St Nicholas Abbey, Barbados.

Built in 1658, by Col Benjamin Berringer, St Nicholas Abbey in northern Barbados is one of only three surviving Jacobean Mansions in the Western Hemisphere - there is another in Barbados and one in Virginia.

It was built to plans sent out from England which were followed to the letter, so there are chimneys, and two fire-places in the bedrooms - somewhat superfluous in Barbados. It is called an Abbey merely as an affectation of what a gentleman's large house should be called.

Berringer was a partners of John Yeamans, from the next plantation south who was a rival for his wife Margaret. When Berringer was forced to leave St Nicholas Abbey by his wife in 1661 - so the story goes - Yeamans had him poisoned. Shortly afterwards Yeamans married Margaret and put the two plantations together. The boundaries of which survive to this day.

Yeamans had transferred his allegiance to Charles II from Cromwell at the right time and was knighted and rewarded with the governorship of the new colony of Carolina in North America. He sent 3 ships to Carolina in 1663, the expedition that founded Charleston.

The Abbey is a remarkable survival of what a plantation Great House and outbuildings looked like in its heyday and is treasure-house of furniture and china.

However there is a salutary reminder in the museum of the vicious and inhuman system that generated all this wealth, in an inventory of 1822 valuing the unhappy male and female slaves who were compelled to live and work on this Plantation.