Henry Hoare's Paradise

Abstract

In the early eighteenth century Henry Hoare, the banker, built a Palladian Villa near the old manor house of Stourton on the Dorset border of Wiltshire (Fig. 1). He called the place “Stourhead,” from the springs of the river Stour in the valley below. His son, Henry “the Magnificent,” completed the house and dammed the valley to form a lake, around which he made a landscape garden famous in his day and now one of the most perfect survivors of its kind. The house stands on high level ground overlooking the bare Wiltshire downs, its original appearance altered by the addition of wings and a portico (Fig. 5). Some three hundred yards to the west, at a place traditionally known as Paradise,1 the ground falls steeply into the valley where the lake is situated. This can also be approached by a road which descends dramatically from the bleak upper landscape into the lush atmosphere of the garden, where the planting of the hillsides increases the height and the impression of being in a hollow. The walk round the ...