The Birth of Modern Britain: A Journey into Britain’s Archaeological Past: 1550 to the Present. Francis Pryor

      Chapter Two

       ‘Polite Landscapes’: Prestige, Control and Authority in Rural Britain

      IF THERE IS ONE aspect of Britain that is widely celebrated abroad it must surely be the literally astonishing beauty of its parks and country houses. I use the word ‘literally’ because I’ve long been addicted to house and church visiting and I still come across scenes in parks and gardens that make me gasp in astonishment. I will never forget, for example, a visit to Stourhead in Wiltshire, once the home of perhaps Britain’s greatest early archaeologist/antiquary, Sir Richard Colt Hoare. The park around Stourhead was designed by his ancestor Henry Hoare II and has remained open to visitors since the 1740s.¹ The carefully laid-out walk around the great artificial lake takes one past a succession of beautifully positioned temples, vistas and grottoes.

      As a keen gardener myself, I am convinced that the main reason why the layout of the grounds at Stourhead work so well is that Hoare created them gradually, by degrees. Unlike most garden designers today, he did not start with a blank piece of paper and then impose his design on the landscape. Instead, the design is the landscape, only subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, modified to fit its creator’s long-term vision. For me, Stourhead, together with Stowe (Buckinghamshire), Painshill (Surrey) and the water gardens at Studley Royal (North Yorkshire) are some of the greatest achievements of British art and design. One reason for their success is the discipline acquired by accepting the confines of their respective landscapes; I think this is why such gardens are infinitely superior to the stage-design set pieces one encounters today at events like the Chelsea Flower Show.

      I well remember the hot autumn day when my wife Maisie and I first visited Stourhead. We had almost finished the descent from the last of the great garden buildings, the Temple of Apollo, and as we walked down the path we were both thinking similar thoughts, along the lines of a cool drink and a large sandwich. We approached the houses of Stourton, the estate village that successive owners of Stourhead had subtly altered to make more attractive, when my gaze was suddenly taken by a glint off the water to my left. I had forgotten all about the lake in my eagerness to find lunch and almost missed one of the greatest man-made views in the British landscape, over to the Palladian bridge and across the lake towards the Pantheon. I was so captivated by the scene before me that I then spent the next half-hour wrestling with cameras and tripod, attempting to take the perfect photograph. Meanwhile, lucky Maisie was grabbing something to eat before the pub closed for the afternoon.

      Of course that view at Stourhead was no accident and was always meant to be the visitor’s final coup de théâtre. After more than two and a half centuries it had lost none of its power or magic. A succession of inspired individuals have contributed to the growth and development of the British landscaped park, which is still regarded by many as the nation’s greatest contribution to world art, so I would like to make it clear from the very outset that in this chapter I shall not attempt even a superficial history of its development, as others are far better qualified to do that than I.² Instead, I want to look at what archaeology can reveal about what was happening around the periphery of the great houses, parks and gardens; at how the estates and houses that went with them were built and run; and how private individuals and public authorities together organised life for the ordinary inhabitants of rural Britain.

      But first, a few words on garden history and archaeology which over the past thirty or so years have become sub-disciplines in their own right.³ One of their spin-offs has been the movement to restore old or overgrown parks and gardens to something approaching their former glories. This in turn has led people to research into more abstract subjects, like Georgian aesthetics and attitudes to landscape, because you cannot attempt sympathetic restoration without appreciating the subtleties of what the original gardeners and landscape designers were trying to achieve.⁴ There have been a number of major excavation projects like those by Brian Dix, at Hampton Court Palace, or the great ruined Jacobean house at Kirby Hall, Northamptonshire, which have subsequently been followed by the restoration of entire formal gardens.⁵ Garden archaeology has established itself as a subdiscipline in its own right. These highly specialised digs make extensive use of historical documents, and a variety of clever procedures, such as the meticulous plotting of the many rusted nails used to join the edging boards of long-lost flowerbeds.

      As a general rule, many of the features revealed by garden archaeologists can be very slight. Although they are from a much earlier period, I’m put in mind of the shallow trenches dug for the elaborate box hedges at the palatial Fishbourne Roman villa in Sussex.⁶ Very similar traces have been found at the two sites just mentioned, Hampton Court and Kirby Hall. In many instances even these slight remains can be detected without putting a spade in the ground, through the use of various geophysical surveys.

      Put simply, geophysics involves the use of highly sophisticated machines which are wheeled, dragged or lifted across the ground, and in the process record certain aspects of what lies beneath the surface.⁷ Resistivity meters measure minute fluctuations in the soil’s ability to conduct an electrical charge; magnetometers can detect tiny changes in the local magnetic field. Both techniques can reveal buried wells, post holes, ditches and walls.

      Recently an entirely new generation of machines has come into being. Known as GPR, or ground penetrating radar, these instruments detect the way that radio waves are distorted and reflected back to a receiver on the surface. GPR plots a succession of buried layers and can penetrate deep into the ground. A particularly useful geophysical technique to industrial archaeologists is known by the rather unlovely name of magnetic susceptibility sampling, or ‘Mag Sus’ for short. Mag Sus can detect areas of magnetic enhancement caused by burning and can provide a fairly accurate indication of the temperatures involved – so it can readily distinguish, for example, between a bonfire and a furnace. More to the point, its results are instantaneous.

      The rapid development of fast, lightweight, portable computers has revolutionised geophysics. When I began in archaeology in the early 1970s, I would routinely have to wait a week or a fortnight for my survey reports. Today it’s usual to have finished results in an hour or two. Indeed, when filming for Time Team, our resident geophysicist, Dr John Gater, has been known to produce an accurate printout in minutes.

      Although, of course, they are deeply wonderful (and France, for example, is full of them), I have to say I don’t find strictly formal gardens very attractive, largely, I suppose, because I can imagine myself spending weeks and weeks meticulously trimming pyramids of box hedging and quietly going mad in the process. My own favourite restored garden is the one at Painshill in Surrey, which was originally laid out by Charles Hamilton between 1738 and 1773.⁸ As at Stourhead, visitors perambulate around a great lake and are treated to a series of contrived views which include the usual colonnaded temples and a magnificent Turkish tent, successfully and imaginatively re-created in fibreglass. Perhaps the greatest feat of restoration at Painshill involved the rebuilding of a fanciful watery grotto, complete with side chambers, waterfalls and glittering crystal