In its heyday the Italian Villa that was Silk-Farr House had well-manicured lawns, delightful flower beds, a boating lake, a tropical glasshouse, a tennis court, a splendid water fall, and even a hermitage with a paid recluse. (After sneaking out of the grounds for an unreclusive pint in the My Full Moon the recluse decided never to return.) In the 1930s Sir Isaac Silk-Farr organised children's fetes in the grounds and rough-hewn villagers and smooth-tongued scions of the Somerset gentry played croquet together in an idyll of late Edwardian-style convivality!
The grounds of Silk-Farr House were initially laid out in geometrical form. This was replaced by the 'natural' style of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, which in turn gave way to a wild romantic 'picturesque' look. 'Mona Lot' from number sixty-nine Woodhedge Road (it turned out that there was no number sixty-nine in Woodhedge Road) wrote a stinging letter to the Bath & Wilting. It said "the time had come to talk truth to power" and ended with the ringing line: "For Farr-Silk's Sake make your mind up, Sir Isaac! The grounds of your Italian Villa cannot be symmetrical and natural and 'picturesque' within the space of two decades!"
In its twilight years Silk-Farr House hit on hard times. Even in its hey-day the much trumpeted
warm-air heating system had never been all that efficient (especially in the servants' rooms) and even Miss Silk-Farr's own quarters were said to be "as cold as a prefab kitchen on a February morning in 1947." The gas lamps on the gravel drive glowed ever fainter, and the residents of the neighbouring prefab estate had a sense of an evening coming in which would light none of the Italian Villa's once glittering lights. Locked away in the vaults of Bath's Victoria Art Gallery is a painting called The Lady Of The Italian Villa by an artist whose nom de brush was 'The Tristan Tzara of Twiverton'. It shows the much talked about scene of Miss Silk-Farr stumbling across the prostrate form of her Firewood-Chopper-In-Chief. On his very first chopping day he had been sent into a deep sleep by the scent of the mystical mushrooms which grow so luxuriantly in the turrets of Brunel's railway tunnel. His dreams were filled with images of starlit nights and Harvest moons, of jugs of winking mead and tales of those who had died too young. Miss Silk-Farr is wearing her purple dress (how Twiverton women love purple!) and she reaches down to cool the firewood chopper's sweat-laden brow with her silken hankerchief and rescue him from his journey into the ancient settlement's troubled past.