As regular readers will know I’ve got a soft spot for garden gnomes and have often lectured about them and even written  about their introduction to Britain in the mid-19thc by the rather eccentric Sir Charles Isham of Lamport Hall.

A few weeks ago I finally got to visit Lamport for myself and quickly discovered there’s a lot more to it than just gnomes as I hope this post will show, but let’s begin with a few lines by Sir Charles himself introducing his garden…

A lovely park, but much too short, leads to Elysian ground
Where much to cheer the heavy heart is visible around
E’en those who suffer from hard times, bowed with excess of grief
Will frequently experience miraculous relief.
We recollect old Lamport days, days which have fled and passed
We never heard but one complaint —”The sun goes down too fast”

I did say he was rather eccentric, and perhaps should have added not much of a poet either…

 

As usual the photos are my own unless otherwise acknowledged.

The Ishams are an old Northamptonshire family, first recorded in a village of the same name near Kettering soon after the Norman Conquest. John Isham, a prominent London merchant, three times Warden of the Mercer’s Company,  and  according to the 18thc county history, a man  “bred to business”,  bought the manor of Lamport from Sir William Cecil in 1560. He then built a “Mannour House” and “aplyed himself to plantinge, buildinge, making of pooles, including of grounds & all other woorks of good husbandry, as though he had been brought up in them from his infansy.”

The Tudor house was built on one side of a courtyard with stable/service blocks on right and left and the hall itself facing the parish church not far away across the road through the village.  Much of this was swept away during the 19thc, although the stable block [left hand side in the image] survives,  rebuilt and enlarged and now acts as the entry point to the house and grounds rather the short driveway to the road.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Almost a century later in 1654 his great-grandson,  Sir Justinian Isham, the second baronet, commissioned a grand new block – described by Country Life [26th Sept 1952] as “a miniature Italian palace” – from his friend John Webb, a kinsman of Inigo Jones.  As can be seen in the Blackemore engraving above  it was built at right angles to the existing Manor House and faced into the park. Some of Webb’s letters and designs for Lamport still survive and can be seen in an article in the 1921 Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects,

Although the house and wider estate are generally well documented that’s not the case for  the gardens until  the 19th century. However they were then, as now, largely behind the house to the east and south-east. What little is known comes partly from the youthful diary of Sir Thomas Isham. Keeping a journal was a habit drilled into him by his father, and one volume, written in Latin, covering 1671-73 survives.  It was edited by Sir Gyles Isham and published in 1971 and includes mentions several walks, one each of sycamore and beech trees and another””enclosed with thorns on each side,” . There was too a mount and a bowling green [which can be glimpsed over the wall in the sketch of 1760 below] which was much used by Thomas.  While most of these features have long gone what does remain from this period is a circular stone structure in the middle of the large expanse of lawn behind the house:  the 17thc stone-walled pit used for cock-fighting.

Thomas inherited in 1675 and soon afterwards went off on the Grand Tour for almost three years,  leaving Lamport  in the care of the estate’s steward Gilbert Clerke. Clerke is an interesting character – former Cambridge don,  theologian, scientist, mathematician and author who merits his own entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography – who lived and worked at Lamport for six years until 1683, so its quite likely he was capable of designing a garden without much assistance.  In a letter of April 10, 1678 he wrote to Sir Thomas in Rome telling him “We are going to gravell yr walks and make Garden monstrous fine and have planted wallnutt trees on to Scaldwell dyke.”   The walnut avenue ran through the park and lasted for about 250 years, gradually succumbing to old age  before the few remaining ones were cut down in 1929 and replaced with horse chestnuts.

There’s no sign of a mount now, but Sir Gyles Isham, the last of the family to live at Lamport wondered if it had been  extended and converted into  the raised terrace walk that runs along the inner side of the main garden wall, along the lines of a 1702 poem by Lady Winchilsea “Upon my Lord Winchilsea’s converting the Mount in his Garden to a Terras”  Running along the foot of the terrace slope is a gravel path which leads to a set of iron gates thought to date to about 1699/1700.

Sir Thomas died of smallpox on the eve of his wedding in 1681 and Lamport was inherited by his brother Justinian  the 4th baronet (1658-1730). He was to become  a prominent Tory politician but more importantly for the purposes of the blog continued to develop the Lamport estate.

Thanks to a 1721 sketch by Peter Tillemans the one part of the early gardens we do know about is  the area in front of the Webb block. This shows  a small  formal and enclosed garden with what look like cypress trees or possibly carefully trimmed yews backed by high hedges.   The steps to the right and left probably led to terrace walks similar to those surviving today elsewhere in the grounds.

