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Ashcombe was derelict when Cecil Beaton first saw it, the surviving fragment of a once grand eighteenth century country house set amidst rolling downland. OVer the next fifteen years Beaton transformed Ashcombe into a rural idyll, and a few other memoirs of the period so vividly evoke the gilded slightly edgy flavour of the 1930s. Through Ashcombe's doors flowed artitis, dukes, aesthetes, exiles, filmstars, writers,eccentrics. Yet the house was also Beaton's wartime refuge from his growing success as a photographer and the backdrop to a doomed affair.