Tag Archives: landscape

Hidden history written into the Kings Weston landscape. 

Anyone with an interest in archaeology will probably have heard of LiDAR before. It’s a technology that uses laser pulses to measure distances and can be used to create complex 3D models and map  large areas of land. It has the ability to penetrate trees and vegetation and help reveal what lies beneath. It’s been used in archaeology for a number of years now and has helped discover features as large as cities in Egypt and temples hidden in the Amazonian rainforest.

Lidar mapping of the UK has been publicly accessible for a while, even appearing as a layer of Bristol’s Know Your Place website. We’ve made use of it before, but recently a more detailed and informative new survey has become available through the National Library of Scotland website. This new map has helped reveal some of the hidden features of the estate with new clarity.

The Lidar map for the whole of the Kings Weston estate, trees and buildings removed to reveal the topography below. The Avon is obvious at the bottom of the image, Penpole the bright finger of land on the left, and Kingsweston Hill identifiable by the sharp outline of paired quarries. 

Unfortunately, Penpole Wood and the steep slope down to Lawrence Weston has proved too confusing for useful interrogation, but the lawns around the house, largely flat and open and undeveloped for centuries,  prove perfect for enhancing the data to better through features into relief. When compared to documentary sources, what we’ve discovered from this exercise is interesting but throws up new questions over the development of the grounds.

At first glance the plan looks a psychedelic confusion of stripes and rectangles. The location of Kings Weston house has been added to the plans to help orientation. The ancient avenue it a distinctive line running south-west, diagonally from the house to the bottom left-hand corner where it meets The Circle. The South Walk runs through the jumbled ridge along the bottom of the image, and the formal gardens and path to the Echo complete the basic triangle back to the house. Different colours show slopes of land exposed to five different directions, explaining the red, orange, yellow, turquoise, and blue colour scheme.

The area around the house and lawns enhanced to throw details into relief. Kings Weston house is in black at the top of the image. 

 The lines and stripes can eventually be read, some crossing over the top of others, and some cutting through different layers. Using what we know from maps and other illustrations we can interpret these lines and place them in order of when they were created.

The lowest of these layers, Phase 1, the features which pre-date the historic park, are a series of wide strips running south-west to north-east, roughly the same alignment as the ancient lime avenue, but much earlier. We’ve previously postulated that some of the more significant ridges, visible with the naked eye even, could be the alignment of a roman Road passing through the estate, but the new LiDAR map shows a distinct curve at their south end, definitely not something the Roman engineers would have approved of! Instead this is likely a field boundary or track passing between two fields. South of this, the grain of ridges becomes tighter and less pronounced. The ridges can be traced passing through later features, albeit more faintly, or stop abruptly, showing attempts were made at erasing them later in time. In other areas, such as the south-west corner, they seem to survive ghostly beneath stronger features laid above them.

PHASE I – strip fields and ridge-and-furrow marks are interspersed with field boundaries and, perhaps, a trackway. 

These lines represent long field divisions and the tighter-grained likely to ridge-and-furrow agricultural management of the landscape. The City Archaeologist has suggested that these are early-medieval in character, so perhaps established around the Norman Conquest. At this date then, we see that the plateau was principally farmland, though it’s unclear whether a manor house existed, or whether it was even on the same site as the present house. Of course, the ridges do not preclude an earlier, Roman, landscape having existed below them.

The next phase has only become visible using this new edition of the mapping. It also includes lines, but these are of an irregular fan-like pattern bounded by a shallow banked perimeter. This looks to overlay the old field pattern below it, and is interpreted here as the levelling-out of the park, with material being dumped in lines, each line built up from west to east, gradually building up the land before being levelled-out. These features are hardly noticeable when standing there today. That the lines spread out along the ancient lime avenue suggest that it existed as the main access for the work.

PHASE IIA – A levelled area pushes out from the line of the present ancient lime avenue and over earlier agricultural features.   

Dating this phase is difficult. There is nothing that documents its formation, but its relationship with the avenue and the apparent intention to landscape the terrain suggest it relates to aesthetic improvements, so possibly the 16th or 17th Century when the agricultural landscape had become the park to the late-Tudor mansion.

The levelled area was certainly in place before a series of trees were planted in a straight line mirroring the orientation of the ancient lime avenue. These trees can be seen as a series of shallow circular depressions dug through the fan of ridges. From the c.1710 engraving of the house we know that there was an avenue on this alignment, one that stretched as far as the Tudor house. The survival of the avenue depressions on the levelled area, but not closer to the house, might be explained by the softer nature of the made ground.  

