Secrets of the Stately Garden | 2007 Prior Park

Hi, you're watching Secrets of the Stately Garden on the Time Team official YouTube channel, with me, Tony Robinson. England in the summer. See the gently rolling fields and the lovely little stream and the curve of the trees? It's the epitome of the natural English landscape. But appearances can be deceptive. Because beneath the sweeping meadows of Croon Park in Worcestershire, there are miles of drainage tunnels built with millions of bricks. With these, legendary landscape designer Capability Brown transformed a boggy field into a fashionable lake and valuable farmland. Up on the surface, Croon Park may look like a miracle of Mother Nature, but down here you can see it's definitely man-made. This isn't a triumph of nature, it's a triumph of engineering and illusion. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. In the 18th century, landowners, designers and engineers transformed the English countryside. They diverted rivers, created vast lakes and built strange follies. They employed thousands and spent millions. At Croon Park alone, the Earl of Coventry spent about £35 million in today's money. And what I want to know is why? It's a question that will take me far from the tea shop and the Sunday afternoon stroll and deep into a shocking world of subversion, weird science and sexual intrigue. From the dank crevices of mossy grottos to the dazzling brilliance of Imperial Rome. The Landscape Garden is one of this country's greatest artistic achievements, the product of one of the most dramatic periods in history, the Age of Enlightenment. An age in which the laws governing society, politics, philosophy, even the universe were ripped up and rewritten. Croon Park is one of England's finest 18th century landscapes. Here it's possible to experience the garden as its creator, landscape designer Capability Brown, intended. It does seem a bit artificial in the 21st century, trotting around the park in a carriage. Something very alien to us, but of course this was the natural way to visit a parkland in the 18th century. In fact, the park is designed to be seen from a carriage. And as we move around the corner here, we see a Corinthian temple coming into view. These various buildings emerge from the shrubberies and then disappear behind cover once again. So it's a bit like a movie, things emerge and then they disappear again. I suppose it's the closest you could get to it, but of course it's all designed to seem natural. So Brown is very carefully composing these viewpoints. He knows exactly what we're going to see and when, but it seems almost accidental. You can't tell that a huge amount of work went into it. And that's perhaps the true genus of Brown's design here, that you wouldn't know unless you knew about all these, this wonderful web of tunnels, the great technology that helped build this place, that it is all an artificial design. Lancelot Capability Brown created at least 170 gardens. And he was so successful that today, when we visit great landscapes like this, all we see is the illusion. Brown perfected the landscape garden, but he didn't invent it. To uncover its true story and to understand what it was that inspired landowners to spend millions creating vast landscape gardens, I need to see beneath the illusion. At another of these great gardens, the National Trust are embarking on a three quarters of a million pound restoration. The transformation of Pryor Park in Bath is a unique opportunity to look beneath the veneer of an 18th century landscape garden. Pryor Park was created between 1736 and 1764. The house has been preserved, it's now a school, but much of the garden has been reclaimed by nature. The only clue to its original appearance is a handful of illustrations, so the Trust is relying on archaeology. They want to excavate the serpentine lake that was filled in during the 19th century, unearth the cascade, a waterfall that tumbled from the lake, and restore the clearing into which it once flowed. It's a major undertaking. The cascade is buried beneath 200 years of mud and its sluice mechanism is a mystery. But this is about more than the restoration of Pryor Park, it's an attempt to understand the ideas and inspirations behind it. And to do that, we need to understand the motivation of the man who created the garden, landowner Ralph Allen. Allen wasn't a wealthy aristocrat, he was born in a humble cottage, but made a fortune in the newly founded post office and the quarrying of stone. His was the ultimate 18th century success story, a rags-to-riches tale only possible in a new kind of society, forged in the city overlooked by Pryor Park, Bath. Like Ralph Allen, Bath's transformation was dramatic. In 1700, it was a small provincial town, but by 1800, it was one of the 10 biggest cities in Britain, and at its heart was the pump room. Today, with its cucumber sandwiches and its cream teas, it's a