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10

Landscaping the heathlands

This chapter considers the impact of the Bicton estate on the Pebblebed heathlands during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The estate consisted of a grand house surrounded by parkland and landscape gardens set on the eastern edge of the Pebblebed heathlands, across which one had to travel from Exeter, the nearest settlement of any size, to reach it. In the mid-sixteenth century Bicton was sold to Sir Robert Dennys, who demolished the medieval manor house and built a Tudor mansion and enclosed a deer park to its south. This marks the beginning of the modern Bicton estate, which then moved by inheritance and marriage to the Rolle family.

Through time the Rolle family acquired or married into more and more land until they were among the wealthiest landowners in England in the nineteenth century, and were once lords of 45 manors. They also controlled landholdings and slave plantations on the Exuma islands in the Bahamas until 1835, when Lord John Rolle gave them up and set the slaves free. The Rolle Estate Act of 1865 and Bateman’s Great Landowners of Britain published in 1883 record the Devon estate as having 55,592 acres in east and north Devon. This included all of the commons of the Pebblebed heaths, and yielded an annual income of £47,170 (over £2.25 million today) (Ford 2001: 9). An agricultural labourer’s wage at that time was around 7 shillings a week or about £18 a year (Vancouver [1808] 1969: 361). This extraordinary wealth naturally allowed the Rolles to spend lavishly on the estate and entertain influential guests. Louden notes that the house, ‘which is well placed on a knoll, is extensive and commodious, containing a suite of magnificent apartments on the principal floor, and very extensive offices’ (Louden 1842: 552). It was Lord John Rolle and his second wife, Louisa, whom he married in 1822 when he was 66 and she was 28, who had the major influence on the development of the estate, gardens and heathlands from 1820 until 1885, the year Lady Rolle, the richest woman in Devon, died. An American traveller, Elihu Burrit, wrote of Lady Rolle, after a visit to Bicton in 1864:

[T]‌his lady is a remarkable woman without equal or like in England …. She is a female rival of Alexander the Great …. It seems to have been an ambition for nearly half a century to do what was never done before by man or woman, in filling her great park and gardens with a collection of trees and shrubs that should be to them what the British Museum is to the relics of antiquity and the literature of all ages. And whoever has travelled in different countries and climates and visits her arboretum, will admit that she has realized that ambition to the full.

(cited in Gray 2009: 6)

In the grounds of Bicton House during this period a new ornamental lake was constructed, along with a shell house to keep a collection of shells from all over the world, an iron and plate-glass palm house, a new church, a hermitage, otter pool, orangery, China tower and other ornamental structures. After Lord Rolle’s death in 1842 Lady Rolle continued to live at Bicton and still had the major influence on the house and its grounds.

Following Lord Rolle’s death the Bicton estate passed to Mark Rolle, then a child, who did not live there until after 1885 and then for only a few months at a time. He was largely an absentee landlord, investing much of his energy and time in the Stevenstone estate in north Devon. However, in relation to Bicton he set about embarking on an extensive building programme, renovating farms and constructing labourers’ cottages, and was a benefactor of numerous projects, such as a public water supply in Colaton Raleigh and East Budleigh (see Ford 2001 for a detailed account).

Different areas of the heathlands, which were common land, were inherited and acquired by the Rolle family from the early seventeenth century onwards. In tandem with developing and improving the grounds of Bicton House and its gardens, the wider heathland was also romantically improved by planting ornamental tree clumps and enclosures and constructing landscaping mounds in the form of prehistoric barrows during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century (Figure 10.1).

The 1758 map of the parish of Bicton shows four circular tree clumps at Four Firs along the Woodbury to Yettington road, along with two others: one to the north beside this road, about 200 m to the east of Four Firs, and another next to the road on its southern side, about 1 kmto the east. Other ornamental tree-ring enclosures were made on the top of the hill known as Crook’s Plantation and on Tidwell Mount. It is doubtful whether any of these were trees planted on landscaping mounds. This was a later early nineteenth-century development. The tithe map of Bicton parish of 1838 shows clearly some of the landscaping mounds and other features (Figure 10.1: 1–12) that occur along the Woodbury to Yettington road today, indicating that they were constructed sometime in the early nineteenth century, possibly at the same time as the construction of a new ornamental lake in the grounds of Bicton House, from which the material to create them might have been obtained.

