A spellbinding Cotswold garden that has hardly changed for centuries
Owlpen, most heart-stopping of places, where time almost seems to stand still, has hardly changed for centuries. Vita Sackville-West wrote about it at the start of the Second World War: 'Owlpen, that tiny, grey manor house, cowering amongst its enormous yews, yews that make rooms in the garden with walls taller than any rooms in the house; dark, secret rooms of yew, hiding in the slope of the valley.' What a contrast it must have been to the chaos of towns and cities during the Blitz. What a contrast it still is to our busy, crowded lives today.
The medieval house was improved in the 15th century and additions to the place continued until 1720. But, by the 19th century, the house seemed too small and old-fashioned for its owners and a grander house, Owlpen Park, was built, leaving a couple acting as housekeeper and gardener to be caretakers, living in the back rooms of the increasingly dilapidated manor.
When the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne visited Owlpen in 1894, he wrote a letter to William Morris in praise of 'a paradise incomparable on Earth' and reported that the old hanging gardens of the 16th or 17th century [were being kept] tidy and sweet and splendid, out of pure love for them'.
The shuttered house remained a place of pilgrimage and romance for almost a century. Before the First World War, Norman Jewson, newly qualified as an architect and living 13 miles away in Sapperton, made an excursion on his bicycle 'to Owlpen, a very beautiful and romantically situated old house, which had been deserted by its owners for a new mansion about a mile away a century before. The house was rapidly falling into complete decay, but a caretaker lived in a kitchen wing and would shew some of the rooms to visitors. The terraced gardens with a yew parlour and groups of neat, clipped yews remained just as they were in the time of Queen Anne, a gardener being kept to look after them'.
After the Great War, Jewson, a leading figure in the Arts and Crafts movement, was able to buy the manor for a few thousand pounds when the estate was broken up and sold off in lots. He spent a year repairing the house with local craftsmen and then sold it to Barbara Bray, who referred to him as ‘the magician of this resuscitated dream place’. So, the tradition of pure love for the house and garden was continued until she sold the place to Francis Pagan, who also fell under the Owlpen spell. It was from him that, in 1974, the present owners, Sir Nicholas and Lady Mander, took on the task of preserving the magic of this extraordinary dwelling.
Without the love and commitment of all these owners and carers of Owlpen, the garden might never have survived the passing of so many years and changes. It remains one of the few surviving examples of an early formal domestic setting in the UK, on the steepest site imaginable. Wedged in a tucked-away cleft of the Cotswolds, Owlpen is protected by woods rising to the north behind the house, which perches above a stream running along the foot of another hill to the south. Five hanging terraces of horizontal yew underline the gabled building; and the garden is populated with bold topiary shapes. The yew parlour still stands, with its walls higher than any room in the house; at various times, the area has been known as the green drawing room, the ballroom, the dancing floor and the wilderness. Some of the topiary has had to be replaced and, though their shapes may have altered over the years, many may have been rooted in the same spot when Shakespeare was writing his plays. Sadly, the giant yews in the famous neo-romantic Frederick L Griggs engraving of Owlpen, which could be seen growing behind the yew parlour, were felled in the 1950s as they made the house too dark.
Nicholas is a historian and the changes he has made outside have been informed by a respect for the past and a love of architecture. Norman Jewson was a friend, and Rosemary Verey and Simon Verity offered guidance when Nicholas created a simple box-edged parterre on the first level. (There is no sign of box disease, possibly due to the protected setting.) Nicholas also extended the garden beyond the stream. Semicircular 18th-century steps descend to meet a 20th-century flight of Italianate steps rising to a flattened area - allowing you to stand on the slope to the south and admire the house, sheltered by a church, a wood and battlements of yew.
Nicholas used to cut the massive hedges himself but now oversees this. 'They were always battered,' he says, a little ruefully, and it is true that looking more closely, the top of the hedge is now wider than the bottom. This matters: the top should not shade out the roots so rain can reach the base. But it is a small quibble in a perfect place, which is not so much a garden - there are few flowers at Owlpen - as an architectural extension of the house. But Owlpen is, above all, a living piece of history and a testament to the devoted love of those who have saved the place from dereliction.
Owlpen Manor and its gardens are open by appointment for pre-booked groups and via the Historic Houses Invitation to Viero scheme in the summer months: owlpen.com | historichouses.org
RICHARD BLOOM1/4Winter sunlight catches the frosted box and yew parterres.
RICHARD BLOOM2/4The view from the house, across the topiary of the formal garden. to the enclosed wooded valley in the south Cotswold hills.
RICHARD BLOOM3/4A magnificent early-18th-century yew tree, which escaped the attention of latter-day topiarists, provides a striking backdrop to the neatly clipped yew forms that populate the lowest terrace.
RICHARD BLOOM4/4The listed grist mill was built of Cotswold stone in 1728 on the site of a medieval mill at the heart of the estate. Carefully restored in the 1980s by the Mander family, it is now a charming holiday cottage.
