Rousham: Beauty and the Beast

by Stoker

Most of the early part of my career was spent working for a City tycoon who built up in fifteen years a very significant business. Eventually he judged that it had peaked and agreed its sale.  One evening he called me into his properly tycoonish office (view high over the Thames, his own Regency furniture, enough space if needed to address all his loyal employees and simultaneously swing several cats) to discuss a few loose ends; but then got to the point:  “Stoker, if you had as much money as me; what would you do next?”

Now, this was a matter that I often spent time pondering, just on the offhand it might happen, so my response was considered and instant.  “I’d buy some land on the Helford River [south Cornwall] and start making a wonderful garden, and spend the rest of my life watching it grow and mature.”

He looked at me and a long silence ensued. “Stoker,” he eventually said, “You have a very odd sense of humour.”  And the exchange of minds ended.

Yet, what could be finer, more splendid, more satisfying, better for the beauty of the world?And, of course, he would not have been the first to enhance the world by such an act of creation.

In north Oxfordshire, in 1719, Robert Dormer-Cottrell, a soldier turned landed gent, began making a garden with the assistance of the designer Charles Bridgeman around his Jacobean house, lurking on a ridge above the River Cherwell. Robert died in 1737, when the estate, house, and garden were inherited by his distinguished brother, General James Dormer.  James was an old man in a hurry. He looked at what his brother and Bridgeman had achieved, and decided that there was room for improvement. He summoned William Kent, the pre-eminent architect, designer, and landscape architect of the age, and asked him to work his magic.  There seems to have been no budget or restraints; generals are after all used to getting what they want and quickly. Kent took Bridgeman’s dull bones of a garden and clothed them in such romanticism and style that nobody has since even attempted to improve them.

The garden, and house, is Rousham. It sits not far from Bicester and close to the former USAF base at Upper Heyford, and yet it could be in a remote valley in Devon or the Lake District (apart from a railway line which loiters just off set.)  There are old stone walls and lots of trees, glimpses of an ancient park with longhorn cattle browsing; then a buttery- coloured lodge, a modest sign, a curving drive to the house, the most wonderful Georgian stable block, and a ticket machine.  That is it. Apart from a sign which ordains: No children under 15. No dogs. No pushchairs.  That really is it; no shop, no plant stall, no caff.  There are notices which we will come back to, but which you should read, and nice loos; as ordained by the late Duke of Bedford who soon after opening Woburn to the public said that he realised that the visitors cared a great deal more about the conveniences than the Canelettos. 

And there are the gardens.  Not enormous, but laid along a great S bend of the Cherwell so as to feel much greater than they are.  There are glades and vistas, views across the river and along it, eyecatchers, temples, ponds, slopes, secret paths, a haha, a pyramid and a grotto and a praeneste (an ornamental colonnade), swans, a sinuous rill making its way through the woods from glade to glade, a cascade, a long ornamental bridge which is in truth a real bridge carrying the distant B4030, endless classical statues, a miniature castle which is not as you might think the dower house but a cattle shed for those longhorn cattle. It is the most beautiful landscape garden in England, probably in the world, and you do not have to accept the opinion of Stoker in this matter; it is generally held by every visitor.   There are also three walled gardens, fully kept up, one still a properly functioning vegetable garden, a great rarity in this day and age. 

General Dormer only lived four years from inheriting Rousham until his death, but amazingly it was almost complete when he died.  It was inherited from him by a cousin who apparently almost never came here, to such an extent that the head gardener wrote a furiously rude letter detailing all the glories of the garden and reminding the cousin what he was missing.  But subsequent generations of the family, now Cottrell-Dormer, have lived here ever since, and whilst they unfortunately tinkered with the house in the late nineteenth century they have never touched the garden, rightly recognising that it could not be in any way improved. The last 280 years show no changes, other than the maturity of the great trees and woods round about.

But we must return to the notices at the cash machine which takes your tenner for admittance.  For they tell a terrible tale. The twenty first century has crept close to the eighteenth century here, and it is about to leap closer.  Oxfordshire is a major economic growth area – possibly some of our readers are familiar with the Bicester Shopping Village fifteen minutes’ drive away, though don’t feel you have to be. The M40 is just over the hill, metaphorically. But literally just over the hill is the aforementioned Upper Heyford air-force base, closed for nearly twenty years.  All that flat land and endless roads and runways, concrete and tarmac.  No property developer could resist, and as it turns out, no government can either.  Here is the perfect site for a tightly-packed new town. The government is determined to build the target it set itself of 1,500,000 million houses in its five-year term, and here is space for 25,000 of them, plus shops and office blocks and industrial estates. So the vista from the garden will not just be to the eye catcher and the gothick mill, but to a townscape lowering over the Cherwell valley, with lights and noise and all the paraphernalia of modern lives. The present owners and the lovers of Rousham are fighting a valiant battle to stop this erosion of the wonderful setting, but in these modern times, will they win? The true answer is that it is most unlikely that they will prevail against such monolithic forces. 

Eighteenth century gentlemen created arcadias in the landscape and of course there was ample space to do so. And maybe their descendants have enjoyed these edens for long enough and it is time to hand over to the people, and install, as would  happen, garden centres and car parks and a food court, maybe a children's waterpark on the Cherwell and a dry ski slope from the Baroque gate down to the river.  If that happens, if on some cursed day that should happen, we will have lost far more than any conceivable benefit.

So go now, this summer or next winter, spend a day, take a picnic and good walking shoes and a friend, and be overwhelmed by what a retired military gentleman and a gifted architect landscaper created. You may not see its like again.

The gardens at Rousham House, at Rousham near Bicester, are open every day, 10am until dusk, admittance currently £10 per head - https://rousham.org/