picture of sedate gentility. But in the 18th century, this was a hotbed of social turmoil, of a revolution led by self-made men like Ralph Allen. Anyone who made money in 18th century Britain came to Bath, you would have in this room a plantation owner from Jamaica, a shopkeeper from London, an industrialist from the Midlands, and it's the first time in British history that a shopkeeper could find himself standing next to a duchess. Wasn't this quite radical, the idea of the nouveau riche sitting down with an aristocrat whose ancestors came over with William the Conqueror? Definitely, it's something they all talk about. They say they're very conscious that barriers are being broken down, which in the previous century, which is the century of battles and wars and swords, you didn't have, and they talk about polishing off the sharp corners, polishing off the angles so we can all rub together. And Ralph Allen's got his portrait up here. Well, Ralph Allen becomes very rich. He earns about half a million pounds in his life, but what's interesting about Ralph Allen is he spends his money in a way that everyone felt comfortable with. He's modest, he is a philanthropist, he follows the rules of society. He's the acceptable face of capitalism in the 18th century. The industrial revolution made Ralph Allen rich, the social revolution made him respectable. For the first time in British history, it was possible for a man of humble origins like Ralph Allen to build a house on aristocratic proportions. And he did it in a radical new style with the help of a fellow outsider. The park's design was inspired by Allen's friend, poet and self-appointed style guru, Alexander Pope. Like Allen, Pope came from humble beginnings, and as a Catholic, he was banned from attending university, teaching or holding a professional position. This is an article written by Pope in 1731, and it's in the form of a poem which is dedicated to his friend Richard Earl of Burlington, and it's advice to Burlington, who was putting in new gardens in his house in Chiswick in London. And look, it says, in all, let nature never be forgot. Consult the genius of the place in all. Now, that may sound pretty poncy to us, but in those days, that was very revolutionary stuff, because what he was saying was, forget all about formal gardens, respond to the nature of a place. Nature is all. Nowadays, that may seem pretty straightforward, but in those days, that was strong stuff. To understand just how strong, I need to see what Pope and Allen were reacting against. This is the Privy Garden at Hampton Court Palace. It was completed in 1702, less than 40 years before Ralph Allen began his garden at Pryor Park. You could say this is the last of the great formal gardens. I think the first thing I noticed is that you can't see out of it. You're sort of trapped inside. That's literally the case, too, isn't it? And it really conveys that sense of royal order. I mean, there are several reasons why a building like this would appeal to one of the ruling class. Firstly, it shows complete control over the environment. It's man shaping nature into rigid geometries. I mean, even now, people come here and overwhelmed by the amount of work that must have gone into it. Yeah. It's a bit uptight, isn't it? Yeah, I think so. You could break out of it, couldn't you? To a new generation of men like Allen and Pope, Hampton Court and gardens like it smacked of the establishment of autocratic monarchy and rigid social hierarchies. So they turned the straight lines into curved, ripped out the formal hedges and replaced them with the ha-ha, named after the sound made by surprised visitors as they stumbled upon it. This sunken wall kept the animals out and let the view in. The landscape was liberated. A revolution had begun. If you want us to investigate more sites, you can make it happen. So help us reach 10,000 members on Patreon. The National Trust is restoring Pryor Park near Bath to its 18th century glory. It's a unique opportunity to discover the intriguing story of the landscape garden. Two months into the restoration, the archaeologists have uncovered the Cascade, a dramatic waterfall that tumbled from the lake into a clearing below. This is the first time it's been seen for 200 years. We had to dig out quite a lot of silt. There's about three and a half to four feet here of silt with all sorts of rocks and bits and pieces. Did you find anything out that you didn't know already? We did. That was the interesting thing because we've lost a bit of the Cascade at the very bottom here, but we've also found bits of calcite and other small bits of stone. What's calcite? Calcite, that's the stuff that develops inside the quarries where you've got all these cracks and fissures in the rock. It's where water dribbled down and this gradually builds up and you get this shiny effect. What would it have looked like when the water had gone over it? When the water's