Valley of the river leach on the left where Bridgeman planned his serpentine lake.

The ha-ha a green line mid right and behind it in grey the square outline of the lodge. The English Heritage plan of the Lodge Park landscape showing Bridgeman’s planting holes as black dots.

Then the owners enclosed it as park and the evidence of the last ploughing was fossilised… as the arable turned to pasture. In the medieval period and right up to the 17th century this whole area was common agriculture. English Heritage carried out an earthwork survey in 2000 and plotted the various earthworks that were visible. The long barrow with what looks like a Bronze Age round barrow a few metres away but cut by a later boundary which follows the curving lines of ridge and furrow. If you look at the LiDAR of Lodge Park, the earthworks show beautifully. ‘No the archaeology shows an abandonment layer on top of the wall. ‘Perhaps it was completed and then the Victorians robbed out the stone’ The ditch was cut through the bedrock, the first courses of the revetment wall were laid (where scale is left) and then the project was abandoned. Ian’s trenches across Bridgeman’s ha-ha to the west of the Lodge. ‘They dug the ditch and started on the revetment wall but it’s only two courses high’ He found it partly backfilled, the debris mixed with fragments of early 19th century pot. I visited Ian who was asked to cut a couple of profiles across the ha-ha ditch. We needed some archaeology to test the history. The ha-ha is there but the viewpoint earthwork is not. The Bodleian plan shows a ha-ha ditch separating the stadium garden from the landscape park and at the centre of this a raised viewpoint. Sir John stipulated in his will of 1742 that it must be completed and a painting by George Lambert indicates that much of it was …but later maps and paintings show that little of it survived into the 19th century. National Trust has long wanted to create it …but was it ever completed? It was thought that the Bodleian plan was the only Bridgeman design plan to survive. The owner of the Sherborne Estate, Sir John Dutton asked Bridgeman to come to Lodge Park and documents record several of his visits during the 1720s.īridgeman was an innovative designer, a developmental garden history link between the formal gardens of Switzer and the landscapes of Brown. The landscape/ garden designer Charles Bridgeman was the creator of this plan. Part of the survey plan for Lodge Park created by Charles Bridgeman in the early 18th century and rediscovered in the Bodleian Library in 1998 It showed this area of pasture planted with avenues, view points and blocks of woodland with a serpentine canal in the valley as a centrepiece. Oxford 1998: in the Bodleian Library a plan of Lodge Park was discovered. A rare unexcavated example of a 5,500-5,800 year old burial mound. There are groups of trees and on the north side one of the best megalithic long barrows in Gloucestershire. Lodge Park stadium begun in the early 17th century (right hand side) and added to and altered in subsequent centuries. At the back of it is a wide expanse of Cotswold pasture crossed by a valley. On the Sherborne Estate in Gloucestershire, there is an early 17th stadium known as Lodge Park, built to watch deer coursing.

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