Landscape Parks and the Memorialisation of Empire: The Pierreponts' ‘Naval Seascape’ in Thoresby Park, Nottinghamshire during the French Wars, 1793–1815

Abstract

This paper engages with debates over estate and empire during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars through a focus on park landscaping. Drawing on Colley's (1992) idea of a ‘cult of the elite hero’ and work on life geographies (Daniels and Nash, 2004), it examines landscape and monument design commemorating naval service. Unlike most other studies of this period, the paper examines naval monuments in the private setting of a landscape park and considers the ways in which this disrupts a neat division between public and private spheres. At Thoresby Park in Nottinghamshire, Charles Pierrepont, a naval veteran active in landscape improvement, created a ‘naval seascape’ which promoted a sense of a ‘service elite’ (Colley, 1992). The paper examines the contested meanings of this seascape and the ways in which they help revision the nature of landscape parks during the French Wars and their public and private roles.