For our May session we visited Fyne Court on the Quantock Hills which was once the site of a Georgian mansion and landscaped gardens.  The house was destroyed by fire in the 19th century and the traditional garden has been largely lost.  Our job was to read the clues left behind in the landscape to try and find out what the site had been like in the past.

We had been invited along by Cat Lodge and Jess Midgley from the National Trust who now own the site.  We started out by looking at lots of maps of the area, including tithe maps and old Ordnance Survey maps right up to modern day LiDAR.  We compared the maps to see what had changed over the years.

After this we ventured out into the grounds and surrounding fields to look for clues about what the gardens and landscape had looked like in the past.  We quickly realised that the house had been under the lawn just outside, now full of deckchairs and picnickers!

As we explored further afield we found a ha-ha which was constructed to stop cattle getting into the formal gardens.  We also found stone pillars which had once supported a bridge along a footpath where the occupants of the mansion had walked to church.  We ended up in a beautiful buttercup filled field where we spotted a rectangular bank forming some sort of enclosure, which was probably part of a Deserted Medieval Village.

After this we walked to the site of the old walled garden where fruit and vegetables to feed the owners of the mansion would have been grown.

It was a lovely sunny day, perfect for a bit of landscape detective work. A big thank you to Cat and Jess for inviting us and for such an interesting day!