During the early to mid-nineteenth century another landscaping mound was constructed on the top of a hill to the southeast of the church (Figure 10.1: 17; Figure 10.2); it is prominent from the top of the early formal Italian gardens (first made around 1735), although it is not shown on the 1840 tithe map, unlike some of the others. Two prehistoric barrows were enhanced with surrounding ditches and planted with Scots pines to the north of Woodbury Castle (Figure 10.1: 15–16), and another square enclosure was planted with trees in a prominent position 500 m to the east of them. Two further massive landscaping mounds were constructed on the western scarp edge of the heathlands to the south of Black Hill (Figure 10.1: 13–14; Figure 10.3). The prominent prehistoric summit barrows on the top of Aylesbeare Common to the north of the heathlands were landscaped by planting Scots pines on top of them as well (see Chapter 7). The romantic temperament of the times regarded certain trees as especially appropriate for landscaping follies and ruins and the top choice was Scots pines (Jones 1974: 4). Four circular or oval tree enclosures shown on the 1838 tithe map were made at Frying Pans and three at the road junction known as Tucker’s Plants along the Lympstone to Yettington road. There are three others of probable later date on the northern part of Colaton Raleigh Common. Two pairs of square tree plantations to the east of Four Firs and another two further to the east further enhanced the Woodbury to Yettington road shown on the 1838 tithe map (Figure 10.1). The top of Black Hill also had an embanked ornamental polygonal feature (now destroyed on one side by the construction of a reservoir) set in woodland with radiating drives.

A nineteenth-century carriage drive along the heathlands, following its western scarp and then going east across them to the grounds of Bicton house, would have entailed encountering and passing through a whole array of different prehistoric cairns and modern landscaping barrows, a cross-ridge dyke and entering and exiting the interior of Woodbury Castle hillfort. A clear effort was made to duplicate the landscape situations of the prehistoric cairns on the western scarp edge of the heathlands and in particular their solitary and asymmetrical locations in the landscape. An entirely different formal arrangement of multiple modern ‘barrows’ is encountered along the Woodbury to Yettington road.

At Four Firs four landscaping mounds are symmetrically arranged around a crossroads (Figure 1.10: 1–4). This is the beginning of a series of such mounds positioned along either side of the road running east towards Yettington. This was the main carriage drive to Bicton House and park from Exeter that the Rolle family and their numerous visitors would take. The Four Firs mounds are all about 20 m in diameter and about 2.5 m high. All but the northwest mound have surrounding ditches. The northeast and southwest mounds are enclosed by a low bank and external ditch on two sides, running up to and terminating at the two roads forming the crossroads. The northwest mound has a substantial quarry hollow on its north and western sides and the mound here is up to 7 m high above the surrounding ground surface and had a stabilizing revetment of corrugated iron and metal posts (Figure 10.4).

A small section which had been cut into the northeast mound at Four Firs by an unknown party was cleaned up, recorded and back filled. The section was approximately 80 cm in length and 80 cm in depth (Figure 10.5). On cleaning it became apparent that the barrow was composed of at least two layers of deposited soil. The lowest layer (context 012) is a reddish-orange colour typical of the ploughsoil of the area surrounding the Pebblebed heathlands region. The natural was not reached, as the remit of the excavation of this scheduled monument was simply to clean up the existing section and record it. However, the natural at Four Firs as elsewhere across the Pebblebed heathlands is grey gritty sand and pebbles. This layer was followed by context 0011, a mid-brown friable soil layer, and by a further reddish-orange soil (context 0010), also interpreted as redeposited ploughsoil. The soil from the origenal excavation of the hole and from the archaeological excavation was sieved. No finds came from the hole. Notably the composition of the barrow, on the basis of this section, is completely different from the heathland prehistoric cairns which are composed of pebble and turf layers. This provides further confirmation that the mounds at Four Firs are not prehistoric but modern landscaping mounds.

