Hagley Park is the landscaped grounds around Hagley Hall in Worcestershire, England. The grounds comprise of undulating deer park on the lower slopes of the Clent Hills. They were redeveloped and landscaped between about 1739 and 1764, with follies designed by John Pitt (of Encombe), Thomas Pitt, James "Athenian" Stuart, and Sanderson Miller."Hagley Hall" in Historic England Planned as part of an 18th-century enthusiasm for landscape gardening, especially among poets, the park brought many distinguished literary visitors to admire the views, as well as poetic tributes to their beauty and Classical taste
The park is open to the public, with admission charges (the house is generally not visitable).Hagley Park website
The appeal of the past
A park adjacent to the former manor house at Hagley was mentioned in the 14th century as having an embanked ditch as boundary, traces of which still remain.Tom Pagett, Introduction to the History of Hagley, Hagley Historical and Field Society 1997, "Getting a living from the land" The grounds eventually fell into disuse and were only renewed at the end of 17th century by Charles Lyttelton. It was his grandson George, however, who was chiefly responsible for landscaping them in the Neoclassical taste and making them one of the foremost examples of the style in England.William Scott, Stourbridge and Its Vicinity, pp.258-9] In particular he started a tradition of abandoning the European taste for formal gardens, incorporating instead the natural beauty of the landscape. The charm of the grounds was further underlined by the creation of buildings in diverse styles: some that recreated ancient Greek and Roman examples, another being a gothic folly. About the grounds were various inscriptions underlining the fact that this was a literary landscape which reflected the shaping vision of some of the leading poets of the 18th century.Joe Hawkins, "Hagley Park History"
Because the grounds were wide and extended up valleys and over wooded hillsides, it was impossible to take in the whole as a single vista. Instead there was a circuit often described in contemporary works, such as the introduction to Thomas Maurice’s Hagley: A Descriptive Poem (Oxford 1776), which guided the reader along a route through alternating light and shade, open and closed prospects, rises and descents.Maurice 1776, pp.13-21 Along the way were memorials to poets that commanded outlooks either across an open area within the park, such as that from Pope's Seat, or else down to the Hall and then across to the distant hills beyond, as from Milton's seat. On the south-eastern boundary there was access to an even wider prospect from the summit of Clent Hill, where yet another memorial was erected. It consisted of four rough-hewn pillars, the so-called Ossian’s Tomb, known also as the Druid's Temple or later simply as the Four Stones.Photo online
Another series of prospects was associated with Wychbury Hill to the north, towards which the old road to Halesowen climbed in a hollow way from between the church and the former site of the Hall.William Harris, Clentine Rambles, p.14 On the slope immediately overlooking the new Hall was a column, originally the gift of George Lyttelton's old employer, Frederick, Prince of Wales, which was moved to that position as a memorial following the prince's death in 1751.Photo Beyond that was the Wychbury Obelisk, raised in 1758 by an illegitimate Lyttelton half-brother, Admiral Thomas Smith, who lived at nearby Rockingham Hall.Tom Pagett, An Introduction to the History of Hagley, Hagley Historical and Field Society (1997), pp.29-30 On the way there was the Temple of Theseus built for George Lyttelton's father by James Stuart in imitation of the ancient Temple of Hephaestus at Athens.Calder Loth, "The Hephaisteion and its adaptations" Its purpose was to serve both as a landscape feature visible from the Hall and to "command a most beautiful View of the Country" round about.Susan Weber Soros (ed.), James “Athenian” Stuart: The Rediscovery of Antiquity (Yale University Press, 2006), quoted on p. 323 Along the course of the old road on its way there was the rectory, and near it Jacob's Well, the original water source for the Hall,Photo online and a quarry that produced the stone known as Hagley-rag. Above the quarry was the site of Thomson’s Seat, at one time an octagonal building in a grove before it was destroyed by the fall of a tree.Historic England, "Hagley Hall"
The circuit of the grounds as described by Thomas Maurice began at the parish church, which in the 18th century was entirely lost behind trees, and took a path "to a gloomy hollow, whose steep banks are covered with large rocky stones, as if rent asunder by some violent concussion of nature." On the bank above was an elegant Palladian bridge from which one looked up along a sequence of three lakes one above the other to a Rotunda (the work of John Pitt in about 1748) crowning the valley's head. This was a circular Ionic structure, also known as Pope's Temple in the past.The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction, 14.382, 1829 On the bridge itself (a later work by Thomas Pitt) were lines by Catullus recalling the Classical Vale of Tempe overhung by woods (Tempe quae sylvae cingunt superimpendentes).Carmen LXIV, 286
Ascending the left bank, one reached a grotto of "grotesque stone alcoves and seats shaded with laurels" above a cascade decorated with glittering vitrified slag from the old glass industry in the area. Beyond that was the first memorial to an English poet in the circuit, a tall stone urn dedicated to William Shenstone.Wiki-Commons A further climb through woods brought one to open grassland and another urn dedicated to Alexander Pope beyond the Rotunda. From there a woodland walk climbed to an ivy-covered castellated ruin, completed in 1748 and designed by Sanderson Miller. Photo online The Gothic style windows of this are said to have been transferred from the remains of Halesowen Abbey.A History of the County of Worcester, Volume 3 pp.130-36 Of the castle's four towers, only one was intact and that was inhabited at the period by the park keeper. Continuing within the park, rather than leaving by the gate to Clent Hill, one next encountered a pebble-floored rustic hermitage composed of roots and moss and near it a curved seat of contemplation with its Latin name (sedes contemplationis) spelled out in snail shells. The design for this may even have been Alexander Pope's and was associated with a description of such a retreat in Milton's Il Penseroso.Gordon Campbell, The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome, Oxford University 2013, pp.119-22 Leaving this haven, the path descended and then climbed to Milton's Seat itself, with its panoramic view.Photo online From there one returned downhill to the Hall.
