A new album is available on our website showing the progress we made in raising the tree canopy and thinning overgrowth along the South Walk close to the Circle. We’ve made good progress in visually reconnecting the Home Park with the walk and promoting a new sense of openness to the area. A full album of images here!
View towards the House from the South Walk before, and after Sat 18th’s work
We’re running another guided history walking tour of the Kings Weston landscape on Sunday the 26th April. This will be a chance to explore the rich history of the parkland under the expert guidance of KWAG’s chairman David Martyn.
Taking in both familiar landmarks and some of its hidden treasures it’s sure to prove fascinating to anyone with an interest in the estate. Come and discover over four hundred years of history and the cast of the people who led to development of Kings Weston as one of Bristol’s greatest and most famous country estates.
The history walk is one of our regular fund-raising events and we ask a fee of £6 for anyone who would like to join us. The event will start at 10:30 from Shirehampton Road car park and last approximately 2.5 hours. Places on the walk are limited, and please book in advance by contacting us through the details below. Payment should be made on the day. Children under 16 are free and well behaved dogs on leads are welcome.
Tel: 07811 666671 or email kwactiongroup@gmail.com
We’ve finally completed a project we began in January; the steps linking the historic upper and lower paths through Penpole Woods.
The works are all part of a project in Partnership with Bristol City Council and grant-funded by the Forestry Commission to improve access within the woodland. The steps were one of our priorities and we worked with the Forest of Avon Trust to ensure that they formed part of the original bid. January’s 2-day training course was really well attended and over the two days we had more than 20 KWAG volunteers learn how to put the steps together. Our thanks go to Bristol’s Conservation Volunteers, the training they gave us, and for some of their own volunteers who came along to help on the first Saturday.
We continued the work between January and March working through some very hard terrain, and finally completed the 61 step target in early March. The results from the last few month speak for themselves, and we should be incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved as a group.
We’ve got two galleries of images from the project; one with our usual working party before-after photos, and another in our completed projects files. Please take a look and see what you think of the finished project.
A new image has just been acquired of one of the Kings Weston Estate’s 23 individual Listed Buildings. Seen above, this is a pencil drawing of Wood Lodge dates to 1956 and was sketched by local artist, and Bristol Savage, George Holloway. This view looks towards the Grade II Listed building from the east and shows a number of features that have since been lost including the blocked windows and the stone drip-mouldings above others.
The lodge owes much of its ornamental appearance to Philip Skinner Miles during the Victorian era. It was in the 1860s that Miles undertook the refurbishment of a number of the estate’s buildings, including Wood Lodge, and added rustic wood work, decorative barge-boards and a clay pantile roof; Kingsweston Inn Sea Mills Farm, and Henbury Lodge also received similar alterations at this time. However, Wood Lodge has a much earlier origin.
The lodge has always had an important role on the estate; guarding the private parkland to the east from the publicly accessible common land on Penpole Point in the west. It is first depicted on an estate plan of 1772 and is seen in the smaller accompanying image here, by Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, in 1788 (Copyright of the British Library). This earlier view shows the front of the building as it would have appeared from the west. What is obvious is that the present building has very different proportions when viewed from the side, and appears to have shrunk from its original width. The projecting bay on the Penpole Lane side is likely to be the same one as seen today.
From the general appearance of the building, and some of the features shown in these two illustrations, it is possible to attribute this lodge to the architect, garden designer, and mathematician Thomas Wright. We know that Wright was working on designs with Edward Southwell III of Kings Weston House from 1761 and there are strong stylistic similarities between Wood Lodge and some of his other work on the Badminton Estate, Gloucestershire and Tollymore Park in Ireland. At what time the building was so drastically altered it’s not known, and although the thatch has a far more picturesque effect, its present tiled roof must be far easier to maintain!
SPRING BIRD WALK
BOOKING NOW OPEN FOR OUR FREE WALK WITH BRISTOL BIRD EXPERT ED DREWITT
We’re delighted to announce we’ve received Green Capital Grant funding through Avonmouth and Kingsweston Neighbourhood Partnership and we can now put on this years programme of nature i walks for FREE!
The first in the series, our Spring Bird Walk, will be led by expert naturalist, author, and broadcaster Ed Drewitt. Ed has led two previous Dawn Chorus walks before, but this walk will start at the more sociable hour though should be no less fascinating! With Spring upon us there will be plenty to see and listen out for on the estate.
Join us in a months time at 8:15 on Saturday 18th April for an 8:30 start from Shirehampton Road Car Park. The walk should last approx 1.5 hours and the cafe at the house will be open for teas, coffees, and refreshments afterwards. Please note that although free it’s essential that you book for this event as places are limited. Sorry that we aren’t able to allow dogs on this particular walk.
To book a place please get in touch by email to KWAG@theweasels.plus.com, or call on 07811 666671.
Please feel free to forward this post and poster to anyone you think might be interested. A PDF copy of the poster for printing and display can be downloaded HERE.
A book exists in Bristol Record Office called the Kings Weston Book of Drawings (KWBoD). It’s a fascinating volume comprising numerous original Eighteenth Century drawings for Kings Weston house and surrounding parkland features. The most visually attractive of the pageshosts a drawing for a pair of sphinx proposed for the “cheeks of the great steps”. Now long lost these once guarded the main entrance of the house before falling victim to changing fashion in the 1760s.
