Sundial, Walled Garden, Preston Hall

Sundial, Walled Garden, Preston Hall

Designed by Robert Mitchell and dating from 1795, this is a near-square walled kitchen garden of considerable complexity and ambition, forming part of general improvements to the Preston Hall estate carried out at the end of the 18th century. It is listed as part of a group with the Stables, Temple, Preston Hall itself, and the Lion's Gates. The garden retains its original formal quadrant layout of paths, at the centre of which stands the sundial: a carved classical base supporting a large brass armillary sphere.

The enclosure is built in brick with polished ashlar dressings, buttresses, and long and short quoins. Its component parts include a single-storey Dutch-gabled Gardener's House integral to the north wall, a pair of three-storey octagonal gazebos rising from an internal cross-wall, lean-to glasshouses along the internal wall with associated back sheds to the north, and further glasshouses to the south. Some sections of the brick walling are limewashed or rendered where glasshouses formerly stood, and the top of the wall is finished with flat ashlar coping throughout.

EXTERNAL WALLS

The north and west external walls are plain brick. The rear of the Gardener's House occupies the centre of the north wall, with a pair of small outhouses adjoining to the left and a further outhouse to the right. The west wall has a doorway to the left.

GARDENER'S HOUSE

The Gardener's House is a harled, single-storey, three-bay structure with sandstone ashlar dressings. The front elevation has a central door flanked by windows. The sides are finished with raised Dutch gables, each with a gablehead stack; there is an east window, and the building has been extended to the west. The rear elevation has three regularly placed bays, the third of which is bipartite, with an extension to the right — including a former store — featuring a door to the left and windows to the right. Glazing to the Gardener's House is in 8, 9, and 15-pane patterns. Roofs are pitched slate with harled low stacks, ashlar neck cope, and later chimney cans. Painted cast-iron rainwater goods.

SOUTH WALL (remodelled 1888)

The south wall presents the most ornate face of the garden. At its centre is a formal stylised-arch entrance with decorative wrought-iron gates. A large central round-headed plaque, inscribed "JC" and carved with swags, fruit, and a bird, breaks the wallhead and is held in place by decorative stone supports; a carved date stone within a shield sits below. The plaque is also decorated on its interior face. Flanking the entrance are stepped ashlar buttresses surmounted by lion statues — the left lion holding a shield bearing three billets arranged two over one, the right lion holding a shield with a clasped dexter hand. These buttresses terminate in low wing walls carrying rounded Italianate planters. The remainder of the elevation is plain brick with regularly spaced ashlar and brick buttresses, alternately headed with a large carved rose or thistle finial. On the interior face of this wall, a carved foliate panel sits above the arched entrance.

EAST WALL

The east wall is plain brick with low doors to the left and right. Each door surround has ashlar long and short quoins and an ashlar lintel, with an inset armorial panel above the right door (undated). The right door is timber-panelled but now damaged. The left doorway appears plain from the outside, but the interior reveals a re-used roll-moulded surround with a lintel carved "16 C [heart shape] IB 90" and a cornice above; the door itself is now missing.

INTERNAL WALL, SHEDS, GAZEBOS AND GLASSHOUSES

The internal cross-wall divides the garden and carries the back sheds, gazebos, and glasshouse structures. Its south elevation is brick with thin ashlar copes, standing higher than the boundary wall but curving down to meet it. A large rectangular arch appears at the extreme right where it meets the east wall. The remainder of this south elevation formerly carried a full-length lean-to timber glasshouse, of which remains survive. A pair of doors at the centre gives access to the interiors of the gazebos from the south.

The north elevation of the internal wall carries a single-storey, ashlar lean-to terrace of sheds to the left and right, irregularly fenestrated but retaining identifiable spaces including a potting shed, stores, fruit room, and boiler room. At the centre is a one-and-a-half-storey, five-bay structure, possibly a garden office, with a central door, a bipartite wallhead dormer breaking the eaves, and single windows to the flanks. The three-storey hexagonal gazebos rise from the outer bays of this central range.

THE GAZEBOS

The two gazebos are among the most architecturally distinctive elements of the complex. Each is accessed from steps leading to a two-leaf timber panelled door at ground level. The ashlar first floor has a window. The main upper-level access is through a semi-glazed entrance door on the south elevation — facing south-west on the left gazebo and south-east on the right — with a rectangular fanlight above featuring spiderweb glazing. The remaining bays of each gazebo have alternating plain and aedicule-framed windows. Each gazebo is finished with a pyramidal roof behind a low solid parapet, surmounted by a wrought-iron weather vane consisting of crossed rods indicating compass points with a directional arrow.

The two gazebos were formerly linked at first-floor level by a catwalk with a stone balustrade, now collapsed. This catwalk carried a carved stone eagle at each flank and an architraved armorial plaque at the centre. Glazing to the gazebos and back sheds is 12-pane in timber sash and case windows; the garden office has paired 4-pane timber windows and partially glazed timber doors with fanlights above. Pyramidal piended grey slate roofs with lead ridging cover the gazebos; lean-to outhouses have pitched roofs. Painted cast-iron rainwater goods throughout.

INTERIORS

The east gazebo has a stone-flagged floor with timber tongue-and-groove panelling to part-height at ground level. A hexagonal stone staircase with plain iron balusters and a mahogany handrail rises through the open-plan interior. The west gazebo contains rooms but was not inspected at the time of survey in 2001. Both gazebos formerly had weather vanes projecting down into their interiors; the grilles through which these passed survive in situ.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT

The idea of ornamental viewing turrets overlooking a kitchen garden was fashionable at the end of the 18th century, and these gazebos are considered good examples of the type. Usually built in pairs flanking or terminating a terrace, here they are additionally connected to glasshouses via the adjoining catwalk, which was considered exceptionally forward-thinking at the time. One of the gazebos was intended to serve as "a fruit room, tea-room, library or small horticultural museum." The rooftop weather vanes were also functional indoors, projecting down through the ceiling to show occupants the wind direction without requiring them to go outside.

The design was not without its critics. The garden writer J. C. Loudon complained that "The Modern Method of Carrying summerhouses above hothouse as at Preston Hall has a very bad effect on scenery, besides their incongruity, when considered as overlooking the kitchen garden which certainly, like the kitchen itself, is not an object intended for beauty." Opinion had shifted considerably by 1842, however, when The Gardener's Magazine described it as "an excellent and superiorly designed kitchen garden" in which over 40 different varieties of fig were cultivated.

A watercolour by J. White dated 1794, held in the National Monuments Record of Scotland, shows the walled garden before the addition of the gazebos. A plan of the estate surveyed in April 1806 by John Lauder shows the new layout. A further estate plan by Thomas Carfrae dated 1842 records the layout of the gardens and parks.

The walled garden was latterly run as a chrysanthemum nursery until 1972, after which it was used for growing vegetables. It was disused at the time of listing. A formal rose garden with a classical marble statue is sited on the exterior of the south wall, and a slip garden surrounds the whole complex.