Sojourn in Wiltshire October 2022: Part 2

A visit to Stourhead, known more for its landscaped gardens than for its house. And, after our visit, we thought "deservedly so". Visit the house by all means but go for the gardens and the wider estate.

Stourhead is a large country house in the Palladian style - all columns and symmetry. It was finished in 1725 and had taken four years to build. Today it's full of portraits of people I've mostly never heard of and/or, quite honestly, had little interest in. Lots of money spent buying pictures whilst the peasants outside had the scraps off their table. Nowadays it's called 'trickle down'. It didn't work then and it doesn't work now.

A fairly typical landscaped vista from the front of the house. Designed to provide an impressive entrance for visitors and a lot of what was done was done with impressing visitors in mind. All that's missing are a few peasants to add a little perspective to the rural idyll.

And now to the real reason for visiting Stourhead - the gardens. I think we hit it at about the right time for leaf colour. The estate is around 2500 acres. At various vantage points on the walk around the gardens are a number of ornate buildings, which are for ornament rather than function. Although providing a focus for walking and picnicking is a function in itself, I suppose.

One of the largest trees on the estate - a Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum). It's 150 feet (45.5 m) tall and has a girth of 23 feet (7 m) at 5 foot from the ground. To state the obvious, it's an impressive tree. It never ceases to amaze me what a diet of carbon dioxide, water, light and a few minerals can lead to.

There are a series of three interconnecting lakes in the gardens (or park) at Stourhead, fed by the nascent River Stour (which, coincidentally flows into the English Channel at Christchurch where we were a couple of months ago. Who knew?). The circular walk around the largest of the lakes is just over a mile long and is a not-particularly arduous, but spectacular, stroll.

A nice bit of Autumnal colour.

The bridge doing what it was designed for - adding an attractive vista - with the iconic pantheon on the other side of the lake.

The church of St Peter stands immediately outside Stourhead Gardens and is well worth popping into at the end of your walk. The earliest record of a church here dates from 1291, and it seems likely that the north nave arcade and tower date from that time. Since then there have been a number of additions and alterations, most 'recently' by the Victorians. Above is a rather fine stained glass window in the west wall dedicated to a past rector, John Drake.

Looking down the main aisle towards the altar.

When I first saw this monument near the church, I thought it was a relatively modern folly, in the mould of the Scott Memorial in Edinburgh. But it is the ‘real thing’, a medieval cross. In the 1700’s such relics of the past were considered old-fashioned and valueless; in the case of the Bristol High Cross, it was deemed a nuisance since it was blocking the growing traffic in the town centre of Bristol. Hence, after many complaints, it was dismantled, re-erected on the green by Bristol Cathedral, then taken down again and left in a sorry, discarded pile. Fortunately, Stourhead’s owner, Henry Hoare, saw the ruined cross, decided to rescue it and duly rebuilt it in Wiltshire.

An exterior view of St Peters. It's worth visiting and I found it more interesting than the Palladian nonentity up the hill. I wonder how many visitors to Stourhead feel the same?