The outworks of the Danish Camp at Ugbrooke might easily be mistaken for the pale of a mediaeval deer park.
The question that exercises my good friends from Devonshire, on the other hand, is ‘where the deer were at Ugbrooke?’ ‘Did they wander freely over all the extensive parkland, or were they contained in smaller paddocks?’
A grove of sweet chestnut on the side of an adventitious valley at Benham
There will occur, in landscape, natural valleys, small advances in the slope, hardly enough to be named. At Burghley they carried springs and Capability Brown drained and smoothed them off when he made the lake, but in later works – Ugbrooke, Ashridge, Gatton, Benham above the lake – he offered to these adventitious declivities the same spare planting that he gave to the ‘valley direct’ at Claremont.
In my last (note 213), I offered to my companions at the Tatler’s Waste-bin a list of all those landscapes of that fine man and lord-lieutenant of Huntingdon, Capability Brown, for which I had records of an active deer park.
The golden valley, as fine an example of the valley adventitious as you are ever likely to see
Miss S writes to tell me that being newly arrived in Berkhamstead she took herself to view the town’s great landmark, known as the Golden Valley, and she wonders now if that master of beech-hung beauty, Capability Brown, whom she knew by reputation, could have worked his wizardry there.
Spring brings out the cynic in men like Captain Ken – it is the sudden and unpredictable change in the look of things. Mr Honey on the other hand grows steadily less repressible. ‘Hark at the lark!’ he is wont to say, at every chirrup from a passing sparrow.
The Bowood Cascade
John Dalrymple: `The rapidity and noise of the rivers should be increased by artificial bulwarks and impediments .. and the falls of water should, by the interposition of rocks, or of new streams brought over them, be made to look more like cataracts than cascades…’
The cascade at Ugbrooke
Mr M is curious to know how a landscape gardener like Capability Brown will have got along with architects, supposing they were employed at the same time, and has written from London to ask which of the two would rule the roost.
John Carr is very likely to have been involved with Scampston, but the house still looked like Brown’s handiwork.
Mrs L. of Ilkley asks what tree would best summon up for the quintennial celebration that is to come in 2216 the quirkiness and quintessential quickness of Capability Brown. I don’t want to promote a competition, but I would put in a vote for the simple and much abused sycamore.
As Thomas Hale observed sycamore will readily regrow from a stump. Its cousin the Norway Maple was coppiced in the shrubbery at Croome for its leaf and colour.
The Brown Advisor©2015
By John Phibbs