His two sons, another Justinian [5th baronet] and Edmund [6th baronet] commissioned the Smiths of Warwick to add wings to Webb’s block  in much the same classical style. To reflect the much larger scale of the building the small enclosed garden was replaced by an expanse of grass with a circular drive so that a coach could be driven directly from the high road across the park and deposit its occupants on the steps at the entrance in the Webb building.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

However be warned. These two engraving also show something else: how dangerous it is to rely on a single image for accuracy. Just look at the number of differences between them.

That the road across the park was the main entry point, certainly for carriages, seems to be born out by Thomas Eyre’s later map.

Aside from that there are just a few snippets  relating to the gardens,  until the early 19th century,  when  yet another Sir Justinian [the 8th baronet] and his wife Mary, embarked on a series of improvements in the 1820s. They called in Henry Hakewill [1771-1830] in 1821 to rebuild the Tudor great hall which he did in the Neo-Tudor Gothic style. He also added the unusual curved porch with a room over it in the angle between two sections of the Garden facade.  The range on the right of that replaced the back of the Tudor Manor House  in 1842.

They. also asked   John Webb [1754-1828 and no relation to the architect] a landscape gardener who had worked with William Emes  to redesign the parkland, and plant a lot more trees, including the cedars on the main lawn behind the house.

However the gardens in their present form owe most to their son Sir Charles Isham, the 10th baronet who owned Lamport  between 1843 and 1903, and who together with his wife Emily had strong views on many things but especially gardens.

He had no sooner inherited than work  began on the extraordinary rock garden, which quickly became famous and featured in Country Life on 30th April 1898

It is a far cry from most people’s idea of a rockery now or at  the time. Loudon described a typical example in 1831 as  “a goodly assemblage of large stones, and perhaps old roots and trunks of trees, lying loosely on a mound of earth”

Instead  Lamport’s  was in Sir Charles’ own words, ” an assemblage of small caves, crevices, excavations, and inequalities, carpeted and encrusted with a vegetation suited to the purpose.”

Roughly semi-circular in form, 90 feet long,  up to 47 feet deep and rising to 24 feet high it was almost entirely built and planted by Sir Charles himself and has a sheer wall facing the open lawn, with its planted side very close to the house and facing north. It also butted up against a conservatory, now demolsihed whic stood on the right hand side in the photo below.

“A striking display of floral beauty was never the principal object in the Lamport Rockery” and so it was planted with “dwarf conifers, ferns, ivies and other specimens chosen for the delicacy and beauty of their foliage, rather than their flowers”

Nevertheless there are “periods when flowers prevail, as for instance during parts of April and May when lavender coloured ‘clouds’ and ‘waterfalls’ of the common aubrietia throw a mantle of exquisite beauty over the upper parts.”

 

 

Several magazines visited and wrote descriptions including The Journal of Horticulture in 1872 which said “it was a striking evidence of Sir Charles Isham’s fine taste and wonderful patience. The whole is his own handiwork and has occupied a period of two and 20 years.”

The rock garden was definitely his pride and joy and he even extended the house so that his bedroom overlooked it. Of course the other reason for its fame and significance is that Sir Charles peopled it  with gnomes which caused a lot of interest although not always positive.  For instance Sir Gyles in his guide to the house dating from xxx thought this interest in gnomes  a “detestable fashion”.

 

Sadly Sir Charles knew what to expect when he left Lamport in 1899, after his wife’s death, to go and live with one of his daughters. The family archives hold a notebook in which he wrote: “Its doom is sealed the day I leave Lamport. No one has ever touched it but self and no one has or ever will have knowledge to maintain it in anything like its present condition.”  As you’ll see from this earlier post he was quite right.

 

Elsewhere around the house and grounds Sir Charles and Emily were making other changes too. Much of Hakewill’s work did not last long because around 1860 they called in William Burn to rebuild the entrance front. Burn also redesigned the open area in front of the long Webb/Smith front by creating a balustraded terrace along the park edge with an elaborate parterre.

A smaller parterre was also laid out in in 1857 in front of the corner porch.- the so-called Italian garden – with box-edged beds  full of colourful planting and vases surrounding a shell basin-  all as typical of its period as the rockery is unusual!  It has now been much simplified, with bedding schemes replaced by low growing shrubs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was Sir Charles who planted the Irish yews along the strangely named  “Eagle Walk”,  which I discovered was so called because it once led to a cage of captive eagles… nowadays it its nothing quite so exotic, merely a small wooden summerhouse.   They were planted very close together and apparently he pruned the yews himself creating  different shapes that took his fancy.

