Highclere Park, Newbury, England

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

A late 18th-century landscaped park and pleasure grounds laid out by the first Earl of Carnarvon over a medieval deer park, the Earl's design for which loosely follows a plan drawn by Lancelot Brown in about 1770 but also incorporates some of the built and planted elements of a late 17th- and early 18th-century rococo garden. The pleasure grounds were further planted with ornamental shrubberies and exotics in the 19th century.

LOCATION, AREA, BOUNDARIES, LANDFORM, SETTING

Highclere is situated about 5 kilometres south of Newbury on the east side of Highclere village and between the A34 and A343 roads which run south from Newbury to Winchester and Andover. The 430 hectare site, which comprises about 13 hectares of informal pleasure grounds and 417 hectares of parkland, pasture, and woodland, is largely bounded by agricultural fencing and enclosed by tree belts. Two short stretches of the north and north-west boundaries abut minor lanes and on the east side, east of Duns Mere, a kilometre of embankment screens the adjacent A34, Whitway diversion. The northern third of the park lies on the fairly level ground of the River Avon valley, this rising in undulations southwards before ascending the steep scarp of the Downs onto Sidown Hill in the extreme south of the park. Wooded downland, crowned by the open crest of Beacon Hill, forms the wider setting for the southern part of the park while the remainder is surrounded by extensive woodland with farmland and a scatter of small settlements.

REFERENCES Used by English Heritage

E F Prosser, Select Illustrations of Hampshire (1833)

E W Brayley and J Britton, A Topographical and Historical Description of the County of Hampshire (reprinted in about 1845)

Gardener's Magazine X, (June 1834), pp 245-59

The Florist (1856), pp 276-7

The Garden, i (1872), pp 613-14

Victoria History of the County of Hampshire IV, (1911), pp 285-6

Country Life, 125 (18 June 1959), pp 1378-81; 126 (13 August 1959), pp 18-21; 168 (23 October 1980), p 1471

N Pevsner and D Lloyd, The Buildings of England: Hampshire and the Isle of Wight (1967), pp 289-91

D Stroud, Capability Brown (1975), p 160

A Paterson, The Gardens of Britain 2, (1978), pp 93-5

D Stagg, Highclere Estate, Management Plan and Appendices 3, 4, 5, (1992)

G Brown, Parklands as Guardians of Early Landscapes: Highclere Castle, Hampshire, (in BAR British Series 267, 1998)

Maps

Thomas Blandy, Map of Highclere (1739) with additions of lands purchased up to 1757, (52M88/1), (Hampshire Record Office)

Major Bull, Map of Highclere House and Grounds adjoining as it was in 1768 (copied 1795), (Highclere Estate Office)

Plan of Highclere showing the design proposals of Lancelot Brown (nd, c 1770), (Highclere Estate Office)

A Map of the Manors and Free Warrens of Highclere ... annotated as probably by Major Bull, 1818 (Highclere Estate Office) [Copy at Hampshire Record Office]

C and J Greenwood, A Map of the County of Southampton ..., 1" to 1 mile, 1826

OS 6" to 1 mile: 1st edition surveyed 1873; 2nd edition published 1897; 3rd edition published 1912

OS 25" to 1 mile: 3rd edition published 1909 

Description written: July 1998

Amended: July 2001