over this, this would have almost sort of sparkled in a way with the sun reflecting off it, so it would have been quite impressive to look at really when you've got numerous pieces of this spread out over the Cascade. The park's owner, Ralph Allen, didn't have to go far for his stone. It was bathstone dug from beneath the surrounding hills. Landscape archaeologist Stuart Ainsworth is exploring one of Bath's old quarries. Wow, this is big isn't it? Crikey. How deep is that shaft David? About 60 feet to the surface Stone has been quarried from the hills around Bath since Roman times. What attracted people to using bathstone? What are its qualities? Well it's a free stone, which means it's free working. It means it can be worked in any direction you like. You can cut it this way, that way, you can drill holes in it, you can do anything you like. So that makes it easy to shape? Yes. So what is it geologically? Is it a sandstone? No, it's a limestone. This stuff was laid down at the bottom of the sea about 140 million years ago. This is sediment and these were underwater dunes if you like. And it was in quarries like this that entrepreneur Ralph Allen invested his money. So how does it operate? Well that all happens up here Tony. And he showed off his stone by building the Cascade. This is where it all went on. You've got this massive culvert here where you've got the water overflowing from the lake beyond us and how we think it worked is that there was a sluice here which was either kept in place or lowered at specific periods. The water was allowed to build up and then when Allen wanted to impress his friends down below on the cabinet looking at the Cascade, when that sluice is lifted up we think that the water probably went down this wooden pipe. That's an original 18th century wooden pipe down there. Oh yeah. Shoots down there under pressure, goes behind you and then got whooshed down at the bottom. But we're not really going to know that until we fill the lake up and see what happens. With its ingenious engineering concealed behind a wild jumble of rocks, the Cascade was a world away from the rigid geometries of formal gardens like Hampton Court. Their nature was suppressed and controlled. Here it was imitated and celebrated. And that was a revolutionary idea and I want to know what inspired it. To find out I'm going to leave Prior Park behind because the ideas that inspired this revolution took root not in the English countryside but in the intellectual hothouse of 18th century London. And at its heart was the Royal Society, the world's first scientific collective. It was founded in 1660 by a band of intellectual mavericks, men unafraid to question every accepted belief about the world around them, from the structure of the smallest organism to the nature of the universe itself. It's an incredible moment in history isn't it? You've got all these really bright men making fantastic discoveries in a whole variety of fields. What was it that inspired them? The microscope is really the instrument which opens up a whole realm of the small and you start to be awestruck by the complexity of small structures. Now Robert Hooke was the real pioneer of the microscope and in 1660 he published this book which I think is one of the most important books ever written. It was called Micrographia or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made with the Aid of Magnifying Glasses. In this book he starts to look at whole realms of nature people had never thought of before. He says that a flea under the microscope had an anatomy as complex as a lion and the exploration of the inner structures of nature was one of the great great changing points in the history of mankind where we went from looking at nature as a fairly neutral thing to looking at nature as a thing that we could literally take apart and put back together again. So for the new gardeners were there practical applications behind what the fellows of the Royal Society did? Oh they had a fascination with this yes. They were interested in how to increase the fertility of the soil for instance and of course too their fascination with looking at the structures of nature. Now here for instance we have this beautiful late 17th century microscope. Now this could have been put into a gentleman's pocket examine a plant or a structure and put it all away again afterward. Oh looking like a school microscope now isn't it? Pretty well what it is. And this little ivory slide that's got specimens in? That's got things like flies legs and insect parts and things of that sort. You could have bought one of those for about five guineas in 1750. It's really clear it's a big magnification. It's tremendous oh yes. I think if I'd been surrounded by all these new discoveries and all this new science I would have been completely overwhelmed by it all. What do you think they felt about it? Did they realise its significance? Oh yes they did