Tapestries, Maybe Ghost, Woven in Abbey’s Past : England: The 850-year-old country house in Chard glows like gold and is open to the public, for a price. More than 40,000 paying guests are expected this year.

What’s it like to live in an 850-year-old English country house with tapestries woven from drawings by Raphael and gardens dating from the early 18th Century?

“These days it’s like living over the shop,” said Mark Roper, the owner of splendid Forde Abbey.

The survival of the house depends on the admission fees of tourists, and Roper expects more than 40,000 of them this year.

“It has the same problems as other houses: drains burst, machines break down, there are people about,” Roper said. “But sometimes I look at the tapestries and say to myself, goodness me!”

The five 16th-Century tapestries, the most important works of art in the house, are New Testament scenes as painted by Raphael for the Sistine Chapel in Rome.

Roper, sitting in an armchair in the drawing room facing south over lawns, flower beds and stately trees, recites the abbey’s history.

“This room is exactly as Prideaux left it in 1659, except for the electric lamps,” he said.

Edmund Prideaux, who was Oliver Cromwell’s attorney general, converted what had been monastic buildings into a house.

“He was a country lawyer with an eye for the main chance,” Roper said. “Whether he was given it or stole it, we don’t know, but he came out of the brouhaha of an executed king (Charles I) and he did it up.”

Four yellow labrador retrievers and a lakeland terrier trot in, smelling wet.

“It rains quite a lot here. Good for strawberries,” said Roper, who is thinking of extending his strawberry fields, a cash crop.

“It’s a big house, 100 yards from end to end, 60 or 70 rooms,” Roper said. “Not a lot. I forget how many. There’s a debate about what’s a room. Quite large rooms are often broom cupboards.”

Nor is the 1,500-acre estate considered large.

“An old aristocrat once said it was the worst of both worlds to have a large house with a small estate,” Roper said. “The grandees of the past said you needed 1,000 acres for every bedroom.”

But somehow Roper, his wife, Elizabeth, and their daughters, Alice, Victoria and Lucinda, manage to make do with the space they have.

Forde Abbey is in the West Country just inside Dorset, on the south bank of the River Axe.

This is a deeply rural England of green pastures and villages and farms hidden along roads meandering between steep, hedged banks smothered with white flowers of cow parsley.

Forde Abbey is long and low, battlemented, towered, with Gothic windows. Cistercian monks founded the abbey in 1141 on good farmland and continued building for 400 years.

Baldwin, its third abbot, became archbishop of Canterbury. He crowned King Richard I in 1189 and died accompanying him on the Third Crusade.

“The Cistercians were great agriculturists, way ahead of the locals, and they understood water,” Roper said.

So there is a spring which feeds waterfalls and ponds.

Like other monasteries, the abbey was seized in 1539 by King Henry VIII when he separated England from the pope in Rome.

But the buildings, unusually, survived inside a newer facade of Ham stone fashioned to the taste of succeeding owners. The locally quarried stone glows like gold when the sun is on it.

Roper, at 57, is a tall, alert man with a questioning expression, trained in estate management at Cambridge University. He is the third generation at Forde, which his grandmother inherited from a distant cousin.

“When the government began to offer grants for houses like this after World War II, my father almost re-roofed the whole house,” Roper said. “They would give up to 90% of the cost, but it’s not like that now.”

In the cloisters, he pointed out an old window that cost nearly $18,000 to repair when the panes began coming out.

“My father used to open only six days a year at first and extended it to 12 days to get grants,” Roper said. “He survived here by the sweat of his brow and had a Spartan life. No heating.

“He got up at 6:30 every day and he didn’t care if the trees produced a crop in 30 years or 230. He was a gardener by inclination, a great plantsman.”

A visit to the gardens costs $4.50, or to the house and gardens $6.45. Children get in free. A leisurely tour takes 3 1/2 hours.

Elizabeth Roper looks after a herd of ruby-rich Devons, kept for beef, uncommon survivors of what was once a predominant breed in the West Country.

Ghosts?

Roper said his family has never seen anything. But his father insisted that, at age 8, he saw a monk in the dining room.

“He recalled it to the end of his days,” Roper said.

“His parents said, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ to stop him thinking about it. But what was interesting was that he said the monk was wearing a white habit with a black scapula. Now, if he hadn’t seen anything he would have been much more likely to say the monk was in a brown habit tied with a white cord, because that’s what monks usually look like. But the white and black, that’s the habit of the Cistercians.

“Nobody has seen anything since. Perhaps the TV chased them out.”