Up until the mid-19th century the park was generally open to the public, "And citizens who take the air/ Full oft to Hagley Park repair," a local author observed.Thomas Sewell Allen, A Trip to Paris: In Verses (Dudley 1831) p.94 No doubt some carried with them one or other of the tourist guides published at the time. But because of the vandalism caused by some visitors, only supervised access was allowed thereafter.William Harris, Clentine Rambles, p.18 Time, the weather and neglect were also taking their toll over the years, causing some features in the grounds to disappear completely. Only comparatively recently has restoration work begun, starting with the Wychbury Obelisk in 2011. More recently the Palladian Bridge was rebuilt and the vista opened up the valley to the repaired Rotunda at its head.Natural England 2014 Paths are now being brought back into use, and new trees planted, in preparation for opening the park up once again.Bromsgrove Advertiser, 21 August 2015
A poetical landscape The development of the 18th century English park was the product of those educated in the Classics during the Augustan age, men whose imagination had been taught to interpret a landscape through the eyes of the Latin and Greek poets, and also in part by the Classical landscapes of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Peter De Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-century Britain, Stanford University Press, 2003, especially Chapter 3: "The Leasowes and Hagley Park, a school for taste" Although examples from neither of those painters were to be found in Hagley Hall, in the parlour there hung Arcadian landscapes by their later Baroque counterpart, Francesco Zuccarelli,Heely, 1777, p.12 and visitors to Hagley certainly compared aspects of the grounds to paintings by Poussin. Jacob's Well reminded Horace Walpole of "the Samaritan Woman's in a picture of Nicolo Poussin,"Quoted in Hagley Historical Society Newsletter 3 while James Heely found in the prospect uphill to the Prince's Column "a landscape that would do honour to the pencil of Poussin – an inexpressible glow of the sublime and beautiful, in all the fullness of their powers".Heely 1777, p.24
Chiefly, though, the landscaping of Hagley Park was a poetical project. Among visitors were Alexander Pope, who had developed his own more modest grounds at Twickenham, and William Shenstone who, in addition to his work on his own property at The Leasowes, helped develop the garden at the neighbouring Enville Hall.Recollection of Some Particulars in the Life of the late William Shenstone, London 1788, Other poets with an interest in garden development who wrote poetical tributes to Hagley were William Mason and Richard Meadowcourt (1695–1760)."To Sir George Lyttelton on his house at Hagley" One other visitor was Henrietta Knight, Lady Luxborough who, while she lived, was at the centre of the circle of local landscaping poets, and who came to view the newly constructed "Giant's Castle" in 1748.Letters written by the Late Right Honourable Lady Luxborough to William Shenstone Esq, London 1775, p.45
Lord Lyttelton was himself a poet and erected monuments about the grounds to those poets whom he admired and counted as his friends: Shenstone, Pope, Thomson, Milton. The inclusion of the last of these was an aesthetic announcement of the new taste in landscape gardening there which, eschewing European artificiality, took its lead from the description of Eden in the fourth book of Paradise Lost.The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden, 1620-1820, MIT Press 1988, p.79 In his essay on "The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening" (1780), Horace Walpole was to commend Milton's description as "a warmer and more just picture of the present style than Claude Lorrain could have painted from Hagley or Stourhead", going on then to apply Milton's lines on the management of water to the principal garden vista at Hagley Which through veins Of porous earth with kindly thirst updrawn, Rose a fresh fountain and with many a rill Water’d the garden; then united fell Down the steep glade.Anecdotes of Painting in England, Vol.4, p.268 In addition, lines from Milton appeared at two other sites in the park. Within the Hermitage was inscribed the description of the "mossy cell" to which the devotee of melancholy will withdraw, taken from Il Penseroso; while on Milton's Seat, with its broad outlook over the countryside, appeared the passage beginning "These are thy glorious works, parent of good" from the fifth book of Paradise Lost.Heely 1777, pp.95-102