It is fully twenty-one years since I was last at Painshill Park, with Dr Bones on that occasion. That was blazing summer, but a rainy weekday ('holy well weather') works just as well to follow the walks, wonder at the follies, and muse around the lake. Here and there I could glimpse other visitors, but no more than a dozen of them.
On our last visit the Grotto - the largest in the country - was still being restored and on walking through it it's boggling to remember that it had been entirely ruined, the roof falling in during the 1940s. In fact many of Painshill's features were even more ruinous than they were intended to be, as the garden's designer Charles Hamilton did things as cheaply as he could, often using timber painted to look like stone - and even then he couldn't repay the colossal sums he'd borrowed (from the bank run by his fellow gardener Henry Hoare of Stourhead) without selling the estate and having to leave the very landscape he'd created. The Painshill Trust has in many cases not just restored the follies and features, but actually reconstructed them.
I'd not really noticed what a superb composition Painshill is - how carefully the views are arranged, how skilfully the experiences are built on until you reach the fairytale Gothic Tower right at the far end of the estate, how the lake is constructed to look like a huge expanse of water here, a tranquil pool there, or a river in a third place, because you never see it in its entirety. It doesn't count as a 'Gothic Garden', but it's a huge delight.
As you approach the Gothic Tower you can hear the A3 thundering just beyond the trees, which explains part of Nia Broomhall's strangely moving poem displayed outside:
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