On 22 April 2026, our Speakers Secretary, Dr Helen Lockhart, entertained an audience of over a hundred members and visitors with her detailed research of Lady Craven’s adventures travelling through the Crimea to Constantinople in 1786.

A few years after Lady Craven’s scandalous separation from William, sixth Baron Craven in 1783, and her enforced departure from their country house Benham Park on the outskirts of Newbury, she embarked on an exciting journey across Russia and through the Crimea to Constantinople, also visiting Athens and the Greek Islands. She wrote a charming, vivacious and well-informed travel journal in the form of letters to her future husband the Margrave of Anspach, while travelling in the company of her lover Henry Vernon.

Lady Craven’s journal offers an early example of female travel writing in which a woman displays knowledge and learning, while at the same time observing the lives and appearance of foreign women in harems and female bathhouses, spaces inaccessible to male travellers. She describes landscape and scenery in lyrical, aesthetic language of the picturesque and the sublime.

Lady Craven was intrepid and adventurous, undeterred by treacherous terrain, rough roads, steep mountain passes, perilous seas and plague conditions. As an aristocratic woman with international connections, she received generous hospitality from foreign royals, diplomats and high-ranking officials.

Lady Craven describes her time at the Court of Catherine the Great at St Petersburg, criticising the hanging of the paintings in the Hermitage and complaining of the very cold rooms of Prince Potemkin’s palace in which she was entertained. In her account of the journey across Russia by a somewhat precarious sledge, she is impressed by the good state of the teeth of the Russian peasants she encounters and later recounts mock battles put on in her honour by Cossacks in Crimea.

She describes the enchanting scenery on the Crimean Peninsula, views across the Bay of Inkerman, the rough conditions on the Bosphorus and the beauties of Constantinople including the great mosque in the former Church of San Sophia. She gives an account of her expedition into the spectacular grotto on the Greek Island of Antiparos and her trip to Athens and the Acropolis.

Lady Craven recalls how in Romania she and Vernon were lavishly entertained in the harem of Prince of Wallachia but she was unimpressed by the loud music they had to endure. She rounds off her journey passing through the spectacular and often dangerous landscape of the Balkans (at this time Greece and the Balkans were ruled by Turkey as part of its eastern empire).

Finishing her travels in Vienna, Lady Craven was happy to be back in Western territory.

Helen illustrated her excellent talk with maps of the countries crossed and with contemporaneous paintings of the characters and places mentioned in Lady Craven’s writings.

• Our season continues on 27 May when we welcome Dr David Peacock’s talk on The Tudor Cloth Industry in Berkshire. Visitors welcome £5 on the door.