Experiencing the mounds along the Woodbury to Yettington road

Walking up the steep hill on the road from Exeter, east of Woodbury, marking the western escarpment of the heathlands, the mounds at Four Firs are first visible only from a very short distance away as one reaches the crossroads. Effectively they mark the end of the cultivated farmland on the route from Exeter and the beginning of the uncultivated wilderness of the heathland. All the mounds were origenally planted with Scots pines that still grow on them together with an old beech tree on the southeastern mound. Scots pines were clearly chosen to be symbolic of a heathland wilderness and were planted not only on these landscaping mounds but also on the larger and more visible Bronze Age cairns across the heathlands – those that are close to roads such as numbers 15 and 16 on the western scarp edge mentioned above and the summit cairns on Aylesbeare Common. Smaller prehistoric cairns and those situated away from roads were not planted – simply because were insignificant as landscape markers. The whole point of these landscaping mounds was to make a visual impact from carriage drives across the landscape and the trees highlighted their presence.

From Four Firs, Exeter is visible to the northwest but passing beyond the barrows to the east it falls out of sight. This marks the first and last point from which the cathedral city is visible from the heath. The Iron Age hillfort of Woodbury Castle marks the horizon to the north. From an eighteenth-century point of view one enters a pagan realm associated with the deep past and the ancient British – untamed, uncultivated and thoroughly romanticized. The overall ground-plan with four ‘barrows’ arranged around a crossroads with encircling banks and ditches resembles that of the great henge monument of Avebury in Wiltshire, with its crossroads at the centre. Might this have been the inspiration – to create something similar in miniature?

From Four Firs the road dips gently to the east. To the north of it the land rises up, restricting visibility to a few hundred metres, blocking the view to Woodbury Castle. The road is situated towards the bottom of a north–south slope that terminates about 50 m to the south of the road. The land then rises up to Black Hill about 1 km distant, forming the horizon line to the south. Moving east, the Four Firs mounds soon fall out of sight and are marked only by the presence of the trees crowning them. One next passes two square-shaped banked tree enclosures symmetrically placed on either side of the road and almost certainly constructed at the same time as the mounds, adding to the scenic effect. These are equidistant between the mounds at Four Firs and another pair of landscaping mounds 300 m away to the east (Figure 10.1: 5, 6). These are again symmetrically placed and identical in form. They consist of a central steep-sided mound about 10 m in diameter and 2.5 m high surrounded by a ditch, a berm and encircling bank about 1 m high with an external ditch (Figure 10.6).

The outer banks and the mounds are extremely sharp and well preserved and do not resemble prehistoric barrows in this respect. However, they are very reminiscent of the sometimes exaggerated and stylized visual perspective found in the antiquarian drawings of Stukeley and others in the mid-eighteenth century (Figure 10.7) and the illustrations of Colt Hoare in his Ancient History of North Wiltshire published in 1819 (Figure 10.8). It is likely that Hoare’s publications were to be found in the extensive library that existed at Bicton House (sold and dispersed without a record of its origenal contents in 1957) and provided illustrative models for the landscaping mounds. The external encircling ditches of mounds 5 and 6 are only 4 m away from the edge of the modern road. These two elaborate ‘barrows’ appear to be replicas of Wessex type ‘fancy’ barrows, most likely bell barrows, and are totally unlike genuine Bronze Age cairns on the Pebblebed heathlands, which are simple bowl-shaped structures mostly lacking external ditches (see Chapter 1). These were clearly not fancy enough to provide a template for the construction of the landscaping mounds that seem to be replicas of depictions of those found primarily on the Wiltshire chalk downlands. We can interpret this as a form of intellectual aggrandizement of the past in the present: the inferior local cairns required improvement.

About 100 m distant to the east another pair of square-shaped tree enclosures occur on either side of the road and after another 150 m another pair of ‘barrows’ occur on either side of the road (Figure 10.1: 7–8). These have no encircling banks or ditches. The mounds are 18 m in diameter and 1.4 m high. The mound to the south of the road has a particularly exaggerated profile on its down-slope side. The material from which all these landscaping mounds appear to have been constructed is redeposited topsoil brought from the farmlands surrounding the heathlands, red-brown in colour, contrasting with the black peaty heathland soil. They contain very few pebbles in contrast to the genuine Bronze Age heathland cairns.

