THE HERMITAGE

The rectory garden was merely a stopgap. Stukeley was actively seeking something larger, and on 6 April 1734 he leased from Mrs Linthwaite (presumably the widow or mother of the Stamford worthy, Alderman Linthwaite) a ‘little close called the Hermitage by peter gate … at the yearly rent of three pounds’, about 100 yards south west of the rectory.Footnote ¹⁷ This is a particularly useful reference as it appears in a contemporary diary, rather than in one of the less trustworthy retrospective accounts Stukeley was so fond of writing. Notably it is the first mention Stukeley makes of the term ‘Hermitage’ in Stamford and evidence that the name apparently pre-dates Stukeley's acquisition. Seven years later he bought the property outright for 50 guineas.Footnote ¹⁸ In 1736, two years after this first lease, Stukeley acquired the adjacent half-acre (0.2ha) property to the east, noting: ‘I purchased the house at the worlds end by Peter hill of Mr Ashlin, with a garden hanging over St Peters well.’Footnote ¹⁹

However, there is a problem, for while Stukeley states he bought the property from Mr Ashlin in September 1736,Footnote ²⁰ he purchased it again from Samuel and Elizabeth Hurst eight months later.Footnote ²¹ There is no doubt that it was the same property for it is noted in both descriptions that the garden was bounded on the south by St Peter's Well or Lane,Footnote ²² and no other property has that boundary. A possible explanation is that the ground was held on a lease by Mr Ashlin and that the Hursts were the freehold owners. If, as seems likely, Mr Ashlin was Richard Ashling, a gardener residing in St George's parish,Footnote ²³ his occupation makes it quite likely that he would have leased odd plots in the town. Ashling was also one of those who voted for the Whig candidates at the 1734 general election and, during these difficult early years in Stamford, Stukeley had a preference for dealing with people of a similar political persuasion.

It seems, therefore, that there were two adjacent properties on the south side of the present Austin Street: the first leased from Mrs Linthwaite in 1734 and purchased outright in 1741, and the second, immediately to the east, bought from Mr Ashlin in 1736 and purchased again from the Hursts in 1737. The name ‘Hermitage’ applied initially only to the Linthwaite land, but Stukeley used it from the beginning to cover the Hurst/World's End property as well. The expanded use of the name gained general acceptance and appears in the World's End deed of sale when Stukeley left the town.Footnote ²⁴ However, some legal separation must have been kept between the two properties for the boundary descriptions at the 1748 sale are the same as those of the 1737 deed; the increase in price from £50 to £63 reflected inflation and improvement rather than the inclusion of the adjacent 50 guinea lot.Footnote ²⁵

Earlier writers, not recognising that there were two sets of properties in Austin Street or the huge importance Stukeley placed on acquiring a garden large enough to satisfy his horticultural interests, assumed he bought the Austin Street property to live in.Footnote ²⁶ This is not so. There was a ‘cottage’ on the site, but it was of a significantly lower status than a man of Stukeley's standing would have occupied as a home. That he did not go to live there is reinforced by a number of post-1736 references to him living in the rectory.Footnote ²⁷ The main impetus for the purchase was to acquire a garden of sufficient size where he could continue to develop ideas first formulated in Grantham. Another reason was his desire to improve intellectual life in Stamford. He frequently complained of a ‘great want of literary conversation’ in the town,Footnote ²⁸ and wished to set up a literary-cum-antiquarian society to remedy this. No doubt he wished to emulate or surpass the societies established in the neighbouring towns of Spalding, Peterborough, Grantham, Wisbech and Boston: even the tiny nearby village of Greetham had its ‘club’.Footnote ²⁹

Stukeley's Brazenose Society first met in his rectory study three months previously, on 18 June;Footnote ³⁰ acquiring a ‘cottage’ enabled him to provide the society with a more permanent home. When recording the purchase, he noted that he had plans for accommodating his ‘Brazen nose society’ there,Footnote ³¹ although it is possible that Stukeley had access to the garden site before the 10 September purchase, for he noted on 22 June 1736 that he was ‘busy fitting up my hermitage for the brazen nose society’.Footnote ³² The cottage was divided into four occupied tenements at the time,Footnote ³³ but removing the tenants seems not to have been a problem. Stukeley employed one of them, Thomas Elkins, as a labourer in the work of converting the Hermitage, making a number of payments to him in August and September 1737.

Stukeley's propensity to draw everything he came across is fortunate for he left a fairly full record of his work at the Hermitage. The difficulty, as always with him, is in deciding what was completed and what was merely projected. The cottages on the street front of the Hermitage, now 4 Austin Street, are illustrated in a drawing of 27 June 1737 (Fig 2), showing a begowned Stukeley engaged in a midsummer late evening astronomical session; his companions are probably John ‘Collector’ Collins and Edward Lawrence.Footnote ³⁴ The cottage has a single storey, though a dormer window and internal stairs suggest a usable attic space (Fig 3). The rusticated doorway is of a higher status than one would expect for a cottage of this nature, and is possibly an insertion by Stukeley.

Fig 2

Stukeley's depiction of Austin Street, Stamford, looking east, 27 June 1737; the Hermitage, now 4 Austin Street, is on the right. Drawing: Bodl, Gough Maps 16, fol 50, b

Fig 3

Stukeley's drawing of the internal elevation of the north wall at the Hermitage in Austin Street, showing the staircase, indicative of usable attic space, and indications of the former division of the property into four cottages. Drawing: Bodl, Gough Maps 16, fol 50, c

Internally, Stukeley stripped out the dividing walls to make a single room and made the south elevation symmetrical, with a central doorway and large windows on each side. The windows were separated by pilasters on the garden facade. The resulting room was eminently suitable as a meeting place for a learned society, but had the added advantage that it could serve as a conservatory or summer house to which Stukeley and his family could retire from the rectory if the Brazenose project failed. The whole site is illustrated in an uncatalogued drawing held by the Spalding Gentlemen's Society (Fig 4), and the converted building and garden in an unlabelled and undated drawing in the Bodleian Library (Fig 5). Stukeley's south front drawing shows it to have been about 55ft (16.8m) in length, whereas the north frontage of the present building on the site is 60ft 4in (18.4m). This is acceptable as a correlation if the thickness of the external walls is taken into account.

