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View of the monastic ruins of Fountains Abbey
founded by Cistercian monks in 1132
Timon's Villa
GARDENING, CONSERVATION & VISITOR MANAGEMENT DURING WILLIAM AISLABIE S PROPRIETORSHIP OF FOUNTAINS ABBEY
1767-1781
by M.A.Newman (National Trust Archaeologist, Yorkshire).
Originally published in the Annual Archaeological Review,
number 6, 1997-98.
ABSTRACT
Few landscapes are what they seem, and Fountains Abbey is no exception.
In this article, Mark Newman examines both contemporary and eighteenth-century
views and perceptions of designed landscapes, in particular the singular vision of
William Aislabie, and observes an early precedent for visitor access and
management, and for monument care.
Introduction
Fountains Abbey, the Trust's "Gateway" property in Yorkshire, probably means something different to each of the 300,000 visitors it receives every year. There are, perhaps, two basic characterisations which most of them would acknowledge - that it is a tranquil medieval abbey, and that it is a place of outstanding natural beauty. Neither of these, of course, is entirely accurate from an historical perspective. The former ignores the complexity of close to 1000 years of the site being a place of industry, commerce, religious practice, political and military struggle during monastic ownership, and quarrying, hunting, scientific study, gardening and - most particularly - public resort, thereafter. None of these has failed to leave its imprint on the landscape. The latter characterisation is even further from the truth, as little if anything we see in the abbey today is not contrived, or the relict of former design and management.
Modern visitors may also ponder the relationship of the abbey to the adjoining landscape garden of Studley Royal. Some may even give thought to the Georgian treatment of the ruins after they were annexed by Studley, and if so probably marvel all the more that they survived "so unspoilt" despite this episode in their history. Eighteenth-century landscapers, with some justification, are not widely thought of as conservators of the archaeological resource, and William Aislabie of Studley Royal has been no exception. However, recent research casts new and much more favourable light on his handling of the monastic remains.Eighteenth-century disapproval; the reaction of William Gilpin
A disapproving visitor follows long historical precedent. The earliest critic of Aislabie's endeavours published his sharp-worded attacks long before Aislabie s workman and gardeners had finished. William Gilpin, the great proponent of the Picturesque landscape style, visited Fountains in 1771 and aired his views in "A Tour of the North of England" published in the following year. Containing descriptions of what he thought to be truly "picturesque", the "Northern Tour" was a seminal work, influencing gardening and landscape-aesthetic thinking for decades to follow.
Looking from the designed landscape garden of Studley Royal
along the River Skell to the ruins of Fountains Abbey
Gilpin saw little that he liked; of the main gardens he wrote "the whole is a vain ostentation of expense, a mere Timon's Villa; decorated in a taste debauched in its conceptions and puerile in its execution.... it is hard to say whether nature has done more to embellish the scenes of Studley or art to deform them". Works in the abbey came in for similar assault "Indeed the very idea of giving a finished splendour to a ruin is absurd. How unnatural, in a place evidently forlorn and deserted by man are the recent marks of human industry". Another visitor, G.Marsham, summarised Gilpin s sentiments "Nature has been lavish in her delights but Mr. Aislabie has not been less so in his efforts to curb her....I am very glad to have seen this place before Ruin has proceeded to the utmost: a few years more will absolutely destroy it".
Gilpin's audience was wide and influential; his disapproval coloured visitor's descriptions of the estate for decades to come, establishing opinions that have endured to the present day. Several subsequent manuscript travel diaries reveal the writer viewing the grounds, a copy of Gilpin in hand; some at least had the decency to admit liking what they saw better than their guidebook had led them to expect!.
Early precedents for visitor access
The realities are more open to positive interpretation. By the time that Gilpin saw them, the abbey ruins had already been the subject of "tourist" interest for over a century. The previous owners, the Messenger family, committed very little of their business to parchment, complicating interpretation of the management of the ruins during their years of ownership (1627-1767). Only peripheral and inferential sources of information survive, not detailed estate records. The Messengers were Recusants (one of the reasons for their poor record keeping), perhaps predisposing the family to better handling of the remains than they enjoyed under earlier Protestant owners. There are also hints that the Messengers had more broadly-based antiquarian interests.
John Aislabie's development of the water gardens at Studley Royal from 1718 onwards simplified access to the ruins. It has been suggested that as early as 1720 Aislabie tried to incorporate the abbey into the garden, but the letter on which this is based - reporting the rebuff of Aislabie's advances - is more likely to refer to the whole Fountains estate rather than just the Abbey. Moreover, the heights above the Reservoir, which provide the main view of the ruins from the garden, were not acquired until 1730, and there is no evidence to suggest that they were landscaped before John Aislabie's death. Although his interest in antiquities elsewhere is indisputable, there is no actual evidence for particular focus on the abbey.