Drawing in the Kings Weston Book of Drawings, Courtesy of Bristol Record Office
Print of the sphinx at Versailles, published by Jean Lepautre in Vues and Plans, 1667
However ornamental the pen-and-ink design held in the KWBoD is it was not an original one. It was copied, quite meticulously, from an engraving of an identical sphinx in the gardens of Versailles. The original designer was Louis Lérambert who in 1664 provided a wide range of sculptures to the palace, but it was through the engraver Jean Lepautre that the design arrived at Kings Weston.
Lepautre was a well regarded and successful designer and engraver operating in late Seventeenth Century France. He published a number of lavishly illustrated books focussing on Versailles, including his seminal work ‘Vues et Plans de Versailles’ in 1675. It was from this book that the designs for the Kings Weston sphinx had been copied.
This month we’ve made further discoveries linking the work of Lepautre to Kings Weston. By chance an engraving of his came up for sale. It depicted a design for a fictitious building not dissimilar to the Echo. With a new rigour we returned to Lepautre’s work and began reviewing it for any other commonalities. Trawling through the many hundreds of designs he produced there dozens for numerous garden pavilions, interiors, decorative motifs, and statuary. After a brief time we discovered an engraving of the imaginary ornamental urn illustrated here. It’s identical to one of the painted, gilded urns in the stair hall of Kings Weston House and is further evidence that Lepautre’s work was influencing designs during construction between 1712 and 1719..
Left: The painted urn in the stair hall at Kings Weston, circa 1719. Right, the engraving of an imaginary urn by Lepautre.
Lepautre’s oeuvre also contains another print of a building of particular interest, and one that would certainly have influenced the invention of his own Echo-like building that began our recent quest. The building is the Grotte de Tethys, an extravagant artificial cave designed for the gardens at Versailles by the architect Le Vau in 1666, and published in Vues et Plans . The grotto was set close to the palace and at the head of a long promenade stretching out into the park. The Echo would once have shared a similarly formal garden context terminating a long formal axis from Kings Weston house. Like the sphinx the symmetrical arrangement of parterres and “French alleys” were swept away in the 1760s during Edward Southwell III’s aggressive rebranding of the estate as vehemently English political powerbase.
Top: The Echo, designed circa 1724 Middle: Grotte de Tethys, Versailles, engraved 1675 Bottom: Design by Lepautre for a garden loggia. Undated
Features in both of Lepautre’s engravings, such as the triple-arched loggia, the rusticated stonework, cyclopean keystones, and the forest of urns feel very familiar when looking at the Echo. Could these ideas have been filtered through Vanbrugh’s genius to give Kings Weston its own little piece of Versailles? If so this influence can only have come through engravings because by the time the Echo was built the grotto at Versailles had been demolished for almost forty years.
One last piece of evidence supports Lepautre’s influence over Kings Weston and its gardens. In the 1834 auction catalogues that mark the end of the Southwell family’s reign there two books noted; Lot 764: Le Pautre’s designs – 1667 calf bound sold for £1.18.0 and Lot 765: Le Pautre’s designs – 1667 calf bound sold for £1.11.6. Sadly there is no mention of the Versailles book in the catalogues, but these earlier volumes are likely to have been Lepautre’s own designs compiled into the pattern books that helped spread his stylistic influence through Europe. Although we cannot be sure when they entered the Southwell’s library their appearance is unlikely to be coincidence. Could these have been the reference sources for more at Kings Weston than we are yet aware of?
Since foundation in 2011 KWAG has always been keen to ensure that we don’t charge members for getting involved, but we do need to carry on operating and being able to realise our plans to conserve and enhance the estate. We are entirely dependant on volunteer donations and grants, but we need to turn over several thousand pounds a year to make sure we can still carry on benefiting the park.
We do have regular fund-raising events, but now we are asking if you are able to help support us further by considering giving us a donation. To enable this we have created a new and easy way to get donations to us via credit or debit card, or direct through Paypal.
If our work in the estate has impressed you and you would like to see it continue, if you’ve enjoyed one of our free guides and would like to see more in the future, or would like to see more bulb planting, bins, or any number of infrastructure works extended then please lend us your support. We promise to put your donation to the best use we can.
Thank you
In October 2014 we set about planting over 12,000 spring bulbs. Right now we are enjoying the payback from that event with the snowdrops now flowering below the Echo. Not quite a carpet yet, but certainly a fantastic show for the first year.
Bluebells are already coming up thick under foot and should present a stunning display in the coming weeks.
We’ll keep you updated with how things develop with this album.
We were delighted to find that, finally, our long-awaited new map board has appeared in the park. The sign was kindly supported by a grant from the Avon Gardens Trust last year, and since then we’ve spent a long time designing and the artwork and making sure that it gives visitors a fresh and informative way to explore the estate. Based on the map we commissioned from local artist Dru Marland for our estate guide leaflets we’ve ensured that it’s been updated with all the recent changes, like the avenue and restored steps. As well as the usual information about car park, bust stop, bin and cafe locations we’ve also added our ten highlights of the park. It’s far from being an exhaustive list, but we hope it will encourage people to explore more of the 300 acre estate.
The board appeared mysteriously and without warning around the 21st January, and slightly in the wrong place! However as this second photo shows the sign company were very quick in moving it to the correct location when we asked. It now partners our existing leaflet dispenser as an information station at the entrance into the park from Shirehampton Road car park, just on The Circle.
We’re hugely grateful to the Avon Gardens Trust for their support in this project, and also to Bristol Council parks department for working with us in finalising the design and procuring the board on our behalf.
Another arrival has come in the form of a leaflet holder for the cafe at the House. It’ll show off our free guides and other leaflets to best effect, and will help keep the cafe tidy too!
Access our monthly newsletter and find out what’s happening around Kings Weston right now. You can read it on-line here.
