Simon English
England Revisited

On fence bordering road in Hall Barn Estate, south of Beaconsfield.

On a stick put up where the fence that, in 1971, bordered the drive that runs through the Hall Barn Estate. At the moment this section of the park is unfenced. Visually, but for the passage of time, things are much as they were. This section of open parkland is run as farmland and a landscape garden. As farmland sometimes cereals are grown and sometimes it is used to graze the pedigree cattle. As a landscape garden the planting of trees as a visual extension of the woodland walks nearer the house involves clumps and individual standards dotted to give blocks and vistas from different parts of the garden. An impression of infinity and intimacy.

Behind me in the 1971 photographs, in the shadow of a great horse Chestnut tree is a folly with what looks like a splayed roof. Both the tree and the folly have gone, the latter existing as ruined walls. Maybe it was smashed when the tree fell. Here and there old trees from plantings done in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have gone depending on their species longevity. Horse Chestnuts do not live that long, The Limes here live longer. The Walnut in the black and white photograph hardly seems to have grown at all. Where fallen trees have left gaps new plantings are fenced off from cattle by wooden post and rail. The mature trees are unfenced and the cattle have created the distinctive browse line of parkland trees. The young oaks imply a faith in the future and that these trees might be part of this landscape as young emergent, mature standards and ancient hollow trunks for centuries to come.

The open park is balanced by forest from which the grazing animals were excluded by a Ha-ha and remains of a wrought iron fence. This old boundary has no affect on the pheasants and deer which emerge and regain cover at will. The trees in the woodland walks are being managed with new plantings to keep the wood from getting over mature and to provide wood for the house. The walks are hedged as was the fashion when the garden was laid out. The end of each walk decorated with seats, classical statues, follies, a rotunda, lakes and an obelisk. The obelisk has recently been restored (it was looking its age in 1971). The base has a relief of the family crest on one side. On two other sides are relief displays of garden tools of the day; hay rake, bill hook, scythe, fork, spade, edger, besom, hoe, planning string, plumbline level, dividers, pruning hook etc all bound together with a ribbon bow and entwined with vine and bunches of grapes. All to celebrate the work involved in designing, laying out and planting the garden. They are all hand tools and all recognisable today, but celebrate an age when all the work was done by hand.

In this machine age the park has been compromised on its northern boundary by the deep cutting that carries the M40. In 1971 this had only been built as far as west Beaconsfield but now cuts through the park towards London. Access to the House is by bridge, at least the roar of traffic is somewhat ameliorated by the depth of the cutting. In other ways all this road building has altered the land, a big roundabout on the northern corner of the estate and the field to the west being given over to gravel extraction.

Hall Barn is an important early example of landscape design and developed over the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries under the ownership of, mainly, two successive families. I am grateful for permission to visit from the present owner. The fact that this great artwork is still privately maintained and, over the centuries, the aesthetic vision of previous generations is enjoyed is wonderful. Were I an academic and historian I might have been able to quote from Hall Barn’s first owner, Edmund Waller, but what springs to mind is his contemporary, Nicholas Poussin, and the painting ‘A dance to the music of Time.’
Points 61 & 62