Celebrate the winter solstice

Half a millennium of careful tending has given this ancient garden a rare magic, most noticeable in the depths of winter, writes Tilly Ware

- writes Tilly Ware

MIDWINTER is a time for ancient things: bone, iron, stone, wood; the steadfastness of slow-growing hollies, the solidity of an oak silhouette and a desire to fight the darkness with traditions that endure. Few gardens fulfil that desire more perfectly than those at Helmingham Hall. Arriving through tall gates into a 400-acre park, echoing with the throaty bellows of bucks, you feel the old folklore of the winter solstice. Herds of fallow and roe deer have nibbled away for centuries at rolling grassland dotted with copses and magnificent solo trees.

Approaching the hall, barley-sugar brick chimneys gradually loom through the mist rising off the moat, where drawbridges are raised every night as they have been for hundreds of years. The Tollemache family, arriving at Helmingham in the late 15th century, continually improved the estate with gatehouses and avenues, ponds and neighbouring farmland; 20 generations later, with Ed and Sophie Tollemache as current custodians, this patchwork of embellishments and additions makes a magnificently unified whole.