Heatwave reveals ghostly outline of Longleat’s Lost Gardens
The prolonged hot and dry weather has shown up some hidden details
Glimpses of Longleat’s lost 17th century gardens have been revealed in a series of fascinating new drone images.
Intriguing outlines of long-lost walls, pathways fountains and parterres dating back to the 1600s, have become visible as parch marks because of the current heatwave.
The marks show up because soil over buried landscape features is shallower than its surrounding areas. During prolonged hot, dry weather the grass above these features becomes stressed and dies off, revealing ghostly shadows of what remains below the surface.
To the east of the Wiltshire Elizabethan stately home, part of a massive 70-acre, Franco-Dutch formal baroque garden designed by George London in the 1680s for Thomas Thynne, 1st Viscount Weymouth, has been revealed.
The gardens featured canals with cascades and fountains, parterres, statues, flower gardens, a maze and a bowling green, an ornamental wilderness, and The Grove – a forest garden intersected by rides radiating from an inner clearing.
The earliest visible features discovered so far are sections of walled gardens to the front of Longleat House.
These date back to earlier in the 17th century and were painted by the renowned Flemish landscape artist Jan Siberechts in 1675 in what is believed to be the first painting of Longleat.
Other more recent features include the 18th century sweeping in-and-out carriage driveway that once led up to the steps at the front of the house, and which remained in use until shortly after Longleat opened to the public in 1949.
Curator James Ford said:
"It is fascinating to be able to see these ‘ghost’ gardens and other features literally appearing out of the ground around the house.
"While we are extremely fortunate to have contemporary engravings and paintings here at Longleat, there is nothing to compare with actual physical evidence.
"These parch marks, that will entirely disappear again when the rain and cooler weather return, provide us with an invaluable window into a lost world and an opportunity to accurately plot the design and layout of these important elements of Longleat’s history."
As with many of the great estates, Longleat’s formal gardens were transformed into naturalistic parkland in the 18th century by landscape gardener ‘Capability’ Brown.
The 17th century canals were transformed by teams of workmen, digging by hand, to create Half Mile Pond which is now home to a colony of California sea lions and a pair of hippos.