On my week off a little while ago I made the slightly crazy decision to drive for 75 miles to look at a grotto. It was down in Sussex, a county about which I know very little, so I treated it as a fun excursion into terra incognita. The occasion was this: Some time ago, a parishioner gave me a booklet about Ashburnham Place, which was a minor landed estate once upon a time and is now a Christian conference centre after most of the old house was taken down. Around the surviving chunk of the house, outbuildings and church are the remains of the landscaped garden in which Capability Brown had a hand, and these include, on the south side of the lake, the Ladyspring Grotto. I thought this was worthwhile pursuing, so made my way there on a day which promised to be 'showery' but for the earlier part of the afternoon, at least, was pretty uniformly wet as these photographs reveal.
The church still functions as a parish church as well as the chapel of Ashburnham Place itself, and is on the Low Church side of the fence. It still has a railed-in communion-table in the 17th-century fashion, although I'm not sure the woodwork dates to that time.
Anyway, a walk around the perimeter of the lake leads eventually to a winding path up into the hillside to the south. The Grotto is intended to convey the impression of a sort of Graeco-Roman shrine, and the approach is carefully planned - you approach either up a direct path which leads you to the entrance, although the view of the Grotto is shielded until you're only a few yards away, or alternatively follow a different and higher path to the west which leads you around the top of the gully in which the Grotto sits, and then down stone steps past massive blocks of stone to the shrine itself.
This all works remarkably well in creating a sense of the mysterious and numinous, even though the site is a bit overgrown at the moment and the structure is nothing very special inside - the archway is plastered over, and the water rattles undecorously down a drain contained in a stone trough. As for the name, the story goes that there is an image of a 'lady' - or perhaps three ladies, depending on which notice around the grounds you pay attention to - painted on the plaster on the rear wall, which you can see if you splash it with water. I could see little apart from swirls of mould doubtless partly caused by visitors splashing water on the wall, but the estate guidebook does assure us that the image can be seen with infra-red photography. I wonder whether the name in fact existed long before the Grotto itself. The guidebook ascribes the building to Lancelot Brown himself, which I doubt very much as it would have been pretty unique among his work: the great garden designer dabbled in architecture but wasn't really a folly-builder. This looks far more like the work of a landowner who's read his Horace and knows a bit about pagan religion, and has the strange fancy of replicating something of the sort in his garden.
Not far along the side of the lake are the Ironspring, a somewhat unexciting pond, and the Shell Fountain which channels the overflow of a feeder into the lake, but it's the Ladyspring which is the pick of the bunch here. Well worth the drive and the wet!
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