GREAT LANDSCAPES Landscape

Capability Brown’s GREAT LANDSCAPES

His name is synonymous with the most well-established country estates in England. His legacy is rolling parkland and rivers that meander towards expansive lakes. Capability Brown, in the 18th century, forever changed the way that our stately homes look…

IF YOU’D GATHERED TOGETHER a few guineas in the 18th century, you’d probably treat yourself to whatever enormous country pile came on the market, or commission a grand country home yourself. And once you’d created a place with suitably grand Georgian proportions and lavish interiors, you’d probably want to entrust the design of its surrounding parkland to the equally instantly recognisable style of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. Brown was born in Northumberland around 1715 and died in 1783. During that time, he designed a remarkable 250 country estates of which 150 survive today. Schooled in the area he was apprenticed to the head gardener of Sir William Loraine, at Kirkharle Hall, once a vast farming estate and today a more modest country property converted into a series of galleries, craft shops and restaurants. Kirkharle’s estate was one over which Brown effected a great transformation. But it was only after he’d ventured down here to Boston and met his future wife Bridget Wayet –Biddy – in 1744 that he spread his wings. Brown ventured inland and joined Lord Cobham’s staff at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, where he was appointed head gardener at 26, in 1742, remaining there until 1750. Cobham allowed Capability Brown to undertake commissions from his aristocratic friends, and soon he had designed parkland at Belvoir Castle, Burghley House and at Grimsthorpe Castle near Bourne as well as the great English country estates of Blenheim Palace, Highclere Castle and Hampton Court.

The English religious writer Hannah More worked alongside Capability Brown at Hampton, and described how Capability Brown used grammatical metaphors to describe the features of his landscapes – commas, a colon, parenthesis or a full stop –depending on where he wanted the eye to rest.

His vernacular was smooth undulating areas of grass, belts and scatterings of trees and serpentine lakes. Favouring parkland instead of areas of formal gardens was a vast contrast to his forebears like Alexander Pope.

In addition to his eye for landscapes Brown was also a skilled water engineer and could create complex land drainage schemes for his lakes and rivers.

Capability Brown would introduce ha-has, long curved drives, boat houses and ice houses, and would alternate clumps of native trees like oak, beech and chestnut with newly imported exotics such as cedar of Lebanon, which would become his signature tree.

Capability Brown’s success would have netted him over £20m in today’s money, but though he was driven and very much in demand, he’s reported to have maintained his easy-going nature throughout his career, and he dearly loved his wife and seven children. He did, however, suffer badly from bouts of illness, not least among which was asthma, and died aged 67. Burghley House Capability Brown’s association with Burghley House was the longest in the landscaper’s history. His transformation of the country estate’s landscape began when Brownlow Cecil, the 9th Earl of Exeter, inherited the estate in 1754. Unusually, Brown was hired not only to update the grounds of the country estate but to create the stableblocks and the estate’s orangery, indulging the Cecil family’s passion for exotic horticulture with the use of floor-to-ceiling windows, providing excellent views of the formal gardens but also exposing to space to lots of natural light. The restoration of the five-acre sculpture gardens in 1994 reclaimed Capability Brown’s domed ice house, limestone cliff and Swallow’s Rill, a gulley which serves as an overflow for the estate’s lake. Brown’s lake covered 11 acres; it was expanded by the end of the 18th century by the 10th Earl. The estate’s deer park was also the vision of Capability Brown, as were the estate’s balustrade bridge and its Coade stone lions. Pilsgate Lodges, Bottle Lodges and the Queen Elizabeth Gate were all post-Capability Brown additions, though created by landscapers like Stamford’s W Legg from around 1801.

Grimsthorpe Castle The landscape architect’s contribution to Bourne’s Grimsthorpe Castle was thought to be one of his earliest commissions, for Peregrine Bertie, 2nd Duke of Ancaster. In 1741 the estate was remodelled with the

“The remodelling of the parkland surrounding Belvoir Castle, in 1780, was to be one of the last projects that Capability Brown undertook...”

creation of Mill Dam Pond and later in 1771, extensions to the parkland and the creation of a sham bridge over newly extended lakes. It’s thought that the water for Grimsthorpe’s lake was redirected from springs at the ruins of Vaudey Abbey, a Cistercian monastery destroyed in 1536. The architect’s original plans for the sham bridge was one with 11 arches of graduated heights but this seemed too ambitious for the Duke’s pockets. Nonetheless, Capability Brown’s fee was settled by the estate’s executors in 1745 with £105 (over £170,000 today) billed. Not bad for work amounting to three weeks of surveys by Brown and his surveyor Samuel Lapidge and a total of four drawings. Two of these original drawings remain. Brown’s other legacy for the estate, though, was the deer enclosure which remains today. His planting scheme included Scots Pine trees which would frame a view looking east towards the area of ‘God’s Valley’ to the castle. Belvoir Castle The remodelling of the parkland surrounding Belvoir Castle, ancestral home to the Duke of Rutland, was to be one of the last projects that Capability Brown undertook. Alas, the 4th Duke of Rutland had extensive debts and so work stalled along with his finances. Commissioned in 1780, just three years before Capability Brown’s death, the landscape architect’s vision was never realised in time, and the Duke himself also died in 1787. Capability Brown’s plans were lost, only to be rediscovered in 2015 by the Emma, Duchess of Rutland just a couple of years after she embarked on her own project to restore 500 acres of woodland. Searching through the castle’s archives, the Duchess was astonished to discover the original documents and after verification by garden historian Steffie Shields, the Duchess finished the landscape that Capability Brown never got to complete, also writing a book about the project, Capability Brown & Belvoir, and partnering with Alan Titchmarsh who filmed the project for his Titchmarsh on Capability Brown series. Brown had the estate surveyed, and advised on improvements to the house and estate, charging just over £500 in total (around £750,000).

His original plan for the landscape included creating lakes, huge new woods, planting clumps and belts of trees and major earth works, such as smoothing out the castle mound and building an embankment to link it to a nearby hill. Rather than moving the nearby village of Woolsthorpe to improve the view, he incorporated it into his plan, partly screened by trees. He proposed new pleasure gardens, but kept the existing formal Tudor gardens, canal and wilderness. Brown also planned to create a ‘chase;’ open land for hunting, and reinstated Belvoir’s free warren, for hunting with hawks, which would reflect Belvoir’s medieval past. At the time that the work was undertaken, the estate covered 3,928 acres, and Brown was to charge the duke £196 (around £320,000) to oversee the implementation of his plans as well as a further £300 (£440,000) for proposed improvements to the Castle itself and for his journeys to Belvoir Castle. By the time the 5th Duke came of age, his forebear’s debts were repaid and the family fortunes improved. Most of the perimeter belts of trees and some woodland had been planted by the turn of the century. In 1788 three clumps of trees were planted, including Holywell Wood. The planting there is in Brown’s style, with clump of oaks in the centre of a ring of beech and horse chestnut trees, but there is no evidence that the design was Brown’s. The embankment that Capability Brown proposed was probably the last element of his plans to be implemented prior to the Duchess’s 21st century work, but the current Belvoir Castle dates from 1801 and was mostly completed by James Wyatt, and by Sir John Thoroton in 1816 to repair damage by rioting Luddites. Wyatt’s own plans for Belvoir are probably the reasons that Capability Brown’s designs were put on the shelf where they remained in the archives until The Duchess rediscovered them, in a timely fashion, just a year before celebrations for the 300th anniversary of Capability Brown’s birth! n