Garden Walls At Northbourne Court

NORTHBOURNE NORTHBOURNE COURT TR 35 SW

4/29 Garden Walls at Northbourne Court 13.10.52

GV II*

Walled gardens. Circa 1616 for Sir Edwin Sandys, and incorporating various sections dating from C13 to late C20 repairs. Red brick, with some flint. The outer wall is over half a mile long from north-west to south-east, and the walled enclosures about 500 metres from south-west to north-east. There are 3 main enclosures, each subdivided within themselves. The walls of the outer court are about 10 feet high, in irregular English bond, with much restored dogtooth cornice and coping. The north-west wall has a C19 wrought iron gate between 2 piers, the main entrance is on the long south- western wall. Segmental ramps support a raised cornice over a rusticated stone carriage arch, with imposts, keystone and cornice. C19 wrought iron gates. The north-western walls are largely of flint, incorporating lesser gateways. The main garden feature is the mount, actually a series of 3 terraces, the lowest 2 brought forward within a walled enclosure to form side terraces. The terraces are all retained by massive brick walls, about 30 feet high at maximum. At the eastern end of this courtyard are flint ruins either of a chapel belonging to the monastic grange on this site, or of the mansion house of Sir Edwin Sandys. C18 plaques on the walls record poems tending to the former view. Outhouses included with the walls include a range of C19 stables in the courtyard to rear of Northbourne Court, with half-hipped pantiled roof, 2 raking loft doors and 6 half-doors. Also a small half-hipped outhouse opposite the stables (item 4/30 ), with a single boarded door, and cornice to roof with stack projecting to end left. The position of the monastic grange and later mansion house within the walled enclosures is not clear, although the present Northbourne Court probably occupies part of the site, the ruins and excavated sections within the mount-court suggest the house extended onto this. The mount is one of the finest surviving features of this type of this date in the country (See Country Life, LVII, 954 and CXXVIII, 278. See also B.O.E. Kent II 1983, 407).

Listing NGR: TR3296653033