PHASE IIB – Regular lines of trees and formal garden boundaries redefine the landscape as a parkland focussed on the late-Tudor mansion. 

Of this same phase, a long straight bank through the park and more apparent tree pits seem associated with each other; both are noticeably deliberate and linear. They relate to a second line of trees shown in the engraving, and are another designed garden feature. Garden works at this period also involved the north-eastern side where the earlier agricultural formations are sliced through, or heavily overlaid by new rectilinear boundaries aligned with the formal gardens laid out on this side of the house. A formal grove or orchard shown in 1710 seems to have extended closer to the house than shown in this illustration of a plan from a decade later; this was an anomaly noticed a few years ago when dry weather caused parch marks to form.  

Features in this engraving by Johannes Kip of around 1710 correspond with those identified on the LiDAR plan.

Great changes were wrought across the estate between 1713 and 1728 when Edward Southwell employed the architect Sir John Vanbrugh to redesign his house and parkland. A plan, the Hallett plan, was drawn-up in 1720 and shows many features from the next phase of development. The provision of a grand new frontage facing the old avenues resulted in a new formal court being required to receive guests. Although the carriage drive continued to follow the ancient lime avenue on its northern alignment, substantial works were enacted to excavate and level the new court and create a perfectly flat axial lawn leading up to it. A low causeway was thrown-up to bridge a natural depression in the landscape in the cause of perfection. The embankment and spoil from these works overlaid the medieval field pattern.

PHASE III – Sir John Vanbrugh’s fondness for grand gestures is embodied by the efforts required to excavate a level Great Court and build a perfectly flat causeway leading to its gates. 

Two other features register faintly from this phase: the vestiges of the Great Terrace and a linear garden feature known only from the 1720 plan. These are both to the north of the ancient avenue and have been heavily impacted by the de-formalisation of the parkland and landscaping that occurred later in the Georgian era. Of these works little can be detected from Lidar, perhaps on account of the intention to naturalise the landscape in the picturesque manner.

Hallett’s 1720 estate plan at the same scale and orientation as the LiDAR plan helps pinpoint this phase’s features on the landscape. 

A gap exists in the story LiDAR provides, between the early 18th Century and the 20th. Deformalizing removed formal features rather than creating new ones, and had a generally lighter impact. No great changes were made during the 19th Century, nor early Twentieth. The next obvious mark is a curious dumbbell-shaped feature that, from aerial photos, was constructed in 1947. What this feature was is something of a mystery, but if anyone knows what it was used for, we’d be keen to know! A couple of other features sit outside of the known phases, one amorphous lump lying over the medieval landscape, and a small circular depression further eastward. These, perhaps, will remain a mystery.  

PHASE IV and unplaced phases. The dumbbell shaped feature close to The Circle was built immediately after WWII. Does anyone remember what it was?  

The Letters of Katherine Southwell

Way back in 2013 KWAG made contact with the John Russell, 27th Baron de Clifford, ancestor of the Southwell family. Initially we were most keen to record a number of paintings the family possessed, those which once hung at Kings Weston before the last member of the direct lineage died in 1832, but the family were eager to show us a large collection of documents too. We were delighted to be able to arrange for these to be transferred to Bristol Archives on their behalf, and were privileged to be able to review them before they were added to the city’s collections. 

There was a much of interest to Kings Weston, perhaps nothing more so than a fascinating series of letters written from Katherine Southwell to her son, Edward Southwell, whom she affectionately called Ned, the third of the family to carry that name at Kings Weston. We know Katherine today through a glorious portrait of her that still hangs at Kings Weston house. Painted by Allan Ramsay in 1740, it faces her husband across the hall where they were installed there by her son shortly after her death in 1765; indeed the whole of the portrait gallery may have been designed as much to memorialise her as the rest of the family.

Katherine Southwell by Allan Ramsay, 1740. It hangs in the Saloon at Kings Weston opposite that of her husband, Ned’s father.

Katherine and Ned’s father, also Edward, appear to have had difficulty in conceiving, the young heir not being born until nine years into their marriage. Another child, a daughter also named Katherine, died but ten years old, and perhaps a second son may never have survived infancy. Edward Senior died in 1755 leaving his wife and son alone.  It is perhaps in this context that Katherine’s affections for her surviving son were so great.  

