A house above water in a steep valley of rough woods, rocks and old trees, with a ruined castle on a crag, a mill and thatched cottages; a plausible estate modelled on the Herefordshire and Welsh estates of the Picturesque, not a survey of any.
In 1794 two Herefordshire landowners attacked the parks of Capability Brown. Richard Payne Knight, in a poem called The Landscape, and Uvedale Price, in his Essay on the Picturesque, said that Brown had shaved the country bare, smoothing every bank into lawn and every wood into a clump. Price asked instead for the qualities painters looked for, which were neither beautiful nor sublime: roughness, sudden variation and intricacy. Knight had already made such a place along the gorge of the Teme below his castle at Downton, and Thomas Johnes was making another in the mountains at Hafod.
This valley has the same parts as a Brown park, a house over a lake, a dam, a bridge, a temple and a belt, but each is roughened. The foreground is broken by rocks and thickets, Scots pines and dead trees stand among the oaks, the bridge is of rustic logs and the temple is a ruin. The country round rises steeply in hanging woods; on a crag above the river an old castle is kept as a ruin, and below the dam the river runs past a mill and a small church. The buildings of the estate are cottages of whitewash and thatch.
Humphry Repton, caught between the two sides, agreed that a place should show its natural beauties and hide its defects, but insisted that a house needed a terrace and a garden round it. The argument changed what people looked for in the country more than it changed how parks were made.