The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome by Gordon Campbell

Author:Gordon Campbell [Campbell, Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2013-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

Another estate in the vicinity was Enville Hall, which was the Staffordshire seat of the earls of Stamford for centuries, and is still occupied by members of the family. Between 1745 and 1755 Harry Grey, the fourth earl, created a landscape garden of some 750 acres (300 hectares), and both Shenstone and Sanderson Miller contributed to the design. In the late 1940s a decaying bark-clad hermitage was photographed for a book by Osvald Sirén, but in the informed view of Sandy Haynes, the archivist of Enville, the building in Sireén’s photograph was not a hermitage but rather a summer house on the edge of the lawn. Similarly, there is no reference to a hermitage in the estate records. It is possible that an Enville hermitage escaped the documentary record, but also possible such a building never existed. There is a ruined cottage on the estate that was described in 1756 as a ‘pheasantry and hermitage for the keeper of the fowl’, but its human occupants were all women tasked with looking after the fowl, and were not required to act the part of a hermit.

These estates all had links with Barrells, Lady Luxborough’s estate, and with Woodhouse, which was discussed in the previous chapter. At Barrells Lady Luxborough constructed a ferme ornée (and in describing her garden coined the term ‘shrubbery’). On one occasion she told her neighbour William Shenstone that

a Mr Gough of Perry-Hall was here, about three weeks ago, to ask leave to see my hermitage, and said he liked it. I do not enjoy it much myself: the cold weather and incessant rain would hinder me, were I even in better spirits. Indeed you will say, it is just a proper place for indulging melancholy thoughts, which is true, but therefore I ought to shun it.

It seems that Lady Luxborough had reservations about the desirability of the melancholy induced by her hermitage.

There is another reference to the Barrells hermitage in a letter from Shenstone to Lady Luxborough in which he declares that he is ‘glad to hear of every contrivance near your Hermitage that seems likely to tend to the Hermitess’s repose’. There is no hint of what these contrivances might be, nor is the identity of the hermitess elucidated: it is remotely possible that this is the only instance of a female ornamental hermit, but much more likely that Lady Luxborough is fashioning herself as a hermitess. No record survives of the physical appearance of Lady Luxborough’s hermitage, nor is it clear whether Mr Gough built one at Perry Hall; his house was demolished in 1927, and only the moat remains.

In 1761, close to Perry Hall, in what is now another suburb of Birmingham, the manufacturer and entrepreneur Matthew Boulton decided to supplement his Birmingham factory at Snow Hill with another on Handsworth Heath. The cottage on the heath was rebuilt as Soho House, and the rolling mill in the valley below was demolished to make way for a new factory and accommodation for his workers.

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