If the acquisition of the ruins does not now appear crucial to John Aislabie's garden plans, then the same cannot be said for his son William, who inherited Studley in 1742. It is not just William's works at the abbey which have previously gone unrecognised, but also his role in the overall design of the garden. He has been dismissed as simply a maintainer of his father's plan, finally acquiring the abbey 50 years after it first fell under an avaricious Aislabie eye gaze. Nothing could be further from the truth. Between 1742 and 1781 William extended the length of the garden along the river Skell to six times that which his father knew, creating landscapes at (sometimes ahead of) the forefront of contemporary, naturalising, gardening fashions. It is true that he respected and preserved the garden created by his father (despite its growing divergence from contemporary tastes) but compensated by vastly expanding not only Studley, but also detached gardens at Hackfall and Laver Banks, both within an afternoon's travel.
Financial necessity eventually forced the Messengers to sell Fountains in December 1767, for £18000. This long-desired acquisition conveniently came as Hackfall was nearing completion, allowing William to divert energy and resources to the landscaping of Fountains. The deeply incised river valley, containing both the Studley gardens and the abbey, turns sharply, separating the sections in which the two lie. At this turn lies the Reservoir, and it was around this body of water that William commenced landscaping in 1768. Two years work remodelled part of the existing garden, removed one garden building, created three new ones and installed a network of paths, as well as doubling the size of the body of water. Together this created a sweeping prelude to the approach to the abbey.
Plan to show William Aislabie's building and
gardning works in the Abbey
1767-81
Prior to 1767, the route to the abbey from Studley was agricultural in character. A Richard Wilson painting dated about 1750, admirably depicts the scene. The original monastic fields survived in the valley floor, divided by stone walls. To the north, passing through the field walls, lay a rustic path with a gate across it at the boundary of the two estates. Wilson's picture shows a couple climbing over the wall adjacent to the gate - suggesting it was painted during a period of ill-feeling between the two households, as the gate appears locked! The valley sides were scarred with extensive and numerous sandstone quarries, first opened by the abbey and latterly worked by the Messengers.
This was not a prospect which pleased its new owner. Although not as well documented as the works beside the Reservoir, the early 1770s saw substantial changes. The field walls were swept away opening the eastern vista of the abbey; the north side of the valley was tidied and a new raised carriage drive, still used today, created. The river was canalised, scandalising Gilpin and those of a similar mind, but undoubtedly creating a monumental south side to the frame of the great vista. A second path route threaded through the woods to the south of the canalised Skell, though less is known of its character, that seen today being a later creation.
Historical Care
Information on the works at the ruins is limited. Of William Aislabie's thoughts or intentions we have no primary indication; the narrative of the works themselves must be deduced from what physically survives or has been fragmentarily documented. A few references to building activities can be found in estate account books of 1769 to 1774, and in four letters from the gardener, Robertson. To these sources can be added the reports of the hostile Gilpin, and the more amenable Arthur Young.
Although the Messengers may have kept the ruins from despoliation, their care was limited. When Ralph Thoresby saw the abbey in 1682 he found it "full of trees, in the very body of it". This state changed little over the next 70 years. Jemima, Lady Grey, visiting in 1755, complained "...nor will he [Messenger] suffer any sort of carriage to profane even the outward enclosure or field the abbey stands in, but when he has made the entrance fast with locks and chains, his respect seems to end there, as he keeps every part of the ruin so shamefully ill it is with difficulty you can scramble about it, and all the inner part of the church is full of rubbish [rubble] overgrown with weeds and nettles".
This lack of care is not as inconsistent as it first appears. Earlier eighteenth-century interest in antiquities in the landscape was concerned with external appearance rather than structural conservation. An excellent example is Woodstock Manor, retained in Vanbrugh's landscaping at Blenheim, the earliest acknowledged use of an ancient building in a designed landscape. This was to be seen at a distance rather than entered, and was purposely filled with trees. Informed by such tradition, the course of action now chosen by William Aislabie is all the more remarkable.
A firmer hand
William Aislabie 's management
Some of the work carried out was driven by necessity. Robertson's letters report masonry collapsing, or being dismantled to prevent it falling. These demolitions, less to William's credit as a conservator, also included elements removed for "aesthetic" reasons, including remnants of the cloister arcade, late medieval walls partitioning the cellarium, and the remains of the Lay Brother's Cloister. Questionable though any demolition might be to modern eyes, the latter two examples at least reopened views of two of the abbey's most impressive architectural features, the west facade and the Cellarium.
The gazebo/gallery within the abbey ruins
As well as demolition, Aislabie's workmen consolidated masonry found to be in a perilous condition before commencing partial excavation of internal debris. Deposits within the cloistral complex had apparently remained untouched after post-Dissolution demolition - hence the rubble through which Jemima Grey scrambled. Aislabie's workmen levelled this rubble in the church, cloister, refectory and cellarium, to create surfaces which could then be turfed, much to Gilpin s disgust.
What they did not do was simply shovel away archaeologically significant deposits. The excavations were carried out with the best standards of care known at the time; Young noting "the rubbish is at present cleared away and all parts of it undergoing a search, that no pavements or other remains of it may continue hid". Even Gilpin admits "among the ruins were found scraps of Gothic windows; small marble columns; tiles of different colours and a variety of other ornamