Features Of Formal Garden To South West Of Ridgemead

The formal garden at Ridgemead, located to the southwest of the main house, comprises terraces, a pavilion, colonnades, paving, walls, retaining walls, steps, a swimming pool, and urns. It dates to circa 1938, the time Ridgemead was completed, and was designed by Robert Lutyens for Captain Woolf Barneto.

The garden features a terrace with sunken pools in front of the house and a sunken garden to its southeast. This terminates at the southwest end with pavilions that have colonnades flanking an open, brick-walled garden, giving access to a sunk rose garden to the southeast and a swimming pool to the southwest. The northwestern upper terrace is rectangular, with a moulded, sunken centre containing three interlinked pools, one of which has been grassed over. The sunken garden to the southeast has stone-coped brick retaining walls and broad stone steps at each end. The pavilions are constructed from white-painted brick with ashlar dressings, mirroring those attached to the main house. They have eight-panel doors within stone architraves facing the house, and lunettes with radial glazing bars to the sides. Moulded bands delineate two offset stages, and they are topped with hipped swept roofs. The colonnades are supported by square-section tile piers on stone plinths, originally topped with cambered timber lintels, some of which are now missing.

The south-western walled garden contains brick walls approximately 1 meter high, which formerly were surrounded by three tiers of semi-circular tiles below a stone cornice, now removed from all but the southwestern section. An end wall ramps down to a central entrance. Side walls have brick piers flanking the central entrance to the rose garden and the swimming pool area. At the northeastern end, two large, bulbous earthenware urns sit on tile plinths.

The sunken rose garden has brick retaining walls with flat stone coping and shallow stone steps on three sides leading down to a flagged terrace with rose beds and a central urn. The concrete swimming pool is sunken and contains a fountain at one end and wooden stands for former diving boards at the other. The garden is included for group value.