Back to Busbridge Lakes

To recover from a Rectory party yesterday - it would have been a garden party but for the weather, which converted it to a house party - I visited Busbridge Lakes, my local Gothic Garden, as in former years, taking advantage of its last opening for 2018, on the August Bank Holiday. The outlook was damp at first, then just overcast, but by the time I was sat next to the lower lake with a cup of tea and a sausage roll the sun was struggling to peek through the clouds. 

It's the tenth year since my first visit, and five years since I was there last. The owners, Mr & Mrs Douetil, have stopped breeding some of the more exotic birds and now concentrate on less rare species, so the lower bird pens are looking overgrown and run-down, but the grounds and pens nearer the house are fine. They're trying to encourage wedding bookings, weddings being where all the money is at the moment.

But I do worry about the follies. The curtain of ivy over the Hermit's Cave is almost reaching the ground ...

And the rest of the magnificent Ghost Walk is getting more and more overgrown. The walls are now almost completely ivy-covered and when you look from the turret on the top of the ramparts the great five-fanged arch of rough stone that forms the entrance to the Walk can't be seen at all (as it should be). The Ghost Walk is completely without parallel in English landscape gardens and someone should really be helping the owners care for this national treasure.

The path to the Doric Temple is blocked by a fallen tree - as I think it has been for a long time. At least it didn't hit the temple itself!

At the top of the hill, Hercules, as presiding genius loci, broods on his plinth.

In her amazing book Gothic Music, Isabella van Elferen (which is also a brilliant name if you're going to be a Gothic academic) suggests that a Goth club amounts to a ritualised means of rehearsing Gothic identity. As I've never been much of a club-goer, I find the same thing going round this Gothic Garden I know well. It is always the same, but not quite the same; I re-acquaint myself with the follies and walks, and observe how other visitors interact with them. There is a kind of calm and repose in doing this, not only due to the water birds making their slow progress across the lakes.

But look! I'm pretty sure I've never noticed this little archway before, glimpsed through the bird pens. I wonder what it was intended to be.