On reflection

Hidden by gentle neglect and revealed by research, the remarkably intact 18th-century garden of Chettle House, Dorset, has been brilliantly reinterpreted by landscape designer Pip Morrison, reveals Christopher Stocks

- Christopher Stocks

TOM and Rosamond Sweet-Escott liked Chettle so much they almost bought it twice. This beautifully eccentric early-18th-century house came up for sale in 2015, having been owned by the same family for the previous 400 years. The Sweet-Escotts put in an offer but were pipped to the post, only for the buyers to have second thoughts and sell it to them after all. The tale of its long and painstaking repair has been detailed by John Martin Robinson in COUNTRY LIFE (November 18, 2020), but the gardens of Thomas Archer’s Baroque edifice have proved to be as fascinating—and enigmatic—as the history of the house itself.

Chettle was built in about 1715 for George Chafin, shortly after his marriage to a local heiress and his election as an MP for Dorset a position he was to hold for the next 40 years. It stands on the edge of the pretty village that shares its name, on the glorious chalk uplands of Cranborne Chase, a vast medieval hunting ground that remains remarkably wild and woolly to this day, crisscrossed by Roman roads and peppered with prehistoric earthworks. The house was long a puzzle to architectural historians, with documentary evidence for Archer’s authorship only coming to light in recent years, but its mystery was as nothing compared with the grounds. Gardens there must surely have been to frame such an ambitious house, yet not a single sketch, plan, or early description has ever been found.