—until I noticed something unsettling: several of the faces bore a striking resemblance to members of my own family. Suddenly, I experienced a distinctly irrational feeling that I’d somehow been cheated out of something I was meant to inherit. 

Weeks later, after arriving home, I scurried off  to visit my grandparents and to interrogate my pop about our family tree. More specifically,  if there had been any wealthy branches of the family. 

Apparently, somewhere far back, there had been. It was a moment in which I felt both vindicated and personally shortchanged and utterly convinced Tyntesfield should have been mine. Since legal ownership was unlikely, I settled for stealing her fictionally instead. 

And so Wyld Hall was born… the setting is actually a blend of two homes, Tyntesfield and Burwalls, which sits on the edge of the Avon gorge, beside the Leigh woods. 

I suppose if there’s a lesson to be found in this story, it’s this: never be the driver in front of me when I’m lost and panicked. But more than that, to know that things don’t really go wrong—life just has a way of rerouting you towards something better.