Kitchen Garden Walls Immediately North East Of Wood House

SX 69 NE SOUTH TAWTON

1/179 Kitchen garden walls immediately north-east of Wood House

GV II

Kitchen garden walls. 1899-1905 by Thomas Mawson. Granite rubble, carefully chosen to appear as walls of crazy paving with some granite ashlar dressing, some slate coping, some slate and brick dressings and slate roof to the service rooms and glass roofs to the hot and green houses. Plan and description: large kitchen garden built across a gentle slope facing north- east with a series of service buildings at the north-west end including the mens shed, tool shed, mushroom and forcing shed, seed store, fruit room and a 2-storey boiler room and potting shed. All these are granite with brick dressings and have timber casements with glazing bars and plain carpentry and joinery detail. In front of these are a series of glass-roofed structures inlcuding the peat house, vinerys, palm house, plant houses and cold frames; all glazed iron-framed structures, mostly on granite footings but some on brick (now disused). A lane separates the kitchen garden and its associated garden from Wood House (q.v.). The most noteworthy feature is the watering well or fountain in the north corner. Behind it the outer wall is higher than the rest with ashlar coping and series of small corbels. In front, that is to say, backing onto the house's service courtyard and facing into the kitchen garden, the watering reservoir is contained within a semi-circular retaining wall and was fed through a fountain in a blocked round-headed alcove defined by blocks up-ended slates set at alternative angles. The massive keystone here once included a bronze lion's head tap. The doorway to right of this has a round head and ovolo-moulded surround and contains the original door. To left, running parallel with the house the wall has flat-topped granite coping (some of it collapsed). Once past the house (where there is another doorway from the main formal garden) the walling reverts to slate coping. The kitchen garden is enormous and intended to produce an income rather than simply feed the household. It is part of an extensive landscaping scheme conceived by Mawson to go with the rebuilding of Wood House (q.v.). Mawson himself considered the whole one of his major achievements. Source: T H Mawson The Art and Craft of Garden Making, (5th edition) includes copious notes and illustrations of Wood House.

Listing NGR: SX6552996078