indeed. They realised that the experimental philosophy as they called it could enable them to take nature to pieces, to classify the pieces, to build the pieces into wonderful new structures and to master what seemed to be the whole grand edifice of nature. The scientific revolution was a shocking and fundamental shift in man's relationship with the natural world. Nature was no longer something to be feared and shut out. Now it could be observed, collected and classified. A mania for collecting brought the world to Britain's gardens. Expeditions brought back new plants from Britain's emerging empire. Exotic fruits like the pineapples, oranges and lemons were grown at Pryor Park. And landowners collected shells, fossils and geological specimens to display in perhaps the strangest of all garden features, the grotto. So you've got almanolics at the centre then you've got a ring of these sort of vertebrae here creating the sort of the circle then radiating from that you've got this sort of sunburst pattern here oh yeah coming all the way round again these sort of sawn up bones. At Pryor Park only a small piece of floor survives. It's hard to imagine just how magical this artificial cave encrusted with curiosities must have looked. But at Paines Hill Park in Surrey it's possible to experience the grotto as it was intended to be seen, to step into the shoes of an 18th century visitor. Thousands of crystals, each stuck on by hand, sparkle in the half-light. There's a distant sound of trickling water and soft sand underfoot. The tunnel opens into a cathedral-like space. Its partially restored ceiling reveals the complex structure. And strange corals and shells transport the visitor to exotic realms. Touch, sight, sound, even smell are stimulated. To enter the grotto is to step into a sensual wonderland. This is West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, home of Sir Francis Dashwood, founder of the notorious Hellfire Club. Here historians think the garden is more than just sensual, they believe there's a hidden meaning behind its follies, a meaning of a sexual nature. I can see that this is a very beautiful landscape and in a way it's really quite poetic, isn't it? It's like the wilderness captured for human enjoyment, but sexy? Not really, unless I'm looking at it through 21st century eyes. I think you've got a point. Actually I think you're seeing it through 19th century eyes, through a sort of veil of Victorian prudishness. Now look, try to see it through 18th century eyes, so you have to re-engage your senses and when you do you'll see just how sensual this is. Sensual, yeah, I can understand that, in that you get all the smells and all the shapes and all the experiences, but that's very different from sexy, isn't it? Tony, can I show you something really sexy? Yes, yes she can. Okay, this is it, this is the Temple of Venus, what do you reckon? Um, well all right, I'm convinced that is a breast without any doubt, isn't it, with a little nipple on the top. It's quite perky. There's more, come and have a look at this. If we come here, we see something else, this rather moist little cave with an oval entrance. I'm not going to say anything about that at all. Then down either side of this mound, there were two paths and the paths represented Venus's legs, so legs are kind of... So she's in the middle of the garden with her legs apart. Didn't people find that very shocking? Even I feel a bit giggly about it. Well in the 18th century there were quite a few Venus gardens, now we just see them as sort of history lessons, they really weren't, they were references to the goddess of love and to sex. I mean they were at it like bunnies. I have to say when I was a little boy, my mum and dad used to take me to places like this and we would be sitting there with our collapsible chairs and car rugs and our dairy leaf sandwiches. I think my mum would have moved if she'd realised what the symbolism was. When I started on this journey, I thought landscape gardens like Pryor Park were natural and beautiful. I now know they're more artificial than natural and I'm beginning to realise there's much more to the landscape garden than a pleasing view and collection of follies. We need to see them through 18th century eyes and when we do, a whole layer of symbolism begins to emerge from the undergrowth. This is Stowe in Buckinghamshire and it's the most symbolic of all landscape gardens. So when you arrived here, what were the kind of scenes that you might be confronted by? Well you had half the garden designed as the path of vice and the other half of the garden designed as the path of virtue, so you had an immediate choice to make. It's a hard choice to make isn't it? Pretty tough. And virtue's over that way. Virtue's over there. And what are these busts? Well you've got the two most unfaithful women in history here. Clare Partre, you remember, did the treble. She committed incest with