Croome Court, Croome d'Abitot, Worcestershire, England

The following is from the English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest.

A mid-18th-century landscape park by Lancelot Brown, his first independent commission, associated with a country house; features include parkland buildings of the highest quality by Brown, Robert Adam, and James Wyatt.

LOCATION, AREA, BOUNDARIES, LANDFORM, SETTING

Croome Court lies about 10km south of Worcester, on a relatively low-lying plain between higher ground to the east and west, onto which its park extends. The same corridor is followed by the M5 motorway, which cuts through the western side of the outer park. Parts of the park are bounded by minor public roads, whereas elsewhere plantation belts or other planting define the edge. Some stretches (for example along the southern perimeter in the area of the Park Seat) are followed by a blue lias stone wall, probably 19th-century and replacing one of the 1790s.

Pirton Park (please see separate description of this site), 2km to the north-west, was landscaped by Lancelot Brown for the Earl of Coventry in the 1760s. Although here registered as a separate site for reasons of clarity, Croome and Pirton were intervisible and essentially elements of the same scheme of landscaping.

REFERENCES Used by English Heritage

William Dean, Hortus Croomensis (1824)

D Stroud, Capability Brown (1975), pp 57-60, 203

Trans Worcestershire Archaeol Soc 5, (1976), pp 41-9

C Beresford, Croome Court: Historic Landscape Survey (1996)

R Lockett, A Survey of Historic Parks and Gardens in Worcestershire, (Hereford & Worcester Gardens Trust 1997)

Maps

OS 6" to 1 mile: Worcestershire sheet 40 SE, 1st edition published 1884-5

Worcestershire sheet 41 SW, 1st edition published 1884-5

Worcestershire sheet 47 NE, 1st edition published 1884-5

Worcestershire sheet 48 NW, 1st edition published 1884-5

OS 25" to 1 mile: Worcestershire sheet 41.13, 1st edition published 1885

Archival Items

For guide to the substantial body of archival materials see Beresford 1996