The “entrance” to the walk is near an arbour of box,  the last, and overgrown of the seven box bowers, which were planted around 1750 but carefully maintained  by Sir Charles. who wrote

“Seven Box Bowers on the lawn, more than twelve decades old,
With loving hands and anxious care fresh beauties still unfold.”

Beyond the rock garden and ornamental grounds is the kitchen garden, the walls of which probably date from the time of Gilbert Clerke, or the early 18thc at the latest because of the unusual construction technique of some of the walls. They were built on a series of largely subterranean arches, following a system recommended by Thomas Fairchild for growing peach trees. The idea was that the roots would benefit from moisture from the shaded side but the fruit get full sunshine.  Sir Charles doesn’t seem to have been terribly interested in that and is thought to have replaced the ageing fruit trees with an early specimen of the newly introduced wisteria which s till going strong. . There was, also  and still is, an orchard off to one side and a substantial range of glasshouses.

 

 

To care for all this the Ishams had large garden team, and like most great estates exhibited and competed at flowers shows. They opened the gardens regularly to the public as well as holding fetes for good causes. Michael Heaton’s incredibly detailed study of the Lamport accounts showed that there was a large garden staff, with gardeners being paid 12 shillings a week and the head gardener £1, with an annual bill of about £300

The house became increasingly expensive for them to live in and they built a house at Cartrefle in Wales often renting  out  estate.  After Sir Charles died in 1903 Lamport  and the title passed to his cousin  Sir Vere who also  found it too expensive and  gain rented Lamport out.

Amongst the tenants before the outbreak of war in 1914 were Lord and Lady Ludlow who had the six other box bowers ripped out because “they harboured flies.”

 

The Victorian conservatory was also taken down and replaced by a small formal lily pond and rose garden – “a great improvement” according to Sir Gyles’  1974 guidebook . These are not open to visitors although you can peer over the fence!

In 1931 Vere passed the estate to Gyles, although it was still let and in 1933 decided to turn it into a country club. That didn’t work so it was rented again and then  it was requisitioned first for use by British troops, then by Czechs and then in 1945/46 for Italian POWs.  When Sir Gyles returned from war service,  he said ” I will not disguise from you the sense of shock I felt when I returned to England after nearly five years in the Middle East to find Italians whom for some period I had been facing on the battlefields of the Western desert, and whom I had seen entering into great numbers into captivity with no very heavy heart, comfortably installed in Lamport.”

There had been considerable damage and the whole property was in need of a lot of tlc but there were shortages of building materials, skilled labour, fuel and money. He rented part of the house to Northampton Records Office, converted upstairs into flats, consolidated the landholdings and then began work on restoration. Country Life wrote 3 articles about th e house in 1952, but the gardens were not in a for state to be covered until 1960.

 

Restoring the walled garden after decades of neglect cannot have been easy, and hard decisions had to be taken. There has been no attempt at any historic recreation or switching to  some currently “trendy” style, instead it has been replanted using perennials from Piet Oudolf’s nursery laid out in blocks and straight lines echoing its history of  growing vegetables. My first thought is that it resembled a giant cutting garden.

 

Sir Gyles must have been an extraordinary character. He had a successful career as  an actor on stage and screen  before the war and could probably have gone back to that  afterwards, but decided instead to return to Lamport. His determination and hard work made him  its saviour – not just because he persevered with restoration against all the odds  but  even more importantly, because, having no close family, he set up  the Lamport Preservation Trust to safeguard its future. They have run it ever since and it’s clearly in very good hands.

Do go and see it if you get a chance. You will not be disappointed

 

 

Let me leave you with some more of Sir Charles’s doggerel

A quiet trip to Lamport, let me tell you once again,
brings the maximum of pleasure with the minimum of pain.
There’s many trains to Lamport, and a big one to Skegness.
The short route leads to happiness, the long one to distress.

For more information: Good places to start are the Trust’s website; but after that there’s a very detailed analysis of Lamport’s finances in Dowries to the Rescue,The History of the Isham Estate, the Men Who Controlled It, and Its Finances 1560-1976, by Michael Heaton, 2018.  There’s also Rose Garwood’s article “Hidden Patronage: Mary and Emily Isham and the Remodelling of Lamport Hall” in Northamptonshire Past and Present, 2012.    And the following articles about the house and gardens:  The Cottage Gardener (1860); The Journal of Horticulture and Cottage Gardener (1872), p.501-3; 1897, Gardener’s Chronicle, p.209-10+217+219+395; 1898, Country Life (1898), p.518-20 ; 1952, Country Life (1952), p.932-35  p.1106-09.; 1960, Country Life (1960), p.1104-07  p.1164-67