Remedial works to ornamental ponds within a historic park in the UK

Abstract

Prior Park is a historic landscaped garden situated in Bath, UK, funded in the eighteenth century by Ralph Allen and designed by the poet Alexander Pope and the landscape architect ‘Capability’ Brown. The gardens include the Palladian Bridge and three man-made lakes, two formed by embankments and the third by a weir situated beneath the bridge. Following decades of decline, the National Trust was gifted the park in 1993 and has since set to restore the park to its former glory. This paper focuses on the restoration of the lakes and describes how overflow spillway capacities from the lakes were increased to allow floodwater to pass safely downstream. It also describes how the embankments were repaired and strengthened without impacting on the vision of the park set by the original architects. The engineering works included reinforcement of grass turf with geotextiles, using stilling basins hidden in chambers below the embankments and restoration of a cascade feature to one of the dams.