Garden designs for Ingleborough Hall: some unresolved questions

Ken Pearce
 JOURNAL 
 2021 
 North Craven 
 Heritage Trust 

In 2014 I was granted access to the plan chest in the Ingleborough Estate office. This venerable piece of built-in furniture proved to contain many maps and plans of the Hall, Clapham village, the wider Estate and farms which had, at one time or another, belonged to the Estate. It took many months to work carefully through all the material, sorting and cataloguing. Among them were designs for the Ingleborough Hall gardens.

These two plans are brilliantly coloured, precisely drafted and beautifully lettered. They were the work of a T.H.Mawson and declared him to be “Hon.ARIBA., London & Windermere” and were dated 1909 and 1910 respectively. To me they were works of art. Such plans, things of beauty, deserve to be available for a wider public to enjoy. And several questions need to be answered if at all possible. Who was Mawson? Also I wondered whether the designs had ever been executed. Could their lines still be distinguished among the surroundings of Ingleborough Hall now that many years had passed during which circumstances and priorities had changed so very much?

To add to the mystery one of the plans was numbered 1, dated December 1909, while the other was numbered 3, dated January 1910. Why was there no plan number 2 in the chest? Where might it be? Could it be brought to light?

Brief recourse to the worldwide web and architectural reference works quickly established that Thomas Hayton Mawson (1861-1933) was an English landscape architect practising from offices in Windermere, Lancaster and London. Much of his work was carried out in public parks across Britain and overseas in Greece, Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands. His work included a number of prestige projects in the fields of both garden design and town-planning. He was also involved in the design of a large number of private gardens.

Permission was granted to visit the gardens around Ingleborough Hall to investigate just how far the Mawson plans had been implemented. The physical form of the long lawn to the south east of the house is the predominant feature in the initial draft as well as Mawson’s final plans and in today’s garden. The walls and long terrace also feature in all three. Mawson illustrates elegant ironwork features at short flights of steps around the edge of the lawn but these are missing from the draft version. Some survive in the gardens to this day. The richly coloured flower beds shown by Mawson are nowhere to be seen nowadays, especially the elaborately shaped beds and paths around a lesser rectangular lawn laid out to the south west of the house. This area is now devoid of formal plantings. The curved sweep of the carriage court which Mawson designed to front the house at its entrance appears to have been swung through 90 degrees to front the south west end of the building. The sinuous path which Mawson shows snaking round the south east corner of this lesser lawn is no longer visible. The three short flights of steps giving access to the north western end of the long terrace above the ‘great plain’ have been replaced by a gradual slope. A crescent shaped grassed slope at the north west end of the ‘great plain’ is there but there is no flight of steps down from the south western side of the long lawn to the rougher ground below. Decorative features and walling shown at the south eastern end of the long lawn on Mawson’s plan are now missing though the double flight of steps which he shows leading down from the long terrace onto the north eastern edge of the long lawn is there today.

It looks as though many elements of Mawson’s plan were put in place but may have been simplified to save costs or as the design was initially put in place piece by piece or later when the numbers of garden maintenance staff had to be reduced in wartime.

Meanwhile two more designs for Ingleborough Hall gardens had come to light in a Farrer family collection. These are in a much more precarious condition than Mawson’s splendid plans and appear to be drafts of two quite different designs, rougher versions than Mawson’s carefully executed work. They are similar in general layout but with important differences. The long lawn so dominant in Mawson’s design and in today’s garden, is labelled in one of these drafts as ‘the great plain’. Both carry a lot of handwritten notes but no date, nor authorship. Nevertheless a careful comparison with the handwriting in one of the diaries written by Reginald Farrer (1880-1920) suggests very strongly that the draft was his work or had at least been heavily annotated by him. These notes include mention of Upper and Lower Terraces in one design and of ‘present terrace prolonged’ in the other. The designs both include many measurements, lengths and elevations (above sea-level?) with mention of walls and parapets. One design shows a ‘little summer house, on pillar’, a feature which appears in well-known photographs of Ingleborough Hall and garden.

