Buckhurst Park, Sussex

Buckhurst Park is an English country house and landscaped park near Withyham, East Sussex. It is the seat of William Sackville, 11th Earl De La Warr. The house is a Grade II listed building.[1] The park, landscaped by Humphry Repton, is Grade II* listed in the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. There are formal gardens which were laid out by Edwin Lutyens and planted by Gertrude Jekyll.[2]

Early history

In the year 1086, according to the 11th Earl De La Warr, Buckhurst formed part of an estate that was recorded in the Domesday Book as belonging to "Ralph de Dene (whose grandfather was cupbearer to King Edward the Confessor) that... passed to the Sackville family – Lords Buckhurst, Earls and Dukes of Dorset, and Earls De La Warr – through the marriage of Ralph's descendant, Ela de Dene to Jordan de Sackville in 1140."[3]

The 7th Earl De La Warr, writing in 1857, recorded that a well-built dwelling house and garden had been mentioned in 1274, and a deer park on the estate was mentioned in the 14th century, during the reign of Edward I.[4]

The Sackville family lived in Buckhurst Place, the original manor house, until the time of Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth I through her mother's family, the Boleyns of Hever.[5] Thomas Sackville's court connections resulted in a considerable fortune, enabling him to draw up plans for a new and more elaborate mansion on the Buckhurst estate, even prior to his elevation to the titles of Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset.[5]

The original grand, partly-moated courtyard house was abandoned when the Queen granted Thomas Sackville a large palace, Knole House in Kent.[5][6] Part of the materials from Buckhurst Place were employed around 1616–1619 to build an almshouse called College for the Poor (now Sackville College) at East Grinstead.[6]

Stoneland and Buckhurst Park

After moving to Knole House, Sackville continued with plans to build a new house at Buckhurst.[5] Construction of the new house, formerly called "Stoneland," was started in 1603, taking the site of a hunting box or keeper's lodge within the park at Buckhurst Place.[6] Upon Thomas Sackville's death in 1608, his son Robert Sackville, 2nd Earl of Dorset, reduced the scope of the original plans while continuing construction of a considerable mansion where the present house stands.[5] The 2nd Earl of Dorset did not include a formal garden.[5]

The house has been much remodelled, notably by a Neo-Tudor renovation in the early 19th century for Arabella, Duchess of Dorset and her second husband, Lord Whitworth, who occupied the house, improving both it and the grounds. They incorporated into the grounds part of the park which had belonged to Buckhurst Place, and they renamed Stoneland, giving it the name Buckhurst Park.[7] By that time, the original house at Buckhurst Place had fallen into ruins.[6]

The park was landscaped in 1830–35 by Humphry Repton, whose landscape plans for the park were embodied in one of his "Red Books",[8] and the remodelling of the house was carried out to designs by his son, John Adey Repton.[9]

For a time in the early 20th century, the estate was let to Robert Henry Benson (1850–1929), senior partner of Robert Benson & Co., Ltd, merchant bankers, a collector of paintings and a Trustee of the National Gallery from 1912.[10] Finding the house and grounds very much as Repton had left them, in 1902 he called upon architect Edwin Lutyens to add an extensive wing.[11][12] The wing was since demolished, but a sunk basin opposite the former "New Room" survives, and surrounding gardens by Gertrude Jekyll adjoining it are carefully recreated from Jekyll's planting plans, rediscovered in a drawer at Buckhurst.[13] Lutyens' favoured Brunswick fig trees also survived the demolition.[14] According to Lutyens' biographer Christopher Hussey, Lutyens stated that he believed he owed his decades-long appointment as architect of New Delhi, the grand central area of which is still known as Lutyens' Delhi, to a chance meeting at a country-house party at Buckhurst during Benson's tenure.[15]

Within the Buckhurst Park estate is the "Hundred Acre Wood," an area that was separated from Ashdown Forest by disafforestation in 1678, when Stoneland was in the possession of the Earl of Dorset. A. A. Milne, who lived nearby at Cotchford Farm, Hartfield, made the Hundred Acre Wood famous as the setting of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories.

The house is open to the public.[3]

Notes

  1. ↑ Historic England. "Buckhurst Park (1285477)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 31 January 2015.
  2. ↑ Historic England. "Buckhurst Park (1000230)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 31 January 2015.
  3. 1 2 William, Earl De La Warr. "Welcome to Buckhurst Estate". Buckhurst Park. Archived from the original on 2010-05-07. Retrieved 3 October 2015.
  4. ↑ Reginald Windsor Sackville-West, 7th Earl De La Warr (1857). Historical Notices of the parish of Withyham in the county of Sussex. pp. 3, 5, 9.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Buckhurst Estate and the Sackville Family". Buckhurst Park. Archived from the original on 2016-03-25. Retrieved 3 May 2016.
  6. 1 2 3 4 Lower, Mark Antony (1870). A Compendious History of Sussex. p. 265. ("the solitary survivor of so much magnificence is the gateway tower")
  7. ↑ Farrant, S. (1989). "The Development of Landscape Parks and Gardens in Eastern Sussex c. 1700 to 1820: A Guide and Gazetteer". Garden History.
  8. ↑ Colvin, Howard (1995). "Repton, Humphry". A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600–1840 (3rd ed.). (gives client as George Sackville-West, 5th Earl De La Warr)
  9. ↑ Architectural Publication Society (1887). "Repton, John Adey". The Dictionary of Architecture.
  10. ↑ "Dealers and collectors: RH Benson". Lady Lever Art Gallery.
  11. ↑ Tipping, A. Avray (1925). English Gardens. p. 63.
  12. ↑ Wake, Jehanne (1997). Kleinwort, Benson: The History of Two Families in Banking. p. 266.
  13. ↑ Dietz, Paula (2011). Of Gardens: Selected Essays. p. 249.
  14. ↑ Lloyd, Christopher (2001). Gardener Cook. p. 40.
  15. ↑ Ridley, Jane (2003). Edwin Lutyens: his life, his wife, his work. p. 211.

Coordinates: 51°05′42″N 0°08′30″E / 51.0950°N 0.1418°E / 51.0950; 0.1418

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