her brother Ptolemy, adultery with Julius Caesar and bigamy with Mark Antony and so she did the three. On the other side Faustina had a penchant for gladiators. It's more like the daily sport than country life isn't it? Well you're quite right. From vice the path leads inevitably to virtue. Here the garden's owner Lord Cobham celebrated the virtues of the ancient world. Inside we've got the four heroes of the ancient world telling us that we need to look back to ancient times for proper virtue. And contrasted them with the corrupt morals of the modern. Here we've got the temple of modern virtue, what's left of it. It was built as a crumbling ruin with trees growing out. What we're left with now is the roots of the trees and the stones between them. We've got a picture of it in the guidebook and in the middle of it is a headless torso of the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole. We're actually prepared to dismember the prime minister. That's a pretty heavy political setup. We don't even do that nowadays. It's pretty tough stuff. Stow is a vast moral lesson written in grass, water and stone. It might be the most complex symbolic garden in 18th century Britain, but it was by no means unique. Throughout the country landowners populated their gardens with a cast of nymphs and classical gods and goddesses, all set against a backdrop of temples and follies. It seems to me that these gardens are theatrical. They're stages for their owners to act out their fantasies, to make a drama out of their beliefs and personality. Right now Pryor Park looks less like a stage and more like a building site. Summer has turned to autumn and the archaeologists have been joined by the stonemasons, who've begun taking apart the cascade to restore its sluice mechanism. But it's one thing to reconstruct the mechanics of a garden, another to unlock its meaning. Whenever I used to visit a garden like this, I'd wander around vaguely admiring the stonework, but without any sense that it had any meaning to it. I just thought that things like this were the eccentric whim of a rather dotty landowner. But I can now see that they're part of a story and a drama, and that drama is full of meanings and full of fun. But what really strikes me is that virtually none of the stories are English. They're almost all Greek or Roman. I know the men who designed these gardens look to the future, inspired by the revolution in science, but it seems they also look to the past, to the wonders of the classical world. So together we brought Time Team back and now we're going to take Time Team to the next level. Help us achieve 10,000 ongoing members on Patreon. It's six months into the National Trust's restoration of Pryor Park Landscape Garden. Stonework sticking out here, I mean it looks like a cattle trough from here. This edge here is chamfered, unless that's broken off. There's the back of it there, but it looks as if it's definitely part of a garden feature, isn't it? I'm trying to understand what it was that inspired landowners like Pryor Park's Ralph Allen to spend a fortune creating vast landscape gardens. I started out thinking 18th century gardens like Pryor Park were a picture of natural English beauty, but I now see that what I thought of as the work of Mother Nature is actually a carefully contrived illusion, and that their beauty is bound up with an elaborate symbolism. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if they're even English at all. Certainly every garden I visit seems to be packed with classical references. I want to know what it was about the ancient world that so captivated the 18th century imagination, and where better to start than in the city overlooked by Pryor Park, Britain's finest Roman city, Bath. In the 18th century, Britain is the new Rome. Like Rome, it's an empire built on trade, upon conquest, and Bath has this extra dimension because it is a Roman city, it's a Roman bath. Whenever you dug a hole in the ground for a sewer, you would come across a Roman mosaic or a piece of sculpture, so the people of Bath were very proud about being the heirs to the Romans. Do you think they saw themselves as new Romans? They did. I mean, if you were at school in the 18th century, books tell you you are the Romans of today. So they tried to acquire Roman characteristics? Yes, well, if you think of the architecture in Bath, that's the most striking similarity. The architecture is modelled on the architecture of ancient Rome. And Ralph Allen's in the thick of all this? Well, Ralph Allen built this massive house, Pryor Park. It's a neoclassical house, it's got a great portico like a Roman temple, and John Wood, his architect, talks about Bath, like Rome, having seven hills, and Pryor Park is built on one of them. It seems that if I want to really understand the landscape garden, I'm going to need a classical education. So I'm leaving England behind and following in the