Dyrham Park Garden

Our next home and garden was Dyrham Park, up very close to the Bristol Channel. There is a great house, 17th century and later, and a large deer park. We chose to walk the deer park first, then do the garden tour, then tour the house. We were in for a surprise.

In the deer park, Hinton Hill, an iron age hill fort, now a bovine stronghold; in
577, seriously, the culminating battle between the Britons and the Anglo/Saxons
was fought near here: the Battle of Dyrham: Cuthwine and Ceawlin slew three
Briton kings, Coinmail, Condidan, and Farinmail and took the cities of
Gloucester, Cirecester, and Bath; sadly, I can never hear nor read the word
"Briton" without remembering... "'Ooare the Britons?" "Well we all are! We are
all Britons. And I amyour king" "I didn't know we had a king! I thought we were
an autonomous collective" "You're fooling yourself! We're living in a dictatorship!
A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes--" "There you go,
bringing class into it again" ... sadly

In the deer park, a menage a trois of deer

A deer nursery

Looking down to the house; we have already walked downhill a good bit; this
house is in a hole!

And at the top of the hill, a statue of Neptune; what is going
on here?

It wasn't until the garden tour that we discovered what was going on...Dyrham
was most importantly the property of one William Blathwayt, a businessman
and civil servant who happened to be fluent in Dutch at just the right time, the
arrival of William and Mary; Blathwayt served as the king's secretary of state
for a decade and was by that time wealthy enough to build himself a country
estate with a Dutch water garden (think Versailles, smaller scale); ponds and
watercourses and falls and fountains; all this needed a water source higher than
the house and garden, and thus the house was in a hole; alas, within a century--
fashions and fortunes change--his descendants had plowed the whole thing up
and covered it over with more deer park (the map above is the only
representation of the original estate's gardens)

This rectangular pond is about all that remains of the original water park

But slowly, the Trust is restoring its beauty

Thus

Very slowly, very carefully; this is what a parterre looks like without the flowers
(taken out for some repairs on the house)

Our day at Dyrham ended in the parking lot, noticing a camper with Washington
state licence plates: and we later met David and Lou, doing pretty much the same
things we are doing...