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| Rousham Park. |
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| Temple of Echo. |
Last weekend
we enjoyed a visit to Rousham in Oxfordshire. The House and its beautiful
gardens were designed by William Kent (1685–1748). Rousham has been the home of
the Dormer family since the mid-1630s.
Kent’s
design for the garden, begun c.1738, and those at Stowe, are thought to herald
the beginning of the landscape garden movement in Britain. Kent was greatly
influenced by Palladio. Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown worked under Kent at Stowe
and was later a famous landscape gardener in his own right – perhaps the most
famous of all.
Exploring Rousham
is rather like stepping into a landscape painting. Not far from the house,
longhorn cattle graze peacefully in a large field, safely curtailed by a ha-ha
(shades of Mansfield Park). As you stroll further into the park, you encounter classical
statues amidst its shady groves.
Eighteenth century visitors were particularly
pleased by the Temple of Echo and the Praeneste terrace. The river Cherwell
wends its way around the bottom of the garden in a stately fashion, adding to the atmosphere of tranquillity.
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| Memorial to Ringwood above the cascade. |
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| Praeneste terrace. |
Like
Elizabeth Bennet at Pemberley, I ‘saw and admired every remarkable spot and
point of view’. I particularly liked the memorial and poem dedicated to
Ringwood, ‘an otter-hound of extraordinary sagacity’.
There’s also
a wonderful walled garden with trained apple trees, a pigeon house, and
spectacular herbaceous borders.
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| Pigeon House. It still has a ladder inside. |
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| Dormer monument in the church. |
We found time to explore the thirteenth century church,
which has many monuments to the Dormer family.
All photos ©
Sue Wilkes.
