The celebrated landscape gardens at Plumpton Rocks in Yorkshire recently reopened to the public after a major restoration programme.Marilyn Elm reports on the history of this leafy lakeside haven, first laid out more than 250 years ago
Photos: Lizzie Shepherd
The path leads you through musty woodland until – quite suddenly – the space opens out. A lake stretches before you; a pair of mute swans glide across waters reflecting the autumnal tints and white birch stems that clad the steep surrounding slopes.
Despite the lake’s beauty, it is the rocks – towering and weatherworn – that demand attention. Overwhelming in their scale and punctuated by striking Scots pines and yews, these great stacks of millstone grit – a kind of sandstone – rear up from the waters, by turns spectacular in the sun, with their ochre tones, or moody and menacing when it retreats.
The 12 hectares of Plumpton Rocks are magical to explore, full of surprise and contrast: a landscape for the senses. I follow meandering footpaths, frequently steep and uneven, through mossy lakeside woodland to reach those ancient rock features, all romantically named by the Victorians: Lion’s Paw, Echo Rock, Lover’s Leap and Knight’s Passageway, where two towering sandstone stacks form a narrow corridor.
Nature flourishes here. Nuthatches, treecreepers and tawny owls in the woodland; mallards, moorhens, herons and kingfishers on the lake and carp, pike, tench and roach beneath its surface. So it’s strange to reflect that while this secluded corner of North Yorkshire may be spectacular, beautiful and richly atmospheric, the landscape is not entirely natural in origin. While the millstone grit outcrops were formed at least 300 million years ago, the lake is less than three centuries old, its waters retained by a dam built with the intention of enhancing the natural beauty of the landscape.
PERFECTING NATURE
In 1753, Daniel Lascelles inherited his share of his father’s vast mercantile fortune and soon after purchased land at Plumpton, near Harrogate. He decided to transform the medieval landscape there into a romantic and picturesque landscape instead.
The new pleasure garden was to be part of a move away from the formality of the Baroque garden popular during the Stuart era (1603–1714), epitomised by the garden at Versailles, with its orderly clipped hedges and patterned parterres, topiary and statues. The ‘Pictures