footsteps of 18th century men of taste, of the landowners who created Britain's great gardens. They were among the hundreds, possibly thousands, of young men, and the very occasional woman, to set off across Europe on the grand tour. They travelled for thousands of miles in bumpy old carriages, they crossed the Alps, they dodged rockfalls and bandits. The journey could take months. Cheers. I should be in Rome by lunchtime. In the eternal city, grand tourists could continue their classical education, and they found themselves surrounded by ancient columns, statues and temples around almost every corner. What they saw here would have a profound influence on virtually every town, village and great estate in the country. And perhaps the most influential building of them all was this, the Pantheon, built nearly 2,000 years ago. Look at these immense granite columns, the precisely carved stone, the perfectly calculated proportions. It's a huge statement of power, isn't it? Written in marble, brick and stone. And to the 18th century grand tourists, it was irresistible, because they saw themselves as the direct descendants of the Romans. They were the creators of a vast empire. They were citizens of the wealthiest, most enlightened nation in the world. So they went back home to recreate imperial Rome on English soil. Some, like Henry Hoare of Stourhead, took it all rather literally. In 1753, he built a miniature version of the Pantheon in his garden in Somerset. The vocabulary of classical architecture, the columns and pediments, the proportions and decoration, soon found its way into virtually every great garden in Britain. But the obsession with ancient Rome went beyond decoration to the very idea of the landscape garden itself. And not far from the city is one of the ancient world's legendary gardens, a must-see for the grand tourists. In the 2nd century AD, the man who gave his name to the wall across the north of England, built this country estate at Tivoli. It was the ultimate Roman rural retreat and an essential stop on the grand tour. Could this be the original landscape garden? Well, he didn't build the villa, because at that time, first of all, to have a villa, it was very fashion. It was a mark of civilization. And because he wanted to have a space, a retreat in the countryside. It's a series of buildings inside the landscape, and it's very much the landscape, the protagonist of this construction. And it's the green and what you see around you, in fact, which is dominating. As many as 70,000 workers built at least 30 buildings over a vast area. They moved hills, built valleys, lakes and islands. They created exquisite interiors and magnificent sculpture. What did people do when they were here? Well, this was a place that was used as a court. He would use this place to receive ambassadors for the administration of justice or for political reasons. So it was very much like a second residence for the ambassador rather than Rome. So all the aristocrats were here, lots of scheming. Lots of aristocrats were here, but it's also used for another purpose, which is pleasure. In a way, it's a bit like a pleasure garden. Oh, yes. Do you know Hadrian, he was possibly an architect himself. And he was keen on music, he was keen on literature and poetry. And we have the idea that he was himself making the drawing of this space. The people who came out here from England, the landowners on the Grand Tour, they must have responded very much to that idea of Hadrian designing his own stuff. Well, yes, they all tried to design their own villas and I do think they have inspired themselves from Hadrian's ideas. Not surprisingly, Hadrian's masterpiece made quite an impression on the Grand Tourists, and a few even left their mark on the villa. If I'd been an 18th century Englishman coming out here and seeing this, I would have been completely blown away. Yes, this was the highlight of their Grand Tour. It's funny, you know, up until now, I had always assumed that the designers were inspired by books about Rome and drawings about Rome. It has never occurred to me that when they came on the Grand Tour, they saw this stuff and thought, oh, I want a piece of this in my back garden. Yes, they saw this. This was all covered with colours and marbles and stucco and statues, and they used to collect at the time. Who did? The English guys? The English. The English were the best collectors. No, they were not stealing anything, they were just collecting because there was a great market at the time and there were dealers. This is a pretty monumental piece of garden architecture. Yes, this is one of the most important spaces of this architecture. This was a monumental fountain and it was decorated on the ceiling with stucco, with colours and even with shells. With shells? So it was a bit like a grotto in an 18th century English garden. Absolutely, yes. And this space was used as a dining room. Hadrian is