Qualla: Scampston Hall

Scampston Hall: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Hillas, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1772, the gardener and landscape designer Lancelot Brown - everyone called him Capability, because that was how he described any property he visited - took on a commission from William St Quintin, MP for Thirsk and recently married to a wealthy heiress. The St Quintin estate at Scampston, four miles east of Malton, had a serpentine park already half-laid by Charles Bridgeman. Brown finished it. He added a Palladian bridge with a Tuscan-columned pavilion on top, and a curiously placed Ionic structure called the Bridge Building, which conceals the end of a long sheet of water and closes the view in the way Brown loved. Two hundred and fifty years later, the bridge is still there. So is the house. So is the family - though not quite the same family, and several name-changes along the way.

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Image: David Hillas | CC BY-SA 2.0

Scampston Hall: The St Quintin Centuries

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JThomas, CC BY-SA 2.0. The hall itself was built in the late 1600s for William Hustler. The estate passed in the 1690s to Sir William St Quintin, 3rd Baronet, who served as Receiver General for Ireland and Member of Parliament for Hull. His nephew, also William, inherited title and estate in 1723, marr...

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Image: JThomas | CC BY-SA 2.0

Scampston Hall: The Last St Quintin

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rick Ligthelm from Rotterdam, The Netherlands, CC BY 2.0. The St Quintin family had a Victorian flowering and then faded. William Herbert St Quintin, born 1851, was a keen naturalist; he kept extensive collections of waterfowl and game birds at Scampston, which Arthur F. Moody documented in a book titled Water-Fowl and Game-Birds in Cap...

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Image: Rick Ligthelm from Rotterdam, The Netherlands | CC BY 2.0

Scampston Hall: Capability's Bridge

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen Horncastle, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Palladian bridge that Brown built around 1775 is one of the more unusual structures in any English landscape park. The bridge itself is sandstone, three segmental arches between pilaster piers. On top of it stands a brick-and-timber pavilion: a T-shaped plan, three bays, pair...

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Image: Stephen Horncastle | CC BY-SA 2.0

Scampston Hall: Piet Oudolf's Walled Garden

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JThomas, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 2004, after several years of redesign, Scampston's old Victorian walled garden reopened as a contemporary masterpiece by the Dutch designer Piet Oudolf. Oudolf - associated with the High Line in New York, the Lurie Garden in Chicago, and the New Perennial movement that transfo...

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Image: JThomas | CC BY-SA 2.0

Scampston Hall: An Inspector Calls

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Mattock, CC BY-SA 2.0. Scampston Hall has appeared on screen as well. A BBC adaptation of J.B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls, broadcast in September 2015, was filmed largely on location in the hall and grounds. In October 2021, the property was one of 142 sites across England to receive part of a £35 ...

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Image: Peter Mattock | CC BY-SA 2.0