I know little about architecture in the formal sense but am in love with buildings, forever looking at them and wondering what histories they harbour, and often giving them a mental makeover to bring out their full ambiance and potential. So how enticing this idea of a ‘half-glimpsed chateau’. There are two minor such chateaux not three miles from where I live – one you can just see through the dense foliage of a grand approaching avenue, while the other is barely visible over a high wall and through trees and shrubs.
It happens that I will be in Budapest next week and will be on the look out.
‘… that leafy, half-glimpsed chateau near Budapest.’
Source: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water (London: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 64
