 | |  Surrey
may seem unpromising territory for Gothic landscapes. And yet, just
outside the centre of Godalming lies Busbridge Lakes, a kind of mini-Hawkstone, nearly
as much fun as that great folly-filled gorge and even less well-known.
Busbridge is only just round the corner from where I live, and it was
here that I first began to suspect that Hawkstone was not
a one-off, but that there was such a thing as a Gothic Garden, that it
was a type which could be traced in other places too.
Mr
& Mrs Douetil bought the derelict estate of Busbridge in 1966. The
great Georgian mansion house had been demolished in 1906, and its
replacement (up the hill away from the gardens) had been
sliced off and turned into apartments. The Douetils moved into the
stables, gradually making the building habitable, and then discovering the amazing landscape they'd got into the bargain.
The owner in the 1750s, 60s, and 70s, Philip Webb, was an antiquary
and the usual sort of moneyed lunatic. He seems to have recognised the
gloomstruck possibilities of the Busbridge environment,
where the stream cuts a deep gorge through the sandstone, leaving rocky
outcrops and caves all most amenable to being tweaked to
produce appropriately Romantick and Gothick reflections. Mr Webb's
early-19th century successor, Henry Hare Townsend, added his own
follies and arrangements to the landscape. The grotto
which houses the spring that feeds the lake is his; the one above it,
built originally as a tomb and topped with a bit of inscribed
Roman detritus, is Webb's. But, as ever, what makes a Gothic Garden is
not random Gothic follies, but the use of follies to accentuate
already-dramatic surroundings.

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The Upper Grotto - the tomb intended for Mr Webb's wife and children. Where was he going to go, then? | "LEG. II AUG." |
Poor
old Hercules on the hilltop was toppled over and smothered in a sea of
nettles before the Douetils found him and put him up again. | Looking
out on the Bottom Lake from the Gothic Boathouse. We were very
impressed that somewhere so careless of health-and-safety diktat was
open to walk around! | A rustick bridge ... |
Follies not yet open to the public... | A Doric Temple, and the lakes along the valley bottom, provide a gentle and tranquil contrast to all the Gothic gloomth. |
But the masterpiece of Busbridge, and a feature which seems to be without any parallel elsewhere, is the magnificent Ghost Walk. This
is a thirty-foot deep rift running into the cliff to the south of the
gardens, adorned with a Hermit's Cave and a lookout tower on top of the
ravine, and entered via an unnecessarily precipitous path at the top,
or the wonderful five-fanged arch at the bottom. |

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I'm
sorry the photographs don't really show the Ghost Walk in its glorious
reality. It is of course pretty ruinous today - that is, even more than
it was originally intended to be. Its niches and alcoves were once
filled with statues and busts which loomed palely out of the shadows;
only one of these remains, looking doggedly out over the lake, the last
remaining guardian - or ghost. On a subsequent visit, we found this
bust fallen from its perch onto the ground below.
As at other
Gothic Gardens, you can only smile at the off-the-wall genius of the
mind responsible for this, and the delightful attempt to encourage such
excitingly scary feelings in visitors. Just imagine the happy Georgian
dinner-guests of Mr Webb or Mr Townsend being brought up here with
lamps and candles, and scaring themselves silly in the dark like a
collection of kids! |
 |  | There's
much more to do at Busbridge. The lower Grotto is closed to the public
at the moment, and around the place one can glimpse all sorts of things
which look meaningful. Rocks like these don't just arrange themselves,
you know: I suspect we have 'Druidical Remains' here. The set on the
right are actually outside the Lakes, in the fishery to the west of the
Rustick Bridge, along with other features which look suspiciously like
even more follies. However, it all needs money, of course, and Mrs Douetil says the lower bridge has already collapsed twice. |
Busbridge
Lakes is only open to the public intermittently, around Bank Holidays.
It tends to be a bit busy as a result, but not so busy that you can't
find a quiet corner or two; in fact, on my first visit, I managed to
wander quite a long way and not encounter anyone at all. The Douetils
are not only concerned with rescuing their Gothic Garden, but also with
breeding rare waterfowl and pheasants; this may seem a distraction, but
in fact the shrieks of the peacocks add a certain frisson to the Gothic atmospherics!
Discover more here. |  |
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