By Tim Woodbridge, author of The Choice
Tim Woodbridge
When his father, a British Intelligence codebreaker died, the author Tim Woodbridge inherited his archive of fascinating research into Stourhead, one of the National Trust’s most celebrated attractions. In 2014, Tim resolved to complete Kenneth’s work - and to solve a puzzle that had eluded his father for almost 30 years. Tim’s new book about the mystery, The Choice (Dotesio Publishing), is out now.
Sometimes you can’t see something staring you in the face. This happened to me when I decided to write The Choice – a story about the human drama behind the building of the world-famous garden at Stourhead. There are many secrets at Stourhead but the greatest is the secret garden hidden underneath the Great Lake.
I had known about the garden ever since my father, Kenneth, first took me there in the early 1950’s. Supported by my mother Joan (someone who dedicated her life to enable him to fulfil his potential), Kenneth became Stourhead’s master historian. It wasn’t until I inherited his archive and read his psychological insights into the man who built Stourhead, revealing that Henry Hoare had outlived all his children, that I decided to write the history as a narrative.
The double meanings presented by Stourhead have left historians with a sense that there is more hidden in the shadows. Perhaps the most intriguing question of all has been; did Henry Hoare build a first garden and then flood it to create another, and if so, why?
The question hinged on something Henry Hoare’s architect wrote in letter to him dated 1744; the year work began to build the garden.
My next shall bring you… how I conceive the head of the lake should be formed. It will make a most agreeable scene, with solemn shade about it…
Kenneth took ‘the head of the lake’ to mean what we see today; the dam holding back the Great Lake. After all, he reasoned, the builders had been paid in full for a Chinese bridge over the lake in 1749, so the Great Lake he reasoned must have been well advanced by then.
However, there were loose ends. For one thing the dam was anything but solemn and shaded – it was exposed. Then there was the painting of the Temple of Flora with a canal, river god and cascade. It was dated 1753, two years before Henry Hoare flooded the valley.
Why would he have built the scene depicted in the painting having already completed a Chinese bridge in preparation to flood this ornamental and decorative scene at the Temple of Flora?
In researching The Choice, I came across an underwater survey undertaken in 2005 that measured water depths and reported building works indicating an earlier garden hidden under the Great Lake. Kenneth died in 1988 without knowing the answer.
Intrigued, I compared eighteenth century maps with the survey and discovered the possibility of old medieval fishponds having been dug out and re-modelled into a garden at the centre of which was a large sentinel oak. Under the water the canal in the 1753 painting appeared to have been extended, ending up in an enlarged lake. The grotto, slightly elevated on the side of the valley, seemed to have a pool that emptied into the lake.
Another canal appeared to have been dug west to where the Pantheon would be sited.
This was evidence that there had been an earlier garden beneath the water, created by digging down, rather than flooding. The question was when and why?
I found the answer in my father’s archive. A drawing of the Chinese bridge showed that the foundations had been built for a water level 1.5 metres lower than the current depth of the Great Lake. This indicated that in 1749, when the bridge was completed, Henry Hoare intended the buildings we see today to go around lakes with water at a lower level.
The ‘why’ could be answered by the death of Henry’s only son through smallpox in Naples in 1752. All his hopes had been invested in the boy and the sudden event was traumatic. Could some level of dissatisfaction with the design of his first garden combined with the death of his son, have prompted him to make the bold step of flooding his previous work? Had he commissioned his architect to build a new home in London at the same time because Stourhead was more ‘pain than pleasure’ for him? Had he started work to build a ‘New Head’ (as he described in a letter recently discovered by Julia Mottershaw and Jean Booth,) to flood the past?
The clues coming out of the shadows indicate that Henry Hoare was subject to uncontrollable forces driving him to express his feelings of love and loss at a subconscious level through his garden. It is why Stourhead’s epic melancholic grandeur is able to move us at a more profound level than if it were simply a piece of good garden design. It is what makes the garden a living masterpiece.
The Choice by Tim Woodbridge is out now priced £8.99 in paperback and £7.99 as a Kindle eBook. It is available on Amazon UK or via www.stourheadthechoice.co.uk