Also in the care of the Farrer family is a whole-plate photographic negative of one of the garden terraces. Computer technology allows this to be converted to a positive image. One can then see that the terrace shown is the long one beside and above the north eastern edge of the ‘great plain’. One can distinguish a series of potted plants standing guard along the edge of the terrace.

Examining the large scale Ordnance Survey map of the area gives a better idea of how the garden has evolved. A 25” to one mile OS map of Clapham was published in 1909, the same year as the first of Mawson’s plans. This map had been re-surveyed in 1892-93 and also revised in 1907. It shows the long terrace above the lawn but no rear wall to prevent soil rolling down the slope above, onto its level surface. The ‘great plain’ is of a much more irregular outline and features a couple of coniferous trees and a fountain towards the western end, within a circular footpath. The eastern end of the lawned area is punctuated by a small handful of isolated trees. Just two short flights of steps are shown. The layout at this stage appears to be a great deal simpler. The circular path continues to be featured on the Ordnance Survey maps over many years.

So the fundamentals of this part of the garden, the part for which Mawson had prepared such attractive plans, remain broadly the same today as in 1907 and 1910 though with enormous changes to the plantings.

In an effort to find more information about Mawson’s plans the Estate records and written reports were consulted. The Estate account ledgers held at the North Yorkshire County Record Office at Northallerton yield just one entry of interest in this context – in June 1912 work started on ‘Ingleborough Terrace’ and was completed by December of that year. The total cost of the work was £233 16s 9d. of which 4 guineas (£4 4s.) was the fee paid to the architect, named as F.A.Whitwell rather than Mawson. There is no indication as to which terrace is referred to.

We find more by looking through James Anson Farrer’s ‘Annuary’. J.A.Farrer was squire of Clapham and owner of the Ingleborough Estate from 1889 until his death in 1925. He kept a diary in which he recorded one entry per year giving an outline of his travels and other interesting events or activities. This record he termed his ‘annuary’, a word he seems to have coined, and it was maintained almost to the end of his life. His entry for 1912 reads in part ‘We returned to Ingleborough for Easter early in April. The terrace round the house was being made, and was finished to the general satisfaction of the family the last week in May’ and later in that year ‘We gave 2 garden parties in May: the first was spoilt by rain, but on the 29th. the day was very bright, and tea was served on the new terrace for the first time.’

In 1915 he records ‘(C) stayed with us for a week at the end of September, and I motored with him to Morecambe. At this time the terrace was laid in red asphalt.’

These entries seem more likely to refer to the upper terrace close to the walls of the house rather than the long straight garden terrace which runs alongside the lawn. They may, or may not, indicate the implementation of Mawson’s design, or one of Reginald Farrer’s draft designs – or the schemes of Mr.Whitwell himself. The mystery remains.

In a further attempt to learn more about the background to Mawson’s splendid plans a visit was made to the Cumbria Record Office in Kendal. There is a large collection of Mawson material there, drawn from the firm’s offices in Windermere, Lancaster and London. The catalogue index of 245 Mawson plans includes no reference to Clapham, or Ingleborough Hall. The accounts ledger for 1909 – 1913 contains no charge or income related to work at or for Ingleborough; the list of clients lists no Farrers. Nothing to aid my research.

As a possibly last gambit I followed the suggestion given in a cryptic note inscribed on the front page of the catalogue, that those failing to find what they want in the collection could try the Lindley library at the Royal Horticultural Society, telephone number provided.

Sadly that avenue yielded nothing either – the mystery remains, at least in part. Where is Mawson’s drawing no. 2? How costly were these drawings? When were the draft designs prepared? Just how much of the lay-out of today’s Ingleborough Hall gardens can safely be attributed to Thomas Mawson or to Reginald Farrer?

Regardless of this there seems little question about the artistry and interest inherent in the three designs. Perhaps someone can shed more light on these fascinating documents.

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