Bank Holiday Discoveries

It isn’t unknown to find a folly not listed in the great survey by Headley & Meulenkamp, but it’s much rare for them to miss a whole garden landscape with its attendant follies. They can be forgiven for overlooking the arrangements at Deepdene near Dorking, as they were completely ruinous and, in the case of one of the structures, actually buried by the local council. But having discovered this place existed, I went to look at it yesterday, a little Bank Holiday excursion.

In 1652 Charles Howard, one of the family of the Dukes of Norfolk, inherited the Deepdene estate and remodelled the garden immediately to the rear of the house in the form of a long, narrow amphiteatre. To this he added a modest flint Tower at the side, and right at the top a Grotto; and opening off one side, next to the Tower, were caves which Mr Howard enlarged and embellished with arched openings and where he ‘conducted experiments’ in his own laboratory). A later owner of Deepdene, banking heir Thomas Hope, added a second layer of folly-building, remodelling the Grotto and adding a Temple to the top of the Terrace above the garden, and, half a mile off to the southeast, a Mausoleum to house first the body of his son who died at the age of 7, and then himself and other family members.

Should we categorise Deepdene as yet another Gothic Garden? It’s not far off, though it’s a very mild example of the genre. Charles Howard’s Embattled Tower is just a toy, sitting very undramatically by the side of a nice flat lawn, and it comes as something of a disappointment to discover that his ‘experiments’ in the caves were in the fields of tanning and leather-working, rather than alchemy or revivification of the dead as we might hope. Thomas Hope’s enthusiasms went nowhere near Gothic, and instead it was Egypt and Greece that captured his imagination (he remodelled the family house in London, built by Robert Adam, in Egyptian manner); but while his follies weren’t Gothic in style, they certainly had an umbrageous personality. At the back of what’s left of the Grotto you can see the false wall be put in over Charles Howard’s flints, with niches to hold artefacts from his own Grand Tour. The Temple at the top of the slope, demolished in 1955, combined Classical and Egyptian motifs, and had Egyptian statues looming either side of its central portico. The Mausoleum is a profoundly gloomy structure even in the Spring sun, squat and pylon-like. I wondered why the orientation panel at the entrance to the grounds included little motifs of screaming Grecian theatrical masks until discovering that Mr Hope put them on the Temple.

However we might think about that, what can’t be doubted is that Deepdene is a garden without a house: that was, scandalously, demolished as late as 1969. The whole landscape passed to the Council who decided that the safest thing to do with the Mausoleum, for instance, was to stick a concrete cap on it and then bury it; it was only exhumed in 2015 when a group of local enthusiasts persuaded the authorities to try and revive the garden. A copy of one of Mr Hope’s Coade-stone lions was placed in the middle of the lawn, the Grotto relieved of the brick pillars put in when it was used as an ammo store in WW2, and the walks reopened. And that wartime usage is another layer in Deepdene’s history: Charles Howard’s underground laboratory became a secret telephone exchange, while the woods are still marked with processions of anti-tank dragon’s teeth, arranged up and down the slopes.

Deepdene was my intended destination yesterday; Coverwood, however, was a happy accident, as I followed the yellow signs indicating a garden open under the National Gardens Scheme, and found a working farm, a Jacobean-style Edwardian house in the woods along the valley, and calming lakes.