Walled Garden To Kinlet Hall

Walled Garden to Kinlet Hall

This walled garden dates from the mid-18th century, incorporating an early-18th-century churchyard wall. It is constructed principally from red brick with sandstone copings. The west wall combines red brick bonded with rubble sandstone sections. The north and east walls feature red brick buttresses, and all garden doors are timber. A cast iron stove stands in the bothy, which has a clay tile roof.

The garden forms a loosely rectangular walled enclosure with a spur wall to the south-east, the rectangular form deviating slightly at the south-east corner. The walls stand approximately four metres high and are predominantly built of red brick in English Garden Wall bond. The east wall has slender, single-stepped buttresses and displays raised brick panels with scorch marks at the corners, where heated air presumably escaped from the wall's internal flues. A collapsed section of approximately 12 metres reveals soot-blackened internal bricks. The north wall carries sandstone coping on multiple-stepped buttresses (possibly 19th-century) and a high brick plinth. The west wall is constructed of a mixture of limestone rubble and red brick, with a collapsed section of approximately 15 metres. The south wall has ramped coping and a brick dentil course beneath the coping at the east end, with no buttresses.

Entrances with timber doors exist at the south, west and north-west corners. A section of connected wall to the east forms a southern boundary to the churchyard and contains bothies with lean-to clay tile roofs set against its north side. The accommodation roof has largely collapsed, and windows and doors face south and east. A doorway through the bothy wall provides access to the churchyard. Vestigial remains of former glasshouses stand to the south of the garden. Some fixings remain in the south wall, along with brick foundations and water tanks.

The interior contains no structures. Former pathways cannot be distinguished in the long grass, and a depression near the centre may indicate the position of a former dipping pond.

The manor house at Kinlet was rebuilt as Kinlet Hall in the early 18th century by William Lacon Childe, Lord of the Manor, to designs by Francis Smith. The neighbouring medieval village was demolished to form estate parkland. A tall rubblestone wall was built around The Church of St John the Baptist in a pleasure ground known as The Shrubbery around 1830. By 1782, Kinlet Park had been remodelled in the spirit of the later 18th century: the churchyard wall had been rebuilt largely in brick as a walled garden separate from the consecrated area and subdivided by paths. The formal straight drives and geometric planting of earlier decades were replaced with naturalistic sweeping pastures, pools, and clumps of trees. A square tower, possibly a belvedere, may have stood in the south-west corner, which is no longer in place; the south-west corner has been rebuilt, possibly in the early 19th century. Throughout the 19th century, the Kinlet Estate supplied food abundantly, and graffiti on the bothy walls lists fruit harvests exported to London and Birmingham.

During the Second World War the estate was intensively farmed for the war effort. Moffats School, a public school, moved into the hall in 1945 and purchased the estate in 1986. The garden stands unused in the early 21st century, with approximately 12 metres of the east wall and 15 metres of the west wall fallen. The bothies are in partial collapse and the glasshouses have been removed or have collapsed.