Stourhead

Stourhead is a painting you can walk into. In the valley below his Palladian house in Wiltshire, the banker Henry Hoare II dammed a small stream to make a lake, and between 1741 and 1780 he arranged around it a sequence of temples, a grotto and bridges so that each turn of the path opens a new composed view. His models were the Italian landscapes of Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin and Gaspard Dughet; Hoare owned Claude's Aeneas at Delos, and the circuit of the lake is often read as a journey after Virgil's Aeneas, down into the underworld and out again.

The buildings are placed like figures in a picture. The Temple of Flora, from the 1740s, was the first. Across the water stands the domed Pantheon by Henry Flitcroft, built in 1753–54, the focal point of the whole garden and the view everyone remembers: its white portico mirrored in the lake, framed by trees. Higher up, the Temple of Apollo of 1757 looks down over the water; it was the setting for the proposal scene in Joe Wright's 2005 Pride and Prejudice. At the eastern end a five-arched Palladian bridge crosses the lake, and in 1764 Hoare even brought the medieval Bristol High Cross of 1373 here from the city, giving his classical dream a Gothic accent.

The grotto of 1748 is the garden's quietest room: a dark, flint-lined passage leads into a dim domed chamber where the springs of the Stour spill past a lead statue of a sleeping nymph into a pool, watched from another niche by a river god, and lines of verse by Alexander Pope are cut into the stone. The lettering of an inscription made here around 1748 later became the model for the National Trust's own typeface. Hoare gave the estate to his grandson Richard Colt Hoare shortly before his death in 1785, and the planting has kept growing since; rhododendrons now crowd the slopes below the Temple of Apollo.

The house itself was designed by Colen Campbell in 1721–25, a Neo-Palladian villa; gutted by fire in 1902, it was rebuilt almost exactly as it had been. The estate, with the village of Stourton at the garden gate, has belonged to the National Trust since 1946. On the edge of the estate rises King Alfred's Tower, a 50-metre brick folly by Flitcroft completed in 1772, near the site of Egbert's Stone, where by tradition Alfred the Great rallied the Saxons in 878 before his victory over the Danes at Edington.

Getting there

Stourhead lies near Stourton in south-west Wiltshire, about 14 km from Frome; the nearest large airport is Bristol (BRS), about 42 km away. By road, follow the brown signs off the A303 or the B3092 from Frome; there is a car park at the entrance. The nearest railway stations are Gillingham, Bruton and Warminster, with an on-demand local bus from the surrounding towns, and a walk of about an hour from Mere. Stourhead is on National Cycle Network Route 25.