Fig 4

Stukeley's drawing of the St Peter's Hill area, Stamford, 7 September 1738. Stukeley's rectory is dead centre, the Hermitage is on the left and the motte of the medieval castle on the right. The Eleanor Cross on the horizon is a later insertion, pencilled in after 1745. Drawing: Spalding Gentlemen's Society's Stukeley Portfolio (unnumbered)

Fig 5

Stukeley's undated drawing (probably 1738) of the Hermitage, Austin Street, Stamford; the crude arch of Merlin's Cave can be seen in the right-hand foreground. Drawing: Bodl, Gough Maps 16, fol 53, a

With the acquisition of this garden Stukeley could now continue developing the ideas begun at Grantham. In his three years there his thoughts on garden design had developed significantly, though his work should be placed in the overall context of early eighteenth-century English garden design. English fashion was beginning to draw away from the strict formality of its French and Dutch models and a most important introduction was the English concept of the picturesque. This gardening world was dominated by the aristocratic owners of large estates, so middle-class owners of smaller town gardens had to adapt these concepts to very different circumstances.Footnote ³⁵ The essence of fashionable thinking was that the created English landscape should be a place for exploration and for surprise and, above all, a stimulus for contemplation.Footnote ³⁶ Superimposed on this was the idea of the circuit where surprise, discovery and contemplation could be planned as an orderly sequence.Footnote ³⁷ To this Stukeley added his own contribution: the idea of the reinterpreted archaeological monument as a garden feature. Stukeley also saw setting as important, and the interpreted monument was not only a feature to be seen and observed but also a point from which to see and observe. With only half an acre (and later 2 acres (0.8ha)), Stukeley was much restricted in these respects, but his Grantham and Austin Street gardens were located on river-valley slopes, providing opportunities for looking out over the garden itself and for looking out to the surrounding countryside. At Barn Hill he took advantage of this and one of his first modifications was to build ‘the mount’ (1742) at the far end to give a view of, and, to a lesser extent, a view from the garden.

At Grantham, stimulated by a pre-existing circular orchard, 100ft (30.5m) in diameter, he had grappled with the idea of reimagining Stonehenge as a ‘temple of the druids’. He described this in letters and sketches to his friend and future brother-in-law, Samuel Gale.Footnote ³⁸ It is not clear what Stukeley realised at Grantham, but, in October 1728, he wrote to Samuel Gale that he was ‘making a temple of the druids’, and in a statement to Archbishop Wake of 3 June 1729, just before leaving the town, he notes: ‘I have a house & garden of my own here, which I have rendered extremely delightful.’Footnote ³⁹ It is therefore possible that he had finished the work and that he came to Stamford with this experience behind him.

The intellectual processes behind Stukeley's innovative garden works at Grantham have been discussed elsewhere,Footnote ⁴⁰ but a most important influence on his thinking was his belief that the druids (along with the Egyptians and Plato) held the ‘divine truth’ of the ‘doctrine of the Trinity’.Footnote ⁴¹ This concept saw the druids as a native expression of proto-ChristianityFootnote ⁴² and thus meant that their surviving physical works could be reconciled generally with Christianity and particularly with eighteenth-century Anglicanism. A garden ‘temple of the druids’ could therefore be seen as a celebration and recognition of this unique fact and a reconciliation of antiquarianism with religion.

With the acquisition of the Austin Street half-acre, these Grantham experiments could be continued, for Stukeley's life in Stamford was now settling on a more even keel. After the hostility of his initial reception and his annus horribilis of 1734, the situation was now easing.Footnote ⁴³ It was perhaps this that allowed him to recommence his academic work and prepare Stonehenge and Avebury for publication (eventually published in 1740 and 1743). The attempt to realise his vision of a garden ran parallel with this.Footnote ⁴⁴ While there are no further specific references to the druids in his garden works, and there are no Grantham ‘Celtic barrows’ or ‘tumuli’ at Austin Street, the druids permeated everything he did: from his work on Stonehenge and Avebury, to such references as ‘setting some thorn trees with misleto’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Though his Grantham garden had a significant influence on his Stamford Hermitage, there are significant differences. At Austin Street (Fig 5) Stukeley retained the overall concept of the druidic temple, with large concentric circles as the dominant motif of the garden, even keeping some of the ‘pyramidal greens’, which at Grantham specifically represented the inner circles at Stonehenge. But the Stamford circles were more conventionally divided into quadrants by four paths, with the intersection of the paths as the focus of the garden, not, as before, ‘an antient appletree oregrown with sacred misletoe’. Gone was Grantham's mysterious entry to the ‘temple’, approachable only via a winding walk outside the perimeter, leading to an offset ‘portico’; here, the visitor was funnelled through a narrowing half-circle to a ‘portico’ directly in line with the building to enter the quadripartite circles of the ‘temple’. The main circle and half-circle next to the building were bounded by curved walls, probably an echo of the pre-existing walls that Stukeley had found at Grantham. The planting around the walls and edges of the large circle was a development of the Grantham ‘fruit trees, plumbs, pears, walnuts, apple trees, etc’, planted around the perimeter with ‘some sort of irregularity to prevent a stiffness in appearance’.Footnote ⁴⁶

As yet, Stukeley did not possess a garden large enough for the visitor to wander round and stumble across hidden features of interest, though it is clear from the way it was divided up that the garden had different functions: the formal circles providing short controlled walks; the parts behind the curved walls providing solitude and surprises (the triangular structure on the right was possibly a projected Rosamund's Bower; see below); and the more wild and random area bounding the large circle at the southern end providing a place for contemplation in a ‘natural’ setting. The structure seen in the right foreground, indicated by the faintly pencilled open arch with short column and ball finial, provided a point from which the whole of the garden could be viewed. It was in fact ‘Merlin's Cave’ (Fig 6), one of the more important features of the garden, named after and clearly inspired by Queen Caroline's famous 1735 model at Richmond. Stukeley's inspiration came from the name and the political and mythological associations of the Richmond work rather than its architectural character, for the Richmond example was a formal Gothic building with thatched roofs, and certainly no cave, while Stukeley's was a whimsy of roughly hewn and apparently randomly heaped stone. While Caroline's earlier Hermitage (1729–32) was an attempt to reconcile natural religion and the new science, her Merlin's Cave can be considered as part of a continuing propaganda war, conducted curiously by means of garden architecture, between government and opposition supporters.Footnote ⁴⁷ It was both an expression of support for the First Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, and a historical-cum-mythological support for the Hanoverian succession. Caroline's Merlin's Cave had been satirised and commercialised – coffee houses, for example, adopted the nameFootnote ⁴⁸ – but Stukeley's was one of the first attempts to pay homage with a serious emulation. The political connotations would, of course, accord with Stukeley's own political beliefs, while the mythology would also reflect his particular interest in Merlin and Stonehenge. While dismissing as ‘absurd’ the Geoffrey of Monmouth story of Merlin transporting African stones from Ireland to Stonehenge, he reported somewhat cryptically that ‘these notions lead us to the original truth, of the Druid founders’.Footnote ⁴⁹

