Qualla: Levens Hall

Levens Hall: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit mattbuck (category), CC BY-SA 3.0. The hedges have been clipped continuously for over three hundred and thirty years. Guillaume Beaumont arrived in the Kent valley in 1689, brought from France via the court of King James II, and began laying out a topiary garden that he would work on until 1712. He had previously designed the grounds at Hampton Court for his royal patron; this was his private commission for Colonel James Grahme, Keeper of the Privy Purse. Most topiary gardens of that period have been lost to fashion, neglect, or root rot - replaced by softer eighteenth-century landscaping, swept away by Capability Brown's followers, or simply abandoned. Levens is the exception. The chess pieces, the cone, the corkscrew, the great geometric shapes - all of them shaped from yew and box - have grown gnarled and corpulent with three centuries of growth, but they stand where Beaumont planted them.

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Image: mattbuck (category) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Levens Hall: Before the Garden

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Heaton, CC BY-SA 2.0. The hall itself is far older than the topiary. A pele tower built by the Redman family around 1350 still forms the structural core of the house - one of the squat defensive towers that line the northern English borders, built when raids from Scotland made every prosperous landown...

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Image: Chris Heaton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Levens Hall: The Beaumont Garden

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andy / Andrew Fogg from near Cambridge, UK, CC BY 2.0. What Beaumont did between 1689 and 1712 has survived essentially intact. A 1730 map of the park and gardens shows almost all the essential elements still present today. The topiary itself sits in tight geometric beds, the yew and box clipped into shapes that are difficult to date...

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Image: Andy / Andrew Fogg from near Cambridge, UK | CC BY 2.0

Levens Hall: Steam, Hounds and the Bagot Years

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carl Bendelow, CC BY-SA 2.0. Grahme's son Henry Graham served as knight of the shire for Westmorland. Further additions were made to the house in the early nineteenth century. The estate is now owned by the Bagot family, who keep the gardens open to the public from spring through autumn. The visitor experien...

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Image: Carl Bendelow | CC BY-SA 2.0

Levens Hall: The Slow Garden

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anthony Parkes, CC BY-SA 2.0. What you walk through at Levens is fundamentally different from the formal gardens at Versailles or Hampton Court, both of which were heavily reworked in subsequent centuries. Here, the same plants are still being clipped to roughly the same outlines by gardeners standing on the ...

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Image: Anthony Parkes | CC BY-SA 2.0