Beckley Park
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Beckley Park is a stately home located near the village of Beckley, in Oxfordshire, England. The house is closed to the public, although it is regularly used for photo shoots and as a film location.
History
Beckley Park has been said to be considered the most atmospheric and rewarding garden in the whole of a county richly endowed with historic gardens.
It is, for a start, extraordinarily remote in feeling for a place only a few miles from Oxford city. A long, rough track, which could never be described as a drive, leads across the fields below Beckley village to a gauntly beautiful house that looks and reads like a construct for one of Iris Murdoch's wilder novels . That a place touched by a perverse and tragic love affair from that most doomed reign of the Middle Ages, Edward Il's twenty strife-torn years from 1307-27, should also have an even earlier Saxon association, seems almost too much to ask from a historic garden. But it was the Saxon 'Beccaule' which King Alfred bequeathed to his kinsman Osferth in his last will and testament, thus setting a pattern of passage, not from father to son in the usual manner, but of gifting from friend to friend as a rare treasure. After the Norman Conquest, Beckley became the capital seat of the so-called Honour of St Valery. Robert d'Oilly gave it to his friend Roger d'Ivry, a luxury toy for the pleasure of a favourite. The lodge has its feet in the last solid, or semi-solid, ground at the edge of Otmoor, a fenland which would at that time have teemed with marsh fowl for hawking and eels and fish for profit.
Roger d'Ivry died in 1112 and another owner, Bernard St Valery, died on crusade at the siege of Acre in 1190 putting the property back in the royal gift. In 1230 King Henry III gave it to his brother, the ambitious Earl Richard of Cornwall - who would be crowned King of the Romans in Aachen Cathedral in 1257, though he never quite became Holy Roman Emperor. Edward II gave Beckley to Gaveston.
When the outraged barons captured Gaveston at Deddington and had him murdered on a hill outside Warwick , King Edward gave Beckley to another favourite, Hugh le Despencer. In the next reign the property went to the Black Prince with the poet Geoffrey Chaucer's kinsman, Thomas Chaucer, as its steward. The role of famous names is some indication of how much Beckley was valued, but what is most satisfying is that records stating which of all these owners dug out the three moats on the Otmoor, garden side of the house and the two moats on the entrance side survive in the royal accounts. In 1373 the Black Prince gave the manor of Beckley, together with the hunting lodge, to Edward III and it was rebuilt in 1375.
Huge buttresses were constructed in the ditch surrounding the inner court of the lodge to support the new great hall. This moat had to be drained during the works, but a new outer moat, 'le utmest dych', was dug and a new entrance to the complex was created. In 1376 a hedge was planted around the outer moat and the park walls were repaired. Unaware of this documentary evidence, Christopher Hussey speculated that it was Richard, Earl of Cornwall, who had the multiple ditches dug. But what is obvious about the triple garden-side moats is that they were never meant to defend a 'castle' as they can quite easily be jumped or even stepped over. They must be functional features like the double moats around so many Worcestershire houses. A moat is more likely to be a medieval damp course than a medieval defensive earthwork; Beckley is a dry house in a wet marsh. Whether the moats also served as larders for eels and fish is another possibility.
The most confusing factor at Beckley is the present house itself, which is not medieval but Tudor in date, a work of about 1540 for Lord Williams of Thame, built upon the triple-moated medieval site.
There are other distractions at Beckley. The south, or entrance, front is reached over a solid, stone-arched bridge across a moat as green as a lawn with waterweed. Valerian pours out of the crumbling grey lias of the moat walls and there is one pyramidal-roofed pavilion rising out of the water at the right-hand corner. Restored by the Victorians, it is probably the survivor of a Tudor twin pair. Clouds of pink roses billow out from the narrow garden strip between the moat and the plum-coloured brick house walls.