Fig 6

Stukeley's drawing of Merlin's Cave, at the Hermitage, Austin Street, Stamford, in 1737. Drawing: Bodl, Gough Maps 16, fol 50v, b

Stukeley's Merlin's Cave was completed in November 1737 and differed from an earlier design in that a medieval finial at the apex was replaced with a short square-sectioned column topped with a stone ball.Footnote ⁵⁰ The column and ball came from Grantham and were clearly important to Stukeley for they can also be seen in a drawing of his Grantham ‘Hermitage Vineyard’ (Fig 7) and were later taken to his Barn Hill garden.Footnote ⁵¹ The column is almost certainly the Roman altar Stukeley referred to in his letter to Samuel Gale of 14 October 1728. Its squat square section is typical, and the added ball is probably not a conceit but had symbolic meaning. On 11 October 1728, Stukeley's first wife, Frances, miscarried and he buried the embryo ‘under the high altar of my hermitage vineyard; for there I built a niche in a ragged wall oregrown with ivy, in which I placed my roman altar’. In the drawing of the discrete garden on the south side of Stukeley's Grantham house the column and ball are shown on the edge of the planting circle, directly in front of one of the niches of the ‘hermitage chappel’. But this drawing was made over a year before his wife's miscarriage and an examination of the right-hand niche of the ‘chappel’ shows that Stukeley later inserted the squat square column there. This reinforces the view that it is the altar under which Stukeley buried the miscarried embryo with all due ceremony. It also possibly explains why the altar was so precious to him, and why he made the substitution in late 1737. Frances died on 1 September that year and this mournful occasion, together with the association of his miscarried child, gave the altar a double poignancy.

Fig 7

Stukeley's drawing of the Hermitage Vineyard, or south garden, at Grantham, in 1727. The Roman altar and its repositioning in the ‘hermitage chappel’ niche can be seen clearly. Drawing: Bodl, Gough Maps 230, fol 412

Stukeley was an active collector and grateful recipient of all sorts of medieval salvage, very often from standing buildings, and he could be seen scouring the town or journeying to more distant places to hunt for items. He twice records travelling thirteen miles to Crowland to bring back a medieval abbot's head and roof angels, and there are numerous accounts of him negotiating with local glaziers to acquire medieval stained glass removed from Stamford's churches.Footnote ⁵² In many case he saved these objects from certain destruction and by acquiring them made a contribution to antiquarianism and scholarship, but his position is ambivalent. There is an inconsistency between his archaeological and historical recording and his gardening activity. His meticulous record, say, of the discovery of the site of the Stamford Eleanor Cross has permanent value, and contrasts starkly with his treatment of the actual parts of the cross that he brought back to his garden, where they were mixed indiscriminately with other bits and pieces. When Stukeley departed from Stamford in 1748 he left them in the garden, and it was only by the merest chance that a single fragment of the cross shaft was recognised there and identified over 250 years later.Footnote ⁵³ Virtually none of the other pieces of medieval stained glass nor the carvings have survived from his gardens, the only examples being the sculptural fragments built into walls. Today, Stukeley's habit of moving archaeological items from their original locations to his various gardens would be considered unacceptable, but the symbolic significance of the object and its importance in establishing the personality of the owner would have been seen by Stukeley and his contemporaries as being paramount; and Stukeley was a man rooted firmly in his time.Footnote ⁵⁴

Also inspired by Grantham was the insertion of a stone plaque into the west wall of the Hermitage garden, inscribed: ‘BEATAE TRANQUILLITATI P. WILH. STUKELEY MDCCXXXVII’. He had installed a similar plaque, inscribed ‘BEATAE TRANQUILLIT … P W. STUKELEY’, in the south wall of his south garden at Grantham. The inscription, which can also be found on Constantinian coins, a specimen of which Stukeley coincidentally exhibited at the Brazenose Society on 19 June 1737,Footnote ⁵⁵ indicated an emergence from the disquieting events of 1734, though his tranquillity was to be shattered again less than three months later with the death of his first wife.

He also began a ‘Rosamund's Bower’ at Austin Street towards the end of July 1738.Footnote ⁵⁶ Such bowers were to gain wide popularity in nineteenth-century medieval-style gardens, reflecting the legend of ‘Fair Rosamund’, Rosamund Clifford, mistress of Henry ii, reputedly retired by the king to a royal hunting lodge at Woodstock to protect her from the vengeance of Queen Eleanor. The last remains of the manor and the labyrinthine structures supposedly protecting the sequestered mistress had been destroyed only a few years previously, during the building of Blenheim Palace, despite Vanbrugh's attempts to save them.Footnote ⁵⁷ Stukeley, who perhaps saw the bower on his Iter Oxoniense in May 1710,Footnote ⁵⁸ was therefore drawing upon a recent event and his bower was an early example of the form, inspired both by associations with medieval monastic gardens and the ‘Fair Rosamund’ legend. The monastic associations are reinforced by a note of August 1739 in which Stukeley says that he ‘translated a capital of a pillar of S. Wilfrids monastery here of S. Leonards, into my hermitage garden & placed it for a seat in Rosamunds bower’.Footnote ⁵⁹ As St Leonard's Priory, Stamford, is a twelfth-century building, the removed capital would have been roughly contemporary with the legend. Stukeley does not seem to have illustrated his bower, but it was probably a secluded covered spot with a seat (very possibly the structure seen on the right behind the curved walls in Fig 5).

The Hermitage remained Stukeley's main garden until 1744 for, even after the purchase of Barn Hill in 1740/1, he waited three years before attempting major works in the garden there. He mentions Austin Street several times after that (eg, cropping various fruits in 1741 and 1742), and a reference to ‘ripe grapes’ there might suggest that the defunct Brazenose Society room was now being been used as a greenhouse.Footnote ⁶⁰ From 1744 onwards, however, he seems to have let the Hermitage garden slip quietly away, concentrating all his interest on Barn Hill. Merlin's Cave was dismantled; he erected a new hermitage and Rosamund's Bower at Barn Hill in 1744 and moved the 1737 ‘Beatae tranquillitati’ plaque there in 1746.Footnote ⁶¹