laying down in this wonderful banquet room and he's dominating this space. This space, which is a space made of water, is like the Mediterranean. And the waterfall, which is coming from the back, is like the Nile. This is surrounded by the provinces of the Roman Empire. In what way? In the way that you have got the statues to the left, which are from Greece. You have got memories of Egypt. So Hadrian's using the whole garden as a political metaphor. Very much, yes. The garden was a stage on which Hadrian could display his power, flanked by a cast of Greek goddesses and Egyptian deities, set against a backdrop of the Roman Empire. Like his 18th century imitators, Hadrian had an appetite for the exotic. Just as the grand tourists came here in search of inspiration, Hadrian found inspiration in earlier times and distant places. From Hadrian's villa, the story of the landscape garden reaches back into a time before history, a time of myth and legend. Because the garden that Hadrian built, that 18th century grand tourists came and marvelled at, wasn't simply a Roman pleasure garden. It was the Arcadia of Greek myth, the paradise of the Arab world, the Garden of Eden of the Old Testament. And it was that that inspired the travellers to go back home and try and recreate a paradise of their own in English soil, a uniquely English hybrid. Right now, it's hard to see any connection between the brilliance of Rome and the drizzle of Praia Park. One of the wettest autumns on record has turned the park into a sticky quagmire and pushed the project behind schedule. But despite the mud, the team has uncovered the walls of the Serpentine Lake. Slowly, Ralph Allen's empire is beginning to emerge. Like Hadrian's villa, Praia Park was Ralph Allen's stage on which to tell his story to the world. So what story was Allen trying to tell? Is there a meaning hidden somewhere beneath the mud? What do we know about any messages or themes at Praia Park? Well, there was quite a lot of stonework in the garden and amongst them there was supposed to be a statue of Moses. But why Moses is a bit of a dilemma. There are very... I have yet to find another Moses in a garden, certainly in the United Kingdom and possibly in West Europe as well. But where was Moses in this garden? Do we have any real clues that narrow down where he was? Well, this is the interesting thing. We've only got very piecemeal descriptions as a whole about this part of the garden. But there's one particular person who wrote about the lake at the top of the garden fed by three springs of water at the head of one of which is a statue of Moses. I think that's the important one because that does then suggest somewhere above the lake here. And with no other similar statues in Britain, the appearance of Moses is a mystery. At Cliveden Conservation in nearby Froome, they've been looking at possible designs. I always had this vision. Somebody like Ralph Allen had gone along to somebody in a building somewhat like this, I suppose, and said, I want something that looks like this. What can you do for me? Well, again, a very interesting point. It would have been something like this. He would have gone to a sculptor's studio and would have been assured by the classical motifs that were around, the references that were there, that that sculptor knew what he was going to be doing. And once he was assured of that, it was up to the sculptor then to try and be as cheap and as economical as possible to make sure he had the best price and he wasn't going to go to somewhere else. Right. I'm sure that would have a philosophy that Ralph Allen would have understood at Pride Park because he was an entrepreneur himself, wasn't he? So he would understand. He wouldn't have wanted Portland Stone for a start. He would have wanted his own stone up on that cascade. And then as he walked around with his friends or when other visitors came, they would have seen that, my word, that stone is good enough for the building. Cracking, you can use it for sculpture as well. And it also works outside, which is a very important point, that in a fairly wet environment like the top of a cascade and outside in a country garden, it's going to withstand the worst of weathers. Winter is approaching. The restoration should be finished now, but instead it's running into trouble. Reconstructing the cascade is relatively straightforward, but the lake's causing concern. The architects and engineers are worried all the water may cause the steep bank behind it to collapse. It's very critical because, you know, if you're in a situation where the lake level rises and the cascade is unable to cope for whatever reason, then it's going to be going over the bank somewhere. Exactly, because we can't leave the top on that because of the steepness of the slope going down. So they've got to reinforce the bank with a massive concrete wall. It's going to push the project back even further. The delay is