A house above a lake in a park of lawn, clumps and a belt of woods, with its estate village outside the wall; a plausible estate modelled on Brown’s parks at Blenheim and Petworth, not a survey of either.
Lancelot Brown, called Capability, remade more than two hundred English parks between about 1750 and his death in 1783. At Blenheim, from 1764, he dammed the little river Glyme to make a lake under Vanbrugh’s great bridge, which had stood absurdly over a trickle; at Petworth, from 1752, he took away the formal gardens and brought the grass up to the walls of the house. The method was always much the same, and Thomas Whately described it in 1770: grass to the house, cattle kept off it by a sunk fence, water in the valley made to look like a river, trees in clumps and singly on the rising ground, and a belt of wood round the whole with a drive inside it.
Here the house stands on a rise with its lawn falling to the ha-ha, and the lake winds below it from a cascade at the dam to a bridge at its narrowest point. A temple looks down on the water from a knoll. The belt hides the boundary, so that the park seems to have none; outside it the ground falls to a stone wall with a triumphal gate and two lodges, where the drive comes in from the village.
Everything that serves only use was taken out of sight: the kitchen garden, the home farm and the village itself are outside the wall. The parish church was kept, and its spire shows over the trees.