The Barn Hill site

The extent of Stukeley's house and garden on Barn Hill can still be determined, for a number of his site plans contain scales and, where they can be measured, agree with the dimensions of the surviving buildings and plots to within about 5 per cent. Stukeley's measurement of his Barn Hill frontage (the present Nos 9A, 9 and 10) was about 125ft (38.1m); the total frontage of these properties today is 105ft (32.0m). The missing 20ft (6.1m) can be accounted for in the site's subsequent history. In 1797, Henry Tatam, cabinet-maker and sometime mayor of Stamford, purchased the site and in December of that year sold a strip at its southern end with a 34½ ft (10.5m) street frontage to a Thomas Lowe. This comprised ‘the Little Parlour, the Entrance, the Passage and part of the Hall’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Between then and 1803 this separate piece passed to Thomas Raymond, silversmith, then to Frances Treen, who wished to build a Methodist chapel on the site. To do so, she needed to extend a foot or so into Tatam's garden and was successful in persuading him to give up a further tiny strip of land.Footnote ⁷⁷ The chapel and the manse, with a Barn Hill frontage, were built in 1804. Both survive, the former slightly truncated to accommodate the present 1886 chapel. The site plan attached to the 1797 deed shows that the main buildings at the southern end of the site had been very little altered since Stukeley's time and confirms that the manse (now 10 Barn Hill), was built on the site of the lower part of Stukeley's hall (Fig 8). After the subsequent demolition of the little parlour the manse became the southernmost part of the built site, concealing the fact that the original Stukeley house extended another 20ft (6.1m). It reached about a third of the way across the present Methodist chapel forecourt (Fig 12). The best overall appreciation of the site can be gained from the 1886 Ordnance Survey 1:500 town plan of Stamford (Fig 13), which was surveyed just before the building of the present chapel.

Fig 12

Barn Hill, Stamford, in 2013, looking north west and showing (left to right): the stump of the bridge gateway, No. 10 Barn Hill and the forecourt of the 1886 Methodist chapel. Photograph: author

Fig 13

The extent of Stukeley's property on Barn Hill, Stamford, 1741–7. Map: Ordnance Survey 1:500 town plan of Stamford, 1886

When Stukeley bought the property, the main house consisted of a front range only: the ‘Great House or y^e old Dwelling House’ (Fig 8), comprising the main apartments on the south-eastern half of the site and a coach house abutting this to the north west. As was his nature, Stukeley had delved into the site's history, presumably obtaining his information from his long-time acquaintance Richard Wolph,Footnote ⁷⁸ to whose grandfather, Richard Wolph, the house had once belonged (he had reputedly given shelter at the house to Charles i in May 1646 on the latter's flight and surrender to the Scottish army).Footnote ⁷⁹ In 1670 ‘Sergeant’ Wingfield,Footnote ⁸⁰ who had purchased the house from the Wolphs, built a new parlour, with chamber over, from part of an old barn,Footnote ⁸¹ replacing a previous hall and chamber. This previous ‘best’ chamber, which took up the full width of the house, was of an older form where the ‘passage lay open into the room’.Footnote ⁸² The two-storey central block with the large windows shown in Fig 10 probably represents the 1670 work, and the fenestration of large transomed windows would certainly accord with that date. The area behind the house was a former farmyard filled with outbuildings, barns and a number of small scattered areas, including a ‘small pleasure garden’ immediately behind the house, a ‘little garden next the dovecote’ and two orchards. It was a difficult site to deal with, but Stukeley saw its potential.

Alterations to the house

From the time of buying the house in March 1741, it took more than two years to refurbish it and it was not until 9 July 1743 that Stukeley and his family moved in.Footnote ⁸³ Even then work was not finished, for a month later he noted that a dozen workmen were still on site,Footnote ⁸⁴ and it was not until a year later that he completed the great parlour. The surviving plans and drawings show that the building works he undertook during 1741–3 were considerable, though again there is the challenge of distinguishing projected from completed works. His scheme for the triumphal arch shows he was active from the time of the purchase and his diaries give the clear impression that he also used Barn Hill as a bolt-hole for contemplation and planning: ‘I divert myself some time every day there’, he wrote, probably in 1741,Footnote ⁸⁵ and again, the next year: ‘I spend much of my solitary time’ there.Footnote ⁸⁶ Stukeley was proud of his new acquisition and visitors had to be shown the house even during the upheaval of conversion: the bishop of Durham, for example, was marched from the rectory to inspect progress.Footnote ⁸⁷

It seems that the major work of consolidation and extension was undertaken in 1742; certainly the reduced scheme for the bridge over the road was finished by September of that year, enabling Stukeley to write to Samuel Gale about what must be the bridge rooms: ‘I have a fine apartment designed for you at Barnhill, consisting of a large room looking full south, down the street, two lesser rooms and a little chamber, together with a little garden walled in, a little house, &c., all distinct from the main house.’Footnote ⁸⁸ The number of references to ‘fitting out’ the main house in May and June 1743 almost certainly refer to decorating and furnishing rather than major structural work.Footnote ⁸⁹

Stukeley's propensity to draw everything he saw is particularly valuable at Barn Hill, and it is fortunate his 1740 site plan survives (Fig 8). As this was a survey undertaken before the purchase, it suggests a certain trustworthiness and serves as a datum against which his later schemes can be measured. It is possible to trace the evolution of these through drawings held in the Bodleian Library and Spalding Gentlemen's Society.Footnote ⁹⁰ The conversion of the house and the installation of his family there took precedence, but Stukeley had plans for the garden from the start and he kept in mind the relationship between the two. This greatly influenced the final appearance and symmetry of the garden front of the house.

The reorganisation of the former ‘great house’ and the provision of modern facilities in new rear ranges formed the essence of the structural work. Before conversion, at the north-eastern end of the rear elevation of the ‘great house’, a doorway under a jettied gable gave access from the parlour to the ‘little pleasure garden’. To achieve a symmetrical garden front, Stukeley incorporated the old coach house into the main building to make the jettied gable the central feature (Fig 14). On either side of this gable, early- to mid-seventeenth-century vernacular-style three-light gabled windows are shown on all his drawings.Footnote ⁹¹ That on the south-eastern side is probably original but the other is possibly Stukeley's insertion, for one wonders whether a former coach house would have had such windows. It is impossible to tell from the drawings and descriptions whether the gabled jetty was a product of the 1670 alterations or were the remains of a cross wing, a common late medieval Stamford building form. Evidence in favour of the latter is that it is at the end of a range, where one would expect it, and its roof pitch is steeper than the flanking gables, and, while the 1740 survey shows no internal cross walls, the June and September 1741 drawings (Fig 15) show them where expected. Speaking against is the symmetrical fitting of the smaller gable-ended jetty within apparently original walls. The fact that the upper floor of the projecting gable is supported by free-standing columns is not relevant as the drawings suggest they were inserted by Stukeley.