Lady Amanda Neidpath, the present owner and thoughtful gardener of Beckley, works not from the house, which for all its towering height is narrow-waisted and surprisingly small in its interior rooms, but from a barn to the side, festooned in white roses, ornamented with richly carved Indian panels and liberally decorated with Buddhist and Tibetan images and drawings. It is a place apart, drenched in its owner's personality and set in its own lawn. From the barn, paths lead past miniature garden enclosures, again Eastern in their ornaments, to turn a corner of the house, and there, beyond a deep pit of water with gunnera, foxgloves and rampageous flowers, is the remarkable north garden with its triple moats, which hang below the house like three strands of a necklace. Between the stone terrace of the house and these moats are two lozenge-shaped garden rooms, one with a tall tulip tree, and round these lozenges topiary passages spread out in a delicious but bewildering green maze, curiously dry above so much still, green water. What crowns these mazes of box and visually overwhelms everything else, floral or green, are the box pyramids, not two or three of them, but an uncountable multitude of 20-30 green spires all kept neat and geometric by the cowman.
The impact of this area is overpowering and difficult to convey. The north wall of the house, with its three projecting towers, rises up sheer from the narrow terrace, and at every few yards off the terrace there are entry points into the moat and topiary maze. Lady Amanda has created routes into the confusion by bridging the moats with clustered telegraph poles; but because the water is greener even than the lawns there is a perilous uncertainty as to where a foot can be placed. Yellow irises flourish in the green water; wild strawberries grow temptingly brilliant upon surprisingly dry banks. Lilies and roses, these last pale pink and wine dark, almost purple, enliven, together with red hot pokers, every small patch of open ground except for the lawns in those two intimate twin garden rooms.
Between the first and second moats runs the Ladies'Walk, a rare straight garden feature, tree shaded and reached by one of the causeway bridges. Out at the narrow north-west end of the house is the third and most impressive of the three garden rooms, the Yew Garden, in dark contrast to the cheerful, light green of the prevailing box-hedged walls. Fourteen bushes, each cut into an abstract shape, fill the rectangular area and it seems reasonable, given the general chronological uncertainty of the site, to call this the Privy Garden and date it to at least as early as 1540 because a Tudor-arched doorway and steps lead down into it from the Privy Chamber at the top end of the house's modest hall. This wonderfully intimate, event-crowded complex of garden rooms was planned in 1919 by Bertie Moore, a Buddhist monk and a friend of Amanda's relative, Percy Feilding. So there are spiritual meanings behind the evident horticultural success. It is Moore's triumph that the intensely characterful house does not overwhelm the garden so closely gathered around it.
From this west end of the Yew Garden stepping stones set giddily in dark water lead out to the great Fishpond and the blank open spaces of Otmoor. This is a relatively treeless area of the grounds, still under development. Interlocking spaces, gauged to the roots of three and five, make sacred Tibetan geometries. The island in the Fishpond is for the swans, which come over, not gliding elegantly, but battering with their wings like noisy motor bikes, to protect their young cygnets. A Chinese temple or a Buddhist stupa is intended eventually for a mound near the water's edge, as there is a notable lack of horizontal features at this point.
At Beckley there is little or no fall of the land on which to project waterfalls and step-set pools. Topography is the master and the director of any garden. Whoever originally planned Beckley's moist garden simply intended to impose an island of order upon a fen, and succeeded brilliantly. It is a timely reminder of the basic garden problems faced by our ancestors: first drain, then garden.
That Fishpond at Beckley does, however, bring two additional elements into the medieval garden equation: one is the larder, the other is visual beauty. Any great house, manor or palace had to be self-sustaining. Eels can only be invited, but fish can be cultivated. Swans too were the medieval equivalents of the Christmas turkey, the most relished and, therefore, jealously guarded roasts on feast days.
Timothy Mowl (with permission from the author).
Beckley Today
Beckley Park is the headquarters of the Beckley Foundation, a charitable trust that promotes the investigation of consciousness and its modulation from a multidisciplinary perspective. It is also the home of Amanda Feilding, Lady Neidpath.
It was used as the set for one of the opening scenes of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (film) in which Frank Bryce runs through the garden to the The Riddle House. Photographers who have worked here include Mario Testino.
External links
- The Beckley Foundation
- Stanway, the house of Lady Neidpath's husband Jamie Neidpath.