One and a half miles from the medieval town  of Saffron Walden in Essex we find a true East  

Anglian treasure: Audley End. A stone-clad  mansion surrounded by sumptuous gardens  

which witness an explosion of colour every  spring as 19,000 bulbs burst from the soil.

In the early days of summer, a walled kitchen  garden packed with organic produce witnesses  

thousands of brightly-coloured irises and  peonies in a cascade of purples and pinks.

Meanwhile, all year round, the  River Cam glides gracefully by.

When first built, Audley End was one of the  largest and most opulent houses in Britain.  

It was a fantastic Jacobean mansion that was for  a time even a royal palace and it speaks to us of  

grand families and the rise and fall of fortunes.  It's filled with beautiful art, furniture and some  

of the most remarkable collections that still fill  the rooms and the halls here. But it's also filled  

with extraordinary human stories.  The house sits in a Capability Brown  

landscape and while the grounds themselves  look tranquil today, the relationship between  

Capability Brown and Sir John Griffin Griffin,  the owner at the time, was far from tranquil and  

it's clear from their letters that they had  some serious disagreements and fallings-out.  

Thankfully for us today, those fallings out and  that enmity doesn't seem to have translated into  

the landscape that we see around us. In the 19th  century the house was significantly remodelled  

giving us the treasure house that we  see today where features from throughout  

the house's long history are still visible and  we really get that sense of the different phases,  

the different fortunes that the house had been  through. They're all here. We can read them all.  

During the Second World War Audley End was home  to Polish soldiers of the Special Operations  

Executive who trained here in secret before being  dropped behind enemy lines in occupied Poland.  

It's an interesting recent story  and again it tells us of these  

extraordinary human stories that  are associated with this place.

Away from the lavish reception rooms and  the elaborately-decorated royal apartments,  

you step into the Service Wing.

This was the engine of the house where around  30 servants worked day in day out in addition  

to another 80 or so staff who worked across the  estate. These people were just as much a part  

of the house as the lords and ladies they served  and we can find their stories captured here too.

A house like this speaks to us of  all the grand and the fine things  

but it can also open the door to  the world of domestic service.  

A house like Audley End required a huge number  of people to enable it to function. It's like a  

machine. Just to give one example, coal must be  brought into the building and it must be stored,  

it must be moved around the building into the  kitchens and into the many, many fireplaces.  

Those fires must be lit, food must be brought in,  food has to be prepared, food has to be taken out,  

served at table. Lamps have to be lit. Every  single one of these activities requires expense.  

They're expensive places to maintain. They require  constant spending of money in the form of wages,  

repairs, material and supplies. The  house has had its ups and downs as well,  

initially a house of huge proportions and  literally fit for a king -- Charles II in  

this case. It had to be scaled back in the early  1700s just to make it a more manageable size.  

The house was successively modernised and  remodelled in the 18th and 19th centuries  

but by the middle of the 20th century it still  did not even have gaslight, let alone electricity.  

Looking at a house like Audley End with its  fantastic art collection and its beautiful  

architecture and its landscaped grounds, sometimes  it's easy to forget that these were the backdrop  

to a complex series of human relationships  but we're really lucky that we've got and  

we continue to uncover documentary evidence  that really helps to fill in the detail  

about the lives that were lived intertwined with  the house and its gardens. And these are intensely  

personal histories that speak of love, separation  and even occasionally of secret relationships.

We're pairing this beautiful Essex mansion with  an exquisite traditional song that was originally  

documented by the famous song collector and  composer Vaughan Williams when he heard it sung  

in 1904 in the Essex village of Hornden. The song  documents the compexities of human relationships  

and features a story of a woman forced to  reject the approaches of the man she loves  

as she's aware that he's been unfaithful. The  song, sung for us by Bea Hankey, ends with a  

poignant warning to girls who might court a  false lover: untrustworthy men are described  

as being like a star on a foggy morning. You think  they're near, but in truth they are far, far away.