Fig 14

A detail from Stukeley's drawing of ‘The garden front of Barnhill house’, c 1741/2. Drawing: Bodl, Gough Maps 16, fol 52v, b

Fig 15

Stukeley's drawing of his plans for the garden at Barn Hill, September 1741. Drawing: Bodl, Gough Maps 16, fol 52, b

Projecting from the rear of the house Stukeley planned two wings to frame the updated and now symmetrically placed ‘small pleasure garden’. The south-eastern range was built, and the portion of this that survives is the only part of any of the buildings on site to survive from Stukeley's time (apart from a fragment of the bridge abutment). It now forms the kitchen of 10 Barn Hill, coincidentally the same use as Stukeley designated on his September 1741 plan (Fig 15). A window Stukeley indicated on the north-west wall in this plan survives today as a timber lintel embedded in a solid wall, and the present doorway from the kitchen is in the same position as Stukeley recorded.Footnote ⁹² Stukeley's range was of two storeys, as is the surviving section. The corresponding range on the north-western side of the garden seems not to have been built. In 1741 Stukeley planned a long gallery in this position, about 10ft (3m) wide and between about 75 and 80ft (23–24m) in length, stretching back from the Barn Hill frontage. He dropped the idea quite quickly, for the site plan of July 1742 shows a plain wall in this position,Footnote ⁹³ as does the 1743 view (Fig 10).

Stukeley was probably influenced in this rather grandiose scheme by his aristocratic friends and patrons, who retained and still used the long galleries in their stately piles, though they were regarded as rather old-fashioned by the eighteenth century. This may have been the reason why he abandoned the idea and placed all his paintings and drawings round his newly refurbished hall. He records them there in September 1743 and 1745.Footnote ⁹⁴ However, the idea of a long gallery still fascinated him, for the next month he sketched a plan of ‘A project for a gallery 60 foot long, in my garden, 23 Oct. 1745’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Again, there is no evidence that it was ever built.

The hall round which Stukeley hung his pictures, formed, together with the great parlour, the core of the restored house and they occupied the major part of the former ‘great house’. Following a similar practice at the rectory, Stukeley inserted salvaged medieval stained glass in his hall windows: ‘I put up 3 images in painted glass, in the upper lights of the window, next the garden, in my hall, being Herebertus de Styveche who lived at Stukeley, Huntingdonshire, in the time of Wm. Conqrs. survey.’Footnote ⁹⁶ At its southern end, the hall gave access to the bridge that crossed over the road, while the new south-easterly rear wing allowed the modern facilities of kitchen and scullery to be immediately adjacent. Beyond a small passage at the base of the bridge, leading from Barn Hill to a rear service yard, was the ‘little parlour’, tucked into the extreme south-eastern end of the site.Footnote ⁹⁷ Its refurbishment with Georgian sash windows is shown on the 1743 drawing (Fig 10), and Stukeley recorded, on 14 July 1743, ‘My d[aughte]r Fannys birthday, we din'd, for the first time, in my new little parlor, which I fitted up in an elegant manner, as a mausoleum to her mother [Stukeley's first wife, Frances]’.Footnote ⁹⁸ The room retained this name when the lower part of the site was sold to Thomas Lowe in 1797.Footnote ⁹⁹ Leading from the hall to the north west was the ‘great parlour’, which Stukeley did not finish until September 1745. When he came to the house he found the great parlour virtually unchanged since 1670, ‘wainscoted … in a grand manner’. Stukeley ‘repair'd it, & painted it in imitation of the Italian Stucco’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The parlour, as formerly, gave the main access to the garden, but beyond that, to the north, it is difficult to say exactly what Stukeley's intentions were, and even more difficult to establish what was carried out after the abandonment of the long gallery schemes. The impetus for this part of the building seems to have been a desire to incorporate the former coach house into the main building to achieve a symmetrical garden front. However, he clearly felt the need for a coach house to replace this one, for though there is no evidence that Stukeley ever kept a coach, he was often visited by wealthy friends and patrons who did. The September 1741 site plan (Fig 15) includes a small detached coach house at the north-western extremity of the site, but Stukeley later changed his mind on its position. On the 1743 bird's-eye view (Fig 10), the north-western yard is empty, but the large size of the entrance to the substantial stable block behind suggests he might have incorporated a coach house there.

On the upper floor Stukeley had the usual offices: a ‘best bed chamber’, ‘own bed chamber’, ‘maid's chamber’ and, behind that, over the kitchen in the south-easterly rear range, a nursery.Footnote ¹⁰¹ There was also direct access to Stukeley's study/library in a room over the bridge,Footnote ¹⁰² the bridge also having its own separate staircase. In the best bedchamber over the great parlour hung two large full-length portraits of Stukeley and his wife ‘by Collins’, his portrait almost certainly being that which now forms part of the collection owned by the Society of Antiquaries.Footnote ¹⁰³ Between the portraits was a glazed area with a door leading to a closet housed under the central gable of the rear elevation of the house. This had a large Venetian window overlooking the garden. Such a grand and innovative window for a small closet was typical of the contemporary practice of subordinating internal function to external form – in this case, the symmetry of the garden front. It was a practice particularly prevalent in ancient towns like Stamford where new symmetrical facades were built to front existing, and less regular, layouts. The large Venetian window was perhaps also a small compensation for the one lost in the abandonment of the Portwood triumphal arch design. However, it did retain an important practical function: the extensive glazing round the closet doorway allowed the large amount of early morning sunlight admitted by the Venetian window to enter the bedroom as well.

The Barn Hill garden

It is for his garden work at Barn Hill that Stukeley is chiefly remembered in Stamford, and the remaining fragments are the principal physical survivals of his presence in the town. Work on it began in earnest in 1744, and he proudly announced the following May:

The work to convert a yard, a ramshackle collection of farm buildings and a series of small gardens into a single unified garden reflecting the tastes and world view of its creator was considerable. Figure 16 shows the extent and disposition of the buildings on site before work began. Large-scale demolition was necessary and Stukeley, with his usual ingenuity, devised engineering solutions for some of the more difficult problems.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In some places he had to excavate as deep as 8ft (2.4m), but he was delighted when his labourers found ancient coins and urns, all of which he confidently proclaimed as RomanFootnote ¹⁰⁶ – though this is most unlikely in the case of the urns. Modern disturbances in the garden have revealed the foundations of outbuildings close to the surface in some places, which suggests that deep digging across the site was not general. Other heavy work included relocating a ‘great yew tree’, which took ten men to shift.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The demolition work created enormous amounts of stone, most of which had to be removed, though Stukeley was able to incorporate some of it into new walls and buildings, including the new wall he built round his three acres in the open fields (see below).

