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?’
The reference on the Uppark plan looks too neat for Brown
The Brown Advisor has long accepted as law the judgements of scholarship. It is only because we have not accustomed ourselves that the pronouncements dredged up and synthesised from primary research will surprise us by their sometimes radical and iconoclastic conclusions. No matter what, no matter how eccentric their opinions then, the Brown Advisor welcomes the breadth and breath of the scholar.
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.
There are none quicker to anger than Staffordshire folk. It may be their dogs and it has been put to me that the time they and their ancestors have spent firing clay, dull and dumb, in their bottle kilns has taught them that only the fire of extreme anger can bring forth the civilised charm of Wedgwood china – or maybe it is spending too much time with the bottle alone that does it.
Mr D of Orwell is puzzled by a passage in Humphry Repton’s red book for Wimpole which is critical of Brown’s approach.
The Brown Advisor©2015
By John Phibbs