3-071-066 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Combermere Abbey, Cheshire, the temporary residence of the Empress of Austria, 1881. Engraving from a sketch by Alfred Rimmer, '...of the mansion of Viscount Combermere, which is the temporary residence of her Majesty the Empress of Austria during the English hunting season...Combermere Lake is very beautiful, and shaped like a horseshoe. Lysons calls it three quarters of a mile long but if we take a line through the middle, and measure from extremity to extremity, it is not less than a mile and a quarter. It contains probably some of the largest pike in England, and in places it is of vast depth. The abbey, as will be seen, is something of the Strawberry-hill type; but it is a real abbey, and was founded by Cistercian monks early in the thirteenth century, and part of the old foundation yet remains inside the building, more especially in the library, which was the refectory. There is abundant evidence to show that the lake is now very much as it was when the abbey was founded. At the dissolution of monasteries it was granted to the Cotton family, who were raised to the Peerage for the services of Field Marshal Lord Combermere, the father of the present owner'. From "Illustrated London News", 1881.