Fig 16

Stukeley's drawing of the site of the Barn Hill garden prior to conversion. Drawing: Spalding Gentlemen's Society's Stukeley Portfolio (unnumbered)

There are a number of drawings of projected schemes for the garden in the Bodleian Library and Spalding Gentlemen's Society, but Figures 10 and 15 sum up the essentials. The impression of the garden given by the drawings and plans differs from that given by the written descriptions: the latter suggest a bipartite garden of bowling green and ‘wild forestiere’ areas, while the drawings suggest a tripartite garden, including the small ‘square garden’ immediately behind the house. The description ‘large open void in the middle, fronting the house’ is ambiguous, for it suggests the area on the plans occupied by the concentric circles, while ‘fronting the house’ suggests it to be adjacent and therefore the square garden immediately behind it. This latter area measured about 55ft (16.8m) by 45ft (13.7m), and would have been extremely small for a bowling green.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ However, the diameter of the outer circle of the middle area of the Barn Hill garden was about 135ft (41.1m), a fairly consistent figure between the various drawings, and the central path was about 14ft (4.3m) wide; if the central path had been grassed, this would have served as a long enough and wide enough place for Stukeley to use when he invited his brother-in-law, Samuel Gale, to play a game of bowls.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ There is no doubt that the concentric circles were constructed, for they are shown on a schematic plan of 1747,Footnote ¹¹⁰ made after the garden was completed, being of roughly the same size and position as those on the earlier plans. Why Stukeley did not mention any druidical associations in connection with the characteristic circles at Barn Hill is not clear: similarly, he chose not to mention any in respect of his designs at Austin Street, nor later at Kentish Town. There is little doubt he had such thoughts in his mind, for only a day or so after he recorded his long description of the garden, he made an indirect reference to the druids, noting, ‘In Febr, last I put some mistletoe on several kinds of trees in my garden’.Footnote ¹¹¹

Stukeley conceived the idea of turning over a large proportion of his garden to a wild and irregular form as early as 1743, for that is how he illustrated the project in his imagined bird's-eye view of the site (Fig 10) and in a similar more detailed second drawing of the same year.Footnote ¹¹² The scheme evolved only gradually and his first plans for the far-end orchard utilised smaller concentric circles abutting the larger ones. Later it became less formal, with trees scattered over a trapezoidal shape (Fig 15); ultimately formality was completely abandoned in the final ‘wild forestiere’ form. This evolution showed a significant progression of thought: gone was the dominating formal garden with smaller random areas and set pieces, as at Austin Street; in its place was a garden with a significant proportion given over to irregularity, an arrangement that favoured the visitor stumbling upon the set pieces. The garden's northern boundary was serendipitous, with a long graceful curve along the line of the medieval town wall tapering the garden to a point and a terminal focus, with a raised area from which to view the garden. The aesthetic and practical potential of this spot had been previously recognised, for it was shown as a raised platform on the survey Stukeley made in 1740 before he purchased the site (Fig 8) and by the fact that ‘the mount’ was one of his earliest garden works, completed more than a year before the house.Footnote ¹¹³

The inclusion of an encompassing, or circuit, walk round the wild part of the garden showed that Stukeley intended visitors to tour the garden and discover its features, and there is ample evidence to show that they did. Stukeley's description of the circuit walk allows the location of various other features in the garden to be identified.Footnote ¹¹⁴ A new hermitage, a specific structure rather than the generic name for the whole site, lay in a straight line from the Mount and this places it as some way down the south-eastern boundary of the garden, very likely on the site of the 1804 Methodist chapel. If so, the 1744 drawing of the Hermitage looks south west (Fig 17),Footnote ¹¹⁵ with the adjacent property of Noah Curtis on the left. The final design is quite different from the more picturesque and ruinous Gothic structure shown in a preliminary sketch in the Bodleian Library.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Instead, with its apsidal end, steeply pitched roof and gabled cross wing, it could almost be mistaken for a mid-Victorian cemetery chapel. A month after its completion on 20 April 1744 Stukeley described it in detail, noting the provenance of its various features.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The stonework of the two-light medieval window came from an old Stamford ‘college’ in St Mary's parish, pulled down by a local merchant to build a new house. Stukeley filled the lights with the medieval stained glass figures of SS Simon, Jude, James and Barnabus. The ‘niche’ above is actually ‘an old Roman basso-relievo of a soldier which I took up at the city of Durobrivae [Water Newton, about six miles from Stamford]’ and the ‘great carved stone’ at the top of the gable came from the west front of the twelfth-century St Leonard's Priory, Stamford. The iron cross above that, which Stukeley acquired in 1717, came from the monastery at St Osyth, Essex. The following year Stukeley set up the medieval head of what he thought was the tenth-century abbot, Turtetyl of Crowland, in a niche outside the Hermitage and on its pedestal inserted the inscription:

Fig 17

Stukeley's drawing of the Hermitage, Barn Hill, Stamford, 1744. Drawing: Bodl, Gough Maps 230, fol 410

The summer house mentioned in the diary description is almost certainly a conversion of the ‘summer house’ on the line of the old town wall, labelled as such on Figure 8; a straight line drawn across the garden to it from the Hermitage would skirt the boundary between the formal and informal parts of the garden, with the Tabernacle somewhere along this line. The summer house (which Stukeley also called the ‘grotto’) was big enough for Stukeley to entertain friends and visitors. A ground plan shows its internal dimensions to have been 10ft (3.0m) by almost 8ft (2.4m).Footnote ¹¹⁹ Stukeley incorporated a large amount of medieval stained glass here, including the figures of William Bruges, Garter King at Arms, rescued from the east window of St George's church, and SS Anna, Cleophas and John the Baptist. On the Feast of the Assumption, 15 August 1744, he ‘put up the painted glass in the summerhouse of the assumption’, an odd choice for a Protestant clergyman, but clearly antiquarianism took precedence over theological considerations on this occasion.

Little is known about the Tabernacle, apart from the fact that it was finished on 12 May 1744, being an early work in the garden, along with the summer house and Hermitage, all of them completed between April and May 1744.Footnote ¹²⁰ In addition, Stukeley makes reference to a projected grotto in August 1746 (almost certainly not the summer house and probably never completed);Footnote ¹²¹ a statue of PhutFootnote ¹²² and a sundial of Stukeley's own design set up April 1744;Footnote ¹²³ a statue of Flora given by the duke of Montagu in September 1744 and set up the following April with dedicatory inscription;Footnote ¹²⁴ a Babylonian garden; part of the cross shaft from the Stamford Eleanor Cross; a new ‘Rosamund's Bower’ (the place where his favourite cat, Tit, was buried in 1747, an occasion that caused Stukeley much distress); and work to make the great farmyard gateway more suited to a garden.

