Pleasure Walks - A Walk on the Wild Side

Emes's grand design for Betley Court Gardens 1785

It’s a bright wintery day, here at Betley Court on the border of Cheshire and Staffordshire. We’ve had the gentlest dusting of snow. Not enough to disrupt daily life, but just a little slippery underfoot. In fact, it’s the perfect day for a walk in the winter sun, provided you’re wrapped up. I managed a 2.5 mile walk at lunchtime, simply for the pleasure of getting away from the laptop and have come back to my desk re-energised by being outdoors in the fresh air.

Walking for the sake of walking is not a new innovation. In centuries gone by, walking was the mode of transport, unless you could upgrade to a horse and cart. Of course, the wealthy could simultaneously afford transport and a fulsome diet, and so perhaps in the attempt to ward off thickening waists and gouty feet, the fashion of creating Pleasure Walks around country estates came into being.

As early as 1624, Francis Bacon the philosopher, and learned ‘influencer’ of his era opined on what he thought a garden should be. And to be precise on this matter, we’re talking about gardens on country estates, not yards behind cottages. To Bacon, this included carefully contrived areas of wild garden, a notion that was enthusiastically adopted by landscapers in the following century. Crucially, he advocated that an important function of a garden was to provide walks that offered shade in the summer, and shelter in the winter, creating the opportunity for exercise all year round.

The idea of creating a picturesque style – a garden that was contrived to be ‘gardenless’, naturalistic (no matter how many trees were to be planted or streams to be diverted or dammed to make lakes) became the dominant aesthetic in landscape during the 18^th century. The well-to-do wanted their pleasure grounds to ape the 17^th century paintings of Rosa, Lorraine and the Poussins.

To this end, these new landscapes tended to contain common elements, according to The Shell Gardens Book,

“..a woody or bosky foreground, a mid-distance with some anecdote occurring – as often as not around an ancient building-and a remote distance of immense space…drifting onto mountains.”

At Betley Court in 1785, the recently widowed Anastasia Fenton* commissioned William Emes to create just such a picturesque landscape. A confrere of ‘Capability’ Brown, he was known for his use of trees and sheets of distant water to create impressive vistas and landscaped many grounds across the Midlands and North Wales. Emes’s scheme at Betley Court saw drifts of trees planted down to the southwest of the house, framing a view of Betley Mere – the ‘bosky’ foreground of Bacon’s dream gardens. These drifts of trees also created the sheltered walks Bacon advocated, the pleasure walks, that were so fashionable. Emes created two here: one marked as a ‘gravel walk and shrubbery’ on Emes’s beautiful hand-drawn plan. This took the walker on a circular route from the house, heading southward to where Betley Court Farm is today, then circling west across pasture towards Tanhouse Brook before curving back towards the house. Emes even had the foresight to add a passage under the walk, so that farm beast did not trouble walkers on their route (although we have no idea if this was ever built as all we have for proof is the note on the plans).

Emes's pleasure paths on today's landscape

Red path - Gravel Walk & Shubbery

Blue path - Wild Walk to the Mere

Yellow dot - Betley Court

Green dot - Betley Court Farm

Turquoise dot - Site of covered seat

Blue dot - Betley Mere

The other is labelled as the ‘wild walk to the Mere’. It is a linear path towards Betley Mere, and with a short hop across the field, it takes in a mound upon which once stood a covered seat; our ‘ancient building’ in the mid distance. Amazingly, this path is still in use today, having been improved and widened, providing the farmer and anglers access to the Mere.

I like to think of Anastasia, finding comfort in long walks, perhaps with one of her surviving children or guest from her circle of influential friends, perambulating down to the Mere. Or perhaps there were picnics and meetings at the covered seat. What it amazing is that the view from the upstairs windows of the house are not all that different today, and Anastasia would probably recognise the view, save for the addition of the railways in the 19^th century, and pylons in the 20^th. We have a lot to thank William Emes for, his vision for planting trees and framing views.

Best wishes

Ladybird Su

*Poor Anastasia Fenton. She returned to Betley Court from Newcastle, where she had raised a family with her husband John, at a house called The Steps (now home to the Newcastle branch of the NatWest Bank). She came back, following a horrendous period of personal bereavement. In quick succession, Anastasia lost her namesake daughter in 1780 (known as Miss Ta by the family) to consumption, aged just 29, then her husband John, quite suddenly in March 1782, aged 61. A further compounding bereavement happened that September when her only son, also named John, died during the influenza epidemic that swept the country that autumn, aged just 33. The grief-stricken Anastasia began to remodel Betley Court, and to make a place of comfort for herself and her surviving youngest daughter, Catherine. Prior to her return, the house had been rented out to the Tollet family, and during that period became dilapidated, although this was primarily because her late husband had not kept on top of maintenance, as he had promised to do.