GARDENS OLD AND NEW. 



Great Duke. In 1848 he had sold Athelhampton to 

 Mr. George Wood, and in 1891 the house and 

 lands were again sold, Mr. Alfred de Lafontaine, 

 the purchaser, being the present lord of the manor 

 of Athelhampton. By this last sale there came 

 to the hands of an antiquary, too late to save 

 many of its most interesting features, a beautiful old 

 English house, whose worst injuries were suffered 

 in a generation when reverence for the noble works 

 of our forefathers was in all men's mouths. 



Doubtless there was a house here from early 

 days, the chief seat of this branch of the Martyns. 

 To this house, probably a place of strength, lit by 

 windows within its courtyards, Sir William Martyn, 

 Knight of the Bath, who died in 1503, made notable 

 additions. Mr. de Lafontaine reckons that the 

 house in its great day enclosed at least three court- 

 yards, the ancient chapel standing in the south-west 

 corner of the first court, which was without the 

 gatehouse. The forecourt was shut in on the north 

 and east by the main block of the mansion house, 

 and on the south and west by the gatehouse and 

 curtain walls. Wings of the house closed in on all 

 sides the middle court. 



Up to the year 1862 the hall was entered 

 through the small archway of a noble gatehouse of 

 two storeys, a gatehouse whose magnificence would 

 have befitted the entry to an earl's castle rather than 

 to a knight's manor house. Over the arch was the 

 corbelling of a beautiful oriel window with a battled 

 head, a panel under its mullions being richly carved 

 with the arms of the owner. In that year of 1862 

 the blow fell. Mr. Wood was by no means a rich 

 man. The gatehouse, like almost every part of the 

 extensive buildings, had decayed, almost to the 

 point of insecurity, during the sad days of the 

 Wellesley ownership. For a general and com- 

 plete renovation funds were lacking, with the 

 grievous result that every stone of that gateway 

 which made Athelhampton remarkable among 

 West Country manor nouses was pulled down 

 and removed. With the gatehouse fell the chapel, 

 the walls of the first two quads and a great part 

 of the house, the gatehouse ruin going to build 

 new stables. 



Luckily, the bones of a beautiful house remained 

 to be clad, and it is remarkable that such a hall set 

 in a pleasant country-side should have been so long 

 disregarded at a time when all accessible parts of 

 England were being searched for ancient homes for 

 those who find in a newly-built country house some- 

 thing garish and disturbing. The loss of its famous 

 gatehouse may have had something to do with the 

 neglect of Athelhampton, for the hall was known to 

 architects chiefly by illustrations of the gatehouse, 

 and, when that fell, few remembered that the hall 

 itself had been respited. 



Certainly, the approach to the hall did not invite 

 the stranger. The "gardens and gallant groves " in 

 which the Martyns and the Brunes once took their 

 disport had disappeared utterly. Athelhampton 

 Hall, once the home of rich knights and squires, 

 was working for its living as a shabby farmhouse, 

 like an old charger in the shafts of a hay-wain. 

 Old photographs remain to show the untended 

 surroundings of a house which had outlived its 

 lovers. 



The sinking of the whole ground level about 

 the hall was the renovator's first object, for the 

 gathering mould of ages had left the house in a 

 hollow. This was no light task for the spade ; but 

 now that it has been achieved the hall floor is dry as 

 its layers left it, and no winter night's alarm calls the 

 servants to the chilly work of bailing flood-water out 

 of the hall. Lawns, terraces and walled gardens 

 are all recent work. Forty thousand tons of the 

 reddish Ham Hill stone went to make the walls 

 and terraces now standing where were cowsheds 

 and ruinous stables and linhays, and already the soft 

 Dorsetshire air has mellowed the masonry. The new 

 garden architecture including the well-proportioned 

 garden-house standing at the end of the stately 

 balustered terrace; the elaborate "Corona" with 

 its fine iron gate and typical Jacobean obelisks ; the 

 green court with its shapely, stone-encircled lily pool- 

 is all good, all reflects credit on Mr. Inigo Thomas, its 

 first designer, all is in character with what its Eliza- 

 bethan owner might have set round the grand earlier 

 house he had inherited, all reminds us, though on ? 

 smaller and more intimate scale, of the noble gardens 

 which, for more than three centuries, have con- 

 tinuously surrounded Sir Edward Phelips's great 

 home of Montacute, a neighbouring home included 

 in this volume. To-day, at Athelhampton, flower- 

 beds and shrubs and young trees flourish upon what 

 was so lately waste ground, and few would believe that 

 our picture of the Privy Garden is one of a garden 

 which has not always nestled beside the old house 

 whose gables and chimneys show themselves over the 

 wall. Our two views of the south elevation, that 

 which includes the porch, the hall and the west wing, 

 are most successful in giving both the architectural 

 value and the picturesque charm of this invaluable 

 remnant of a fine building age. The whole com- 

 position, stretching out on either side from the 

 splendid hall oriel, is excellent in proportion and line, 

 and typical of the domestic arrangements and archi- 

 tectural forms of Gothic building in its later phase. 

 We can also judge of the knowledge and reserve 

 which have been brought to bear on its renovation. 

 Even the lost gatehouse is once more standing, Mr. 

 de Lafontaine having collected sufficient information 

 and enough of its original material to admit of its 

 successful re-erection. 