Dedicatory Latin inscriptions filled the garden. In addition to those commemorating Lord Turketyl and the statue of Flora, there were two separate inscriptions in the 1747 Temple of Flora, one of which survives. Also surviving are the ‘Beatae tranquillitati’ inscription transferred from Austin Street, an inscription over the Great Gate commemorating the battle of Culloden and a plaque to Dr Rogers (Fig 18), which reads:

Fig 18

The commemorative plaque of 1733 dedicated to Dr Rogers, moved to Barn Hill in 1743 and subsequently reset. Photograph: author

Dr Rogers was the inventor of the oleum arthriticum that relieved many of Stukeley's gout symptoms, and the inscription expresses Stukeley's gratitude for ‘overcoming the monster of gout’. Bearing the date 1733, it pre-dates both his Austin Street and Barn Hill gardens and must therefore have been originally set up in the St Peter's rectory garden. Moving the plaque from garden to garden shows the continuing regard Stukeley had for Dr Rogers and his oils, as does setting it up at Barn Hill a week before he moved into the house.Footnote ¹²⁵

The Great Gate (Fig 19), a large gateway giving access through the town wall to the open fields, was, and remains, a significant architectural feature in the garden. It consists of a large round-headed arch with heavy rusticated jambs and voussoirs, and was put into its present form in the early seventeenth century. Once the farmyard had been converted to a garden, the need for access by large carts disappeared, so Stukeley filled in the opening in 1744.Footnote ¹²⁶ He retained a small doorway in a coved recess within the arch and placed niches to each side. Immediately above he set his ‘Beatae tranquillitati’ inscription from Austin Street (Fig 20) and originally planned to top this with a large heavy pediment. Later he changed his mind and crenellated the upper stonework, placing there his arms between those of his two wives (Fig 21). This is the form that survives today, the only addition being the commemorative inscription ‘ANNO VICTORIAE CVLLODONIANAE 1746’ carved across the upper stonework, celebrating the duke of Cumberland's victory. This commemoration was particularly apposite in Stamford as the Jacobite rebels had reached Derby, only fifty miles away, the previous December and the panic in the Stamford region was palpable: ‘all the country round in the utmost fright, hiding and carrying off their goods … and removed towards the fen country’.Footnote ¹²⁷ The defeat of the rebels was greeted with wild celebration: ‘We had most extraordinary rejoicings here for the victory, our whole town, Barnhill particularly, looked like the elysian fields with illumination.’Footnote ¹²⁸ Stukeley later continued this work of celebration with a further Culloden commemoration, his Culloden Close (see below).

Fig 19

The Great Gate, today called the ‘King Charles’ gateway. Photograph: author

Fig 20

The ‘Beatae tranquillitati’ inscription, 1737, moved from the Austin Street Hermitage to the Great Gate at Barn Hill, in 1746. Photograph: author

Fig 21

Stukeley's diary entry for 4 October 1746, showing his design for the Great Gate and its commemorative Culloden inscription. Drawing: Bodl, Eng. misc. e. 126, fol 44

The other major work, the Gothic Temple of Flora, completed in 1747 (Fig 22), is the best-recorded feature of the garden and Stukeley left a number of preparatory sketches showing the evolution of his thoughts on its design. Of the eight drawings in the Bodleian Library, seven are classical in style, but the final one, as built, is Gothic.Footnote ¹²⁹ He also described the project in detail to his brother-in-law, Samuel Gale, in a letter of 12 June 1747.Footnote ¹³⁰ With such extensive recording it is no surprise the temple has been studied thoroughly, opinions of it ranging from ‘rather dull Gothick’Footnote ¹³¹ to Reeve's suggestion that ‘the Temple appears to have been the first Temple of Flora erected in England in the Gothic style’.Footnote ¹³² Reeve places it in the context of the contemporary belief that Gothic architecture had evolved from the overarching forms of trees and foliage. Stukeley's friend William Warburton, among others, not only developed a version of this ‘forest theory’ but also ‘proposed a direct relationship between the forest groves of the Druids with the Gothic’.Footnote ¹³³ Noting Stukeley's statement that he was constructing the temple for his wife Elizabeth to house ‘her numerous pots of elegant curiosities in nature’, Reeve identifies Ovid's Fasti, a book owned by Stukeley, as an inspiration for the design, for there Zephyrus makes a wedding gift of a garden ‘filled with noble flowers’ to his new wife, Flora, making her a goddess over them.Footnote ¹³⁴

Fig. 22

Stukeley's drawing of the front of the Temple of Flora, Barn Hill, Stamford, 1747. Drawing: Bodl, Gough Maps 230, fol 409

Stukeley's description of the temple has been published a number of times,Footnote ¹³⁵ but previously unknown ground plans, sections and illustrations of the interior have now been discovered in the Spalding Gentlemen's Society and Stamford Town Hall. Until now, no full physical description has been published, and neither has the location of the temple in the garden been identified. The drawings and description show that the temple's facade was about 10ft 6in (3.1m) wide and about 11ft 6in (3.5m) tall to the top of the central finial. It was divided into three by ‘demi-columns’, the central opening being 4ft 6in (1.4m) wide and containing a pair of doors 8ft (2.4m) tall. Whether judged as classical or medieval the bases of the ‘demi-columns’ are not accurately depicted in the drawing of 1747 (Fig 22), and though the capitals look vaguely Ionic it is more likely that they were intended to represent thirteenth-century bell capitals with stiff-leaf decoration. Each column is topped with a finial and the spaces between are filled with crocketed gables of concave profile. This latter feature suggests that the stonework is medieval and was once part of a larger ogee arch or canopy – which in Stamford would date to the second half of the fifteenth century. It is very possible that the columns, finials and canopies were genuine medieval salvage and the column bases are just badly drawn. Whether by design, coincidence or merely the availability of material, it is of interest that thirteenth-century columns, in the form of blind arcading, and a large fifteenth-century ogee-arched canopy, over the south porch, exist on the south side of Stukeley's own church of All Saints. Within each gable were shields, painted with family arms ‘in basso relievo’,Footnote ¹³⁶ and flanking the whole were two medieval heads.