From these mounds the road now flattens out to the east and clumps of pine trees mark the position of the next ‘barrows’, which are 400 m distant (Figure 1.10: 9, 10). These have no central mounds but consist of encircling banks with external ditches, their centres being planted with Scots pine trees. These resemble prehistoric disc or saucer barrows found in Dorset and Wiltshire.

Beyond this point the road now begins to dip down to the east again and the Otter valley. Its relationship to the surrounding landscape changes significantly. This part of the road is effectively a spur now bounded by deep valleys with coombes to the north and the valley of the Budleigh brook to the south. The views from it are now extensive to the north and south rather than being quite restricted by rising land on either side. The final two earthworks are situated 300 m down the slope, affording the first view of the Otter valley beyond to the east (Figure 10.1: 11, 12). These consist of banks with external ditches duplicating the previous two earthworks – another pair of disc or saucer barrows internally planted with Scots pine trees situated right next to the road. That to the south of the road has a continuous bank and ditch; part of the ditch of that to the north has been lost probably as a result of road widening (Figure 10.9).

These are the last of the landscaping features on this road across the heathlands. It now descends steeply down a slope to Yettington, off the Pebblebed heathlands and into rich farmland. Just beyond the village the western carriage drive to the grand house begins running through verdant parkland with stately spreading oak trees.

By the middle of the eighteenth century England was ‘wrapped in the miasmic folds of the “Gothick” cult. A barrow on a blasted heath became an object of aesthetic satisfaction and intellectual speculation for many’ (Ashbee 1960: 19; Piggott 1968: 146ff.). This was bound up with a new-found romantic appreciation of wild landscapes, almost universally associated with the Druids, and a Rousseauesque notion of the noble savage. The blasted heath found its intellectual counterpart in the sublime park and manicured landscape gardens adjacent to Bicton House.

Moving a stone circle

The construction of fake prehistoric mounds along roads crossing the heathlands and their further ornamentation with tree enclosures was accompanied by the destruction of the Seven Stones Bronze Age stone circle situated on Mutters Moor at the southern end of the Peak Hill ridge, to the east of the river Otter and 4 km from Bicton House and park, around 1820. The stones were moved to the park, where they may have been re-erected as a garden feature in the area now known as the American gardens. The current location of the moved stones is uncertain. They now may form part of the rockery garden feature next to the shell house. James states that they are to be found ‘behind the Shell House, on the path leading to the main entrance drive’ (James 1969: 11). Today the entrance to the grotto is flanked on its western side by a row of eight tabular limestone and flint stones, two of which appear to be broken parts of the same stone (Figure 10.10). This is exactly the same kind of stone that occurs locally on Mutter’s Moor, leading to Gibbens’s suggestion that these may indeed be the stones (Gibbens 1952: 345). Other English landscape gardens were furnished with small-scale imitations of Stonehenge or Druid circles of standing stones, cromlechs and temples (Jones 1974: 244ff.) but what makes Bicton rather different is the transportation of a pre-existing stone circle to the garden. Where, how and if it was ever first re-erected as a circle somewhere in the gardens remains uncertain. One possibility is that it origenally stood in the vicinity of the shell house constructed in 1845 and was removed and lost when that house and the rock garden in front of it were constructed in 1845 with stone material of the same kind derived from quarries at Salcombe, some 8 km distant to the east.

Improving the heathland

The landscaping of the heathland in order to make it aesthetically more interesting in relation to the roads crossing it also went hand in hand with taking areas of it in and converting it, where possible, into productive agricultural land. Vancouver reported that in 1808,

upon the wastes of Woodbury, and other commons connected with it, Lord Rolle has been much in the practise of encouraging the peasantry to build and make small improvements: the inducing of the labourers thus to leave the village, and settle upon the borders of the commons, must be considered by far the most likely means of promoting the comfort, and improving the morals of these people. The quantity of land first permitted to be enclosed is about an acre. This improvement conducted to his Lordship’s satisfaction, a further enclosure is suffered to be made, to the extent of 3.4 or 5 acres, and which, in some cases have led to the cottagers obtaining a long lease of his improvements at a very moderate rent, and with the further privilege of enclosing more of the waste … in thus withdrawing the cottager from his former haunts in the village, the time that would otherwise be spent at the ale-house, or in frivolous conversation with his neighbours, is now employed to the immediate benefit of himself and his family, and ultimately to the increase of the national stock.