The letters between mother and son begin in 1749, but climax after 1758, the year that Ned left for the Grand Tour of Europe, an essential component in the life of any young man of means at the time. Ned, then aged 20, left behind his 48 year old mother with few friends and family members around her. The parting was keenly felt by her, and the ensuing stream of letters that followed his departure exudes that affection and care felt for her son, but also the eagerness for him to improve himself and kindle ambition. 

Throughout Ned’s three year tour of Europe his mother sent letters, each one was carefully preserved by Edward on his travels and returned with him to the country, testament that his affection matched that of his mother. The majority survive today, though sadly there are notable gaps, where batches of correspondence appear to have been lost to time. It’s also unfortunate that we don’t have a reciprocal collection of Edward’s writings to make full sense of Katherine’s letters, but this doesn’t dim their colourful and engaging insight into mid-18th Century life. In them she updates her son on the global political situation, intermixed with “tittle-tattle” and gossip, encouraging words, and descriptions of her own exploits. Her search for a suitable new home to act as a Dower house is also a regular feature of her letters. Moreover, the letters are an incredible insight into Kings Weston, the gardens and staff employed there, and the comings and goings of tenants, neighbours, and livestock long-known to them both. 

Ned Southwell in the only known portrait of him with his sister Katherine. The painting must date to before 1748, when his sister died. He would have been under 11 years old.

In Ned’s absence, Katherine spent time at Kings Weston, working with the head gardener, Gould, and the estate manager, Nicholls, carrying out her son’s instructions. Sometimes she is at the centre of the action, actively out in all weathers assisting in planting trees, and other times an observer, sending on vivid descriptions of the flourishing parkland. She wrote:

“I got hither to dinner yesterday, and was lucky in having good weather, and took the advantage of a very fine afternoon, to visit your plantations in the quarries, who thrive very well and are very clean, as is the garden; nay even the park is more free from nettles than usual; a prodigious quantity of grass and bullocks and sheep fatting on it; your colt frisking about very gay and for what I know very fine ones; ………I live on the hope of once more enjoying you all together and let the intermediate space run on as it can.”
Kingsweston, 27 Sept. 1758. 

The gardens around Kings Weston house in 1720, before their redesign. 

And soon after:
“Having no letter of’ yours, my dear Ned to answer, and having had no visitor but Mr, Berrow this can bring you no news but of the mute and vegetable part of the creation. To begin then your serpentine plantation at the bottom of Penpole looks much less like a snake than it used to do, the trees in general are flourishing and, the laurels almost cover the wall; it is extremely clean and has been twice sow’d this year, once with turnips and once with fetches.
 
The quarries have lost but few trees, but the hares and the lambs have crept under the rails and nibbled some, out. I find they took good care to keep them out as soon as they perceived it for ‘tis very little damage that is done.

The old kitchen garden is transformed into a nursery, but Gould cou’d not entirely part with the sparrowgrass (asparagus) beds, so has planted only between them, but the want’ of room this year will force him to quit his beloved.

There’s a fine parcel of young things of last year’s sowing in the flower garden, viz beach, swamp oak, Weymouth pines, cyprus, holly, laurel and some larch.
 
Now for my own particular friend the tulip trees that were removed are in health the arbutus are full of fruit and the two small magnolias are alive, but, alas, the great one is dead but what is still a greater misfortune to me, some Dutch sailors stole Jewel (a horse) but the day before I came.”
Kingsweston, 1 Oct. 1758.

Kings Weston in about 1763, with some of the plantations below Penpole Point that Katherine mentions, and shortly after the demolition of the walls of the Great Court in front of the house. (Sir John Soane’s Museum)  

Throughout his time away, Ned was replanning his estate. Katherine writes frequently about floor plans and elevations of the house being sent out to him in Europe with her letters; evidently there were plans being sent back to her and Nicholls too, and schemes which she intimates were significant in ambition. A plan for firing bricks and setting out new kitchen gardens was already in train in 1758. These plans would finally come to fruition after 1762, with the stables and walled garden complex on modern Napier Miles Road being begun; indeed, brick was made extensive use of in these walls.  

 
“Gould advises you to make bricks for the kitchen garden wall; he says there’s earth fit for it, and ‘twill save a great deal, for they are very dear here; send me word if I shall begin; the earth must be dug six months before ’tis worked”
(Kingsweston, 1 Nov. 1758)
 
And later:
 
“My dear Ned,
I have sent you by Mr. Gaussin, Gould’s plan for the house and garden; l don’t imagine ‘tis quite the design you will follow, but as the ground is regularly measured and marked, I hope ‘twill give you some amusement.”
 
“…I come now to yours of 30 Dec. I have sent you, Gould’s plan, it is not so extensive as your: scheme, tho’ it does take in some of the road.”