The building – roughly square in plan and just under 10ft (3.0m) wide and 9ft (2.7m) deep – had a large niche on the north, and a pointed window on the southern side. The interior had its rear corners chamfered to make the internal ground plan half an octagon, the circumference being stepped and shelved to provide a theatre for Elizabeth's flowers. Two sketches of the internal arrangement of the temple survive in Stamford Town Hall (Fig 23),Footnote ¹³⁷ and they show many of the features described in the written description:Footnote ¹³⁸ the niches, the southern window filled with medieval stained glass – ‘St Laurence and St Kyneburga, King Alkfrid [sic]’ – the various coats of arms and inscriptions, and the ‘several busto's’. The ‘gilt statue of Venus de Medicis, 2 foot high’ can be seen in a niche in the south-western corner, while the ‘golden boys [putti] supporting two spandrils [pendentives]’ are prominent on each side of an inscription plaque. This is the Cowley quotation that Stukeley records placing in the temple:Footnote ¹³⁹

Fig. 23

Stukeley's drawing of the interior of the Temple of Flora, Barn Hill, Stamford, 1747. Drawing: Stamford Town Council, unnumbered

There was a small hemispherical dome above, 4ft 10in (1.5m) in diameter, supported by eight ‘spandrils’, and above this, in the oculus of the dome, Stukeley placed the contraption he used for ringing what he called his ‘dumb bell’. This was a weighted flywheel with a rope hanging from its axle that could be pulled by someone at ground level. It worked on the same principle as the horseless carriage that Stukeley was trying to invent.Footnote ¹⁴¹ He also moved the statue of Flora, given him by the duke of Montagu, to a position in front of the temple.Footnote ¹⁴²

The position of the temple was not previously known, but it was certainly not on the site of the summer house that today carries the Cowley inscription (Fig 24). This building, dating from 1840 and refurbished some sixty years later, is situated in what was Stukeley's ‘pasture’, in an area separate from the main garden. The only clue to the temple's location is Stukeley's note that it ‘faces the rising sun’ and that it had a window on its southern side. There are a limited number of places in the garden where this could be. It was tempting to place the temple in the small detached garden on the other side of Barn Hill at the foot of the bridge abutment, for a deed of April 1786Footnote ¹⁴³ notes a surviving Temple of Flora in this area. However, this cannot be, for all the eastward-facing walls of the small garden were in shadow in the early morning. The most likely place for it was in the main garden, possibly against the eastward-facing wall of the stable block, or, more probably, between it and the small square garden adjoining the house. In this position it would have faced the right direction. A close inspection of the 1743 bird's-eye view of the site (Fig 10) shows the later insertion of a small domed structure at the rear of the ‘yard’ that fits closely with Stukeley's description of the temple; it also chimes well with the fact that Stukeley says he rang the ‘dumb bell’ in the temple every morning, suggesting a position near the house.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Fig. 24

The surviving Cowley inscription from the Temple of Flora. Photograph: author

In his letter of 12 June 1747 to Samuel Gale describing the temple, Stukeley expresses the wish that his brother-in-law might join him at the temple's ‘consecration’. He does not explain further, but the statement is tantalising. Was Stukeley still carrying out similar rites to those at Grantham, when he buried his wife's miscarried embryo, or was this a simple dedication ceremony? In this context there has been much discussion in recent years over the development of Stukeley's religious views, from a pantheistic position where all religions deriving from the one true God were interconnected to a spirited defence of Trinitarianism in an Anglican context. It is impossible to ascertain in this instance what Stukeley was up to, for as Hutton says of people like Stukeley: ‘it is very hard to tell where play-acting ended and genuine religious behaviour began’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Details of the garden features that do not survive are sketchy. Nothing further is known of Rosamund's Bower, and all that is known of the Babylonian garden is that it was situated ‘ore Dr Rogers's inscription’, which could suggest a terrace, with the Rogers plaque at the lower level. There are no sketches that include the Stamford Eleanor Cross fragments placed in the garden after December 1745, but Stukeley noted he left them in the garden when he left Stamford.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ This is in probable contrast to the Roman altar, which, because of its personal associations, he is likely to have taken with him to London.

The only remaining part of the Barn Hill garden needing discussion is the kitchen garden. Stukeley nowhere mentions its location, but references to it in 1747 in relation to the troubles Stukeley had with a neighbour – William Noel, MP and Recorder for Stamford,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ who lived on the other side of Barn Hill, directly opposite No. 10 – suggest very strongly it was the ‘little garden walled in, all distinct from the main house’ that Stukeley commended to his brother-in-law, Samuel Gale in 1742.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ This was situated round the base of the south-western abutment of the bridge and gateway under which the duke of Cumberland and the other travellers recorded by Stukeley had once passed and it encroached upon Noel's property (Figs 10 and 12). Stukeley's claim to it seems to have been tenuous, and he ruefully remarks on a number of occasions in 1747 that Noel unfairly deprived him of it.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The history of Stukeley's possession of the plot is unclear, for the 1740 site plan (Fig 8) shows only two small pieces of ground south and south west of the bridge abutment to be part of the Butler site, whereas by 1743 (Fig 10) it had become significantly larger and surrounded the bridge abutment on three sides. That Noel could deprive him of the garden so easily might suggest that Stukeley held it in some informal way that was not legally binding. It is possible the land in question belonged to Mr Wallet, rector of St John's, Stamford, as Stukeley retrospectively records that he approached him (unsuccessfully) with regard to it sometime in 1747, but that ‘Noel was [already] in treaty’ for it. There is no evidence of Stukeley making rent payments for the kitchen garden, which reinforces the view that any entitlement was so tenuous as to collapse immediately under pressure from a powerful local figure such as Noel.

Stukeley's relationship with Noel had been strained from the beginning, coming to a head at the 1734 election when Noel was one of the Tory candidates. Despite Stukeley's bias, his account of Noel's behaviour at the election was a severe indictment of the man.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Passions subsided in later years, but the 1747 flare-up was perhaps exacerbated by an underlying dislike and bitter memories on both sides. Added to Stukeley's frustration at losing his kitchen garden was a violent disagreement with Noel over the Temple of Bacchus, a projecting window inserted in his study on the end wall of the bridge over Barn Hill, ‘which I gave to my da[ughte]r. Frances’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ A drawing of the window shows it to have been 11ft (3.4m) wide with a projection of almost 5ft (1.5m).Footnote ¹⁵² Noel could well have seen this rather large projection directly overlooking his house and gardenFootnote ¹⁵³ as an un-neighbourly intrusion on his privacy.

The suspicion is that Noel's acquisition of the kitchen garden was only a first step towards removing the anomalous blip of the bridge gateway encroaching on to his property. The only way he could do this and eliminate the risk of future difficult neighbours was to purchase the property himself. The opportunity arose sooner than expected, and Noel quickly bought Stukeley's house and garden for £700 when Stukeley left Stamford a few months later.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Stukeley clearly recognised Noel's intentions and was able to push the price up – though not without some ‘agitation’Footnote ¹⁵⁵ – for he had valued the property at £600 only three months before the sale, in January 1748.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ It seems the gateway bridge was demolished soon after Stukeley's departure, the only surviving part being the south-western abutment containing a single room. This was rapidly converted into a summer house, to judge by the garden facade, which is in a typically mid-eighteenth-century developed ‘Stamford style’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Stukeley seems to have known about Noel's intentions for the bridge for he wrote to Elizabeth in Stamford, soon after moving to London, instructing her ‘to take down my new shelves in my new study, before Noel comes. He pulls all that down’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