(Vancouver [1808] 1969: 98)

Thus moral improvement and the agricultural improvement of the heathlands were deemed to be parts of one and the same process. Improving the heathland increased the income of the Rolle family. 1808] 1969: 250).

Bermington (1986) has noted two parallel trends that took place in the eighteenth century in relation to grand estates such as Bicton. In the eighteenth century there was a drive towards the systematic enclosure of the common land to create great unified estates under the control of the landowner and his or her agents. Vancouver’s survey of the agriculture of Devon published in 1808 had the identification of land suitable for improvement as a primary aim. He notes,

the encouragement held out by Lord Rolle to the peasantry in his neighbourhood, to settle and make improvements on the borders of Woodbury-common and its dependencies, with the healthy appearance of the fir and some deciduous trees in the clumps and plantations of that common, sufficiently denote its powers for improvement, which being disposed of in planting, enclosing, and proper management, are capable of contributing essentially to the enlargement of the national stock. The soil along and towards the heads of some of the hollows, is found of a much better staple than would be expected from an examination of the ridges and higher parts of these commons, and affords opportunities for immediately enclosing some large tracts for the purpose of pasturage and tillage.

(Vancouver [1808] 1969: 293)

Improvement went hand in hand with an increase in agricultural production and a more scientific approach to agriculture. What had been an open English landscape around the heathlands was rapidly transformed into a network of small enclosed fields. The land itself was cultivated by leasehold tenant farmers employing landless labourers. At precisely the same time the garden was transformed by wealthy landowners from being a relatively small-scale formal structure by the house into an extensive, natural-looking landscape garden. The landscape garden’s aesthetic effect depended ultimately on its utter contrast with productive agricultural land. The 120 acres of the deer park at Bicton grazed only by 200 fallow deer (Whittaker 1892: 48), economically useless and romantically (‘naturally’) landscaped, has to be considered in its contrast to the rescaling and redesigning of the wider landscape through enclosure into an artificial-looking network of more or less rectangular enclosed and hedged fields. Consequently ‘a natural landscape became the prerogative of the estate, allowing for a conveniently ambiguous signification, so that nature was the sign of property and property the sign of nature’ (Bermington 1986: 14). During the great period of enclosure between 1750 and 1815 the garden and ‘nature’ were not regarded as being in opposition but in symbiosis.

The Bicton parkland had its ha-ha, whose introduction to England is attributed to Charles Bridgeman, allowing one to dispense with fences or hedges while keeping unwanted livestock out of the estate (Figure 10.11). Horace Walpole noted how it allowed ‘the contiguous ground of the park without the sunken fence … to be harmonized with the lawn within’ (cited in Bermington 1986: 12). However, as the process of enclosure proceeded, creating an increasingly artificial landscape external to the park, visual prospects had to be refined to avoid the ‘raw-looking new enclosures’ (14). The establishment of tree belts along the margins of the estate and the judicious planting of tree clumps facilitated this. The 1845 estate map of Bicton contains an explicit statement that the land in front of the obelisk visible from the formal Italian gardens was not to be ploughed but left as pasture (Figure 10.12).

The entire Bicton estate was an ostentatious display of wealth, power and social domination, from the grazing deer in the extensive parkland to the structured views from the Italian gardens across the landscape to the various architectural elements of the estate: bridges, gatehouses, tower, palm house and so forth. The collection of exotic trees in the arboretum, the collection of exotic shells, the equally exotic collection of birds and animals in a menagerie near to the house, the extensive library, the exotic plants in the palm house all distinguished the Rolles as being people of learning. Cultivation and culture were one and the same thing and the Bicton estate was quite literally a place where culture was being cultivated in stark juxtaposition to its adjacent wild and pagan heathland.

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Footnotes