(Spring Gardens) 23 Jan. 1759.
 
“I am in a fright about the bricks; for as that was not Nicholls’s own proposal, I find he does not approve of it, and make great puzzling and difficulties and works, so unintelligibly about it, that I don’t know what he is doing.”
 
In this letter Katherine implies that the line of a road, probably part of Kingsweston Lane, is included. That may have been the southern end that now faces onto the side of Kings Weston inn cottages, but before then looks from maps to have been aligned further to the west. Katherine eventually settled on a house at Westhorpe, Little Marlow, which she figured would be convenient for her son to drop in on between the family’s town house at Spring gardens and Kings Weston. Most of the letters after 1760 are written from her retirement there.  

Westhorpe House, Little Marlow, Buckinghamshire.

From 1759 Katherine leased the place as her Dower house. She agreed to buy the furniture already there, and a boat that she fancied Ned would enjoy using in the park’s lake. After his return to England in 1761, Ned quickly took works on the estate in hand. Unlike his father, who had been created Secretary of State for the Kingdom of Ireland by entail, he had no position in court or government, and sought to rebrand Kings Weston as a political powerhouse. With an ambition for a seat in Parliament, he set about modernising house and grounds as a statement of intent, as many of his peers had also done. His first task was to move the collection of old stables and kitchen gardens from a cramped position next to the house. Employing the architect Robert Mylne, a gentleman whom he’s believed to have met in Rome during the Tour, Ned began work quickly. It is perhaps not a surprise that he turned to his mother to lay the literal and metaphorical foundation of this political ambition.  


“You are very ‘obliging in seeming to think what I have done at Kingsweston prospers; alas, ’twas so very little, that to me ‘tis not perceptible; I shou’d very gladly lay the first stone of any building projected by you for I have a great propensity to like your designs.”

3 May, 1762.
 
She appears to have had concerns over the height to which the garden walls were to be carried for she wrote later the same year:


“I honour your spirit and resolution, that has carried your walls up against all your ministry, but know that from this time forward you’ll be charged with every blight that falls on your trees and must never complain of unripe fruit, or backward pease, without being told you wou’d have the walls so high no sun can come into your garden.”
Westhorpe, 3 Sept. 1762

The stables and walled garden begun by Ned immediately on his return from his Grand Tour. the garden walls make extensive use of the brick he was intent on firing from his own resources. 

We had long believed that the landscape gardener Thomas Wright, the “Wizard of Durham” had worked at Kings Weston, but it is only through Katherine’s letters that this has been confirmed. Wright had been working nearby at Stoke Park on the other side of Bristol, but also for the Duke of Beaufort at Badminton. That he worked at Kings Weston too explains some of the landscaping introduced during the 1760s and the celebration of the quarries in Penpole Wood as rustic garden features.   

“… I am glad you are agreeably detained and that Mr. Wright and you have not quarrelled. He must be a very odd creature for he has refused very advantageous offers from Lord Halifax to go with him to Ireland and prefers liberty tho’ joined to poverty. I don’t blame him for I think I shou’d do the same.
Saturday, 11 April. 1761 (Westhorpe?)
 
“I wish I could see your new designs with Wright but you will tell them me and they will shew better when executed”
Tuesday 8 April 1761 (Westhorpe?)


 Wright probably advised on the deformalisation of the Kings Weston landscape, the thinning of avenues and grandiose architectural features in favour of a naturalistic pastoral landscape. It may have been his suggestion that resulted in the pulling down of the Great Court in front of the house. An important note from Katherine records the year this was planned:

“You are a lucky man, my dear Ned, to have nothing, to find fault with on your return home. I hope your perturbed spirit is at rest now, my dear Irishman and that you no longer overlook your works after ‘tis dark and before it is light. I shall find great fault when I come if the return wall to the parlour window is not down.”
Westhorpe, 22 Aug. 1762

Thomas Wright, 1711-1786 Wizard of Durham, architect, astronomer, mathematician, and landscape gardener. 


Katherine writes in an incredibly genuine and engaging manner, making her letters a joy to read. They are sometimes candid and amusing, whilst her campaign to resurrect the de Clifford Baronetcy in favour her son shows her as determined and intellectual. The total collection of around 200 letters is a vast trove of fascinating details on mid-Eighteenth Century life. We are only now transcribing the collection, possibly for future publication. The original letters are available free to view in Bristol Archives: Letters from Mrs Southwell to her son Edward (bristol.gov.uk)