frustrating, but it does demonstrate the immense task faced by landowners like Ralph Allen when they set out to recreate ancient Rome on English soil. It was a process of translation that would create the uniquely English landscape garden, a creation with a surprising legacy. Join a thriving worldwide community of Time Team fans on Patreon. Your ongoing membership enables us to develop more sites and more episodes. Winter is turning to spring at Pryor Park near Bath. It's nearly a year since the National Trust set out to restore the park. The lake wall's nearly finished and the contractors have begun to restore the clearing below the cascade. On the slope above the lake, Marek thinks he might have found the location of the missing statue of Moses. That is marble. I'll tell you what's interesting is we know from Pope's letters that Moses stood on a marble plinth. So although that's not thick enough to be the main block, that is thick enough to be packing around the base of it. So that could come from up here and I'm fairly certain now that Moses was at the top of this open cascade. Yeah. Which means he's right underneath that porticabin. Shall we shift it to this? That's fortunate, isn't it? After a year of work and 200 years after it was first created, Pryor Park is nearly restored. We said we'd try and crack the story of Pryor Park. How have we done? Well, I think what's going on here when this garden is being created is to use the natural contours of this valley to actually recreate a Roman theatre. If that's the theatre, what's the story? Well, Ralph Allen is a complex character and he made his money out of stone quarrying. He erects a statue of Moses in his garden and Moses is connected with the earth, the stone and the water. He has cascades flowing down here. Oh, just like Moses with his rod, beats the stone and the water flows out for the children of Israel. That's right, but he's not lording it over everybody. He opens a mineral water spring in Bath for the poor, for instance. He seems to retain something of his humble origins. It's kind of very presumptuous but also very audacious, isn't it? That in the 18th century, somebody from such humble origins could overlook a city like Bath and say, I am Moses making money out of the stone and giving you water. Well, it is presumptuous, but on the other hand, maybe he feels he wants to include Bath and the people of Bath within his site and he wants them to be able to see him. He's still retaining a connection. It feels a very inclusive garden here. Despite the archaeologist's best efforts, there's no sign of the Moses statue. But the cascade is finished. Archaeologists, architects and engineers have spent months puzzling over its mechanism. If they're right, opening this sluice should send water tumbling down the rocks for the first time in 200 years. Here we go then. Let's have a look and see. After two centuries of neglect, Ralph Allen's paradise is restored. What I thought I knew about these gardens couldn't have been more wrong. They're not natural and they're not even very English. This is a paradise with exotic roots, the fruit of a revolution in which tradition and formality were swept aside by reason and nature. The result was a work of uniquely English genius. A theatrical display of the exotic, erotic and scientific set against the backdrop of the English countryside. So when a new generation of radicals was looking for inspiration, they studied the designs of their 18th century forefathers. And what they did next took the landscape garden away from the confines of the private estate and away from the realm of the rich. This is Victoria Park in Bath. It's a classic landscape garden and the birthplace of a radical new idea that would transform the lives of millions. Except it wasn't created by a wealthy businessman or a well-heeled aristocrat. This is one of the very first public parks in England created by public subscription in the year 1829. It was free to enter. The only requirements were decent appearance and good behaviour. This is a park built for the people, paid for by the people. Soon parks were created in Derby, Birkenhead, Sheffield, Manchester. In 1848, the importance of parks and green space for the working classes was enshrined in an Act of Parliament. The landscape garden, once the preserve of the wealthy few, was now the right of the many. Next time you take a walk in your local park, look around you and remember that behind it is a story that stretches from 18th century England to ancient Rome through to the gardens of Paradise, Arcadia and Eden. It's thanks to the new money and the new ideas of men like Alexander Pope and Ralph Allen, not to mention the sheer hard slog of the thousands who worked to realise their vision, that today we can enjoy our own Eden, our own little patch of Paradise. Join Time Team on Patreon to access exclusive 3D models, masterclasses and behind-the-scenes insights.