Humphry Repton's Picturesque garden at Blaise Castle
“Blaize Castle!” cried Catherine. “What is that?”
“The finest place in England—worth going fifty miles at any time to see.”
“What, is it really a castle, an old castle?”
“The oldest in the kingdom.”
“But is it like what one reads of?”
“Exactly—the very same.”
“But now really—are there towers and long galleries?”
“By dozens.”
The dreadful John Thorpe in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is trying to persuade Catharine Morland, a neophyte of the Picturesque and of Gothick Romance, to give up the walk she had arranged with the thoroughly rational Tilneys in favour of a sensation-seeking carriage drive to Blaise Castle.
There had already been gardens at Blaise for more than one hundred years. However, the subject of Austen’s delighted satire was the creation of Thomas Farr. He had made a fortune trading in sugar and bought 110 acres and the old manor house from the Henbury estate in 1762. His land, backing onto the village of Henbury, rose up to Blaise Hill and took in the extraordinary gorge of Hazel Brook.
Farr was a friend to both the statesman and aesthete Edmund Burke and Valentine Morris, who had plantations in the West Indies and was making his famously Picturesque garden on the cliffs above the River Severn at Piercefield. Perhaps Farr aimed to outshine them both at Blaise, for its cliffs and deep chasms were a gift to the Picturesque. His centre-piece was the castle itself—a toylike eye-catcher on top of the hill, with a dining room on the first floor and views of the shipping on the Rivers Severn and Avon. This castle he defended with look-out bastions, wooden cannon, and terrible legends: a Robber’s Cave, a Lover’s Leap, a root-house, and Giant Goram and his bath house, known as the Giant’s Soap-Dish. Repton made it sound more like a mining disaster: Farr had had the “bad taste” to propose an “artificial river … about the width of a common navigation canal, secured by different heads or dams [with] all the horrors of fire and steam, and the clangour of iron chains and forcing pumps.”
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To be fair, Farr had encouraged the public to walk in, and it may have been their “barbarous taste” that he sought to gratify. However, his ships were blockaded in the American Revolutionary War, he was bankrupted in 1778, and the property was eventually acquired in 1789, within a week of the fall of the Bastille, by Repton’s client, the banker and Quaker, John Scandrett Harford.
Harford immediately annoyed his neighbours by cutting down trees. Repton weighed in to support him, while acknowledging that it might be unpopular: “... tho’ fully aware of the common objection to cutting down trees, yet it is only by a bold use of [the axe] that the wonders of Blaise Castle can be properly displayed.”
Notwithstanding this felling, Repton aimed to make the place more private and less sensational, for Harford’s Blaise, like Moggerhanger, was to become a “retreat from the bustle of the world … perfectly views under the branches of beech trees, as at Babworth and Honing, to the meadowland of the Royals, until he could offer a sudden preparatory glimpse of the house through a break in his shrubberies. Then came a thrilling series of bends; he boasted of their construction in his red book for Burley-on-the-Hill (1796): “At Blaise Castle … I have lately finished one of the finest approaches in the kingdom; altho’ for many hundred yards the sides of the hills were so steep, that I had to be let down by ropes to mark the line of the road.”
He also had to “appropriate” the additional acreage and so proposed a Woodman’s Cottage, as he would at Moggerhanger in 1798, which, like the covered seat at Rûg, would front the woodland and “seem to belong to the proprietor of the mansion and the castle, without affecting to imitate the character of either.” Here Repton made his first attempt to define his vernacular cottage style: “It must look like what it is, the habitation of a labourer who has the care of the adjoining woods; but its simplicity should be the effect of Art and not of accident.”
He was to conceal the valley floors (as he had at Ferney and Mulgrave) and the garden terraces on the side of the gorge southeast of the house (as he had at Ferney). This time, he advised that “all the yawn-ing chasms be hid by plantations, rather than let any traces remain of works, done under the influence of such barbarous taste.”
There are close parallels with Mulgrave. In both cases, Repton came into a landscape already under-going development in the Picturesque style. In both he completed the work; in both there were deep romantic valleys and views to open water and ship-ping; both had neoclassical boxlike houses set back from this scenery; in both he created an “enchanted ground” with seats, caves, and waterfalls; and in both his design was characterised by numerous long, loop-ing drives and cottages in his vernacular style. Since his clients, Harford and Lord Mulgrave, had very different backgrounds, it would seem that Repton designed primarily to suit the land rather than their taste. His skill lay in persuading them to enjoy the particular character of their territory.
This is an edited extract from 'Humphry Repton: Designing the Landscape Garden' by John Phibbs, published by Rizzoli.
Joe Cornish1/8Blaise Castle was a prospect tower, built by the merchant Thomas Farr in 1766.
Joe Cornish2/8Repton placed William Paty’s villa on the only appropriately smooth ground on the estate, with a view to Blaise Castle at right angles to its south-west front.
Joe Cornish3/8Repton’s panorama shows a pastoral setting for the new house.
Joe Cornish4/8Repton’s challenge was to find a route by which his new approach could cross the dramatic gorge of Hazel Brook.
Joe Cornish5/8In the woods planted by Repton, only the most dramatic cliffs show through.
Joe Cornish6/8The beech trees suppress the understorey and make it possible to look deep into the woods.
Joe Cornish7/8The nine cottages at Blaise Hamlet are each architecturally distinct and all are remarkable.
Joe Cornish8/8Blaise Hamlet is an attempt to capture the lost innocence of olde England, as recalled in the early nineteenth century. The Dairy was built in 1803 next to the house, a forerunner of Blaise Hamlet.
