Ammerdown House, Bath, England

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

HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT

In 1778, Thomas Samuel Jolliffe married Anne Twyford, daughter and heiress of the Reverend Robert Twyford of Kilmersdon, and through her acquired property including an area of sheep walks which formed the nucleus of the Ammerdown estate.

Ten years later, in 1788, and following the death of his mother-in-law, Thomas Jolliffe commissioned a design from James Wyatt for a large villa to be built at Ammerdown. This was set in a park which swept up to the walls of the house, and which was laid out on part of the agricultural land inherited by Jolliffe through his wife, and which he had been improving since 1778.

To the north-east of the house, a walled garden with an ornamental orangery set in its southern wall was constructed; this garden was, until the mid-19th century, the extent of any pleasure ground or garden associated with the house (Country Life 1929).

Thomas Jolliffe, who served as an MP, died in 1824, and Ammerdown was inherited successively by his sons Colonel John Jolliffe (died 1854) and the Reverend Thomas Jolliffe (died 1872), who erected a column in the park in memory of their father.

During the mid-19th century a small area of pleasure grounds, separated from the park by a ha-ha, were laid out between the house and walled garden. Both brothers died without issue, and the estate passed to their cousin, Sir William George Hylton Jolliffe Bt, MP, who in 1866 was created Baron Hylton in right of his mother. Lord Hylton’s eldest son had been killed in 1854 during the Crimean War, and in 1876 he was succeeded by his second son, Hedworth Hylton, who undertook a programme of alterations to the house in 1877.

The 3rd Lord Hylton inherited Ammerdown from his father in 1899, and together with his wife, Lady Alice Hervey, undertook a further programme of alterations to the house. In 1901 they commissioned Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) to design new formal gardens which, through their careful arrangement of vistas, provided an effective link between the house and the orangery in the late 18th-century walled garden (Country Life 1929). There is no documentary evidence to suggest that Gertrude Jekyll advised on the planting of the new gardens, but rather this appears to have been undertaken by Lady Hylton (Country Life 1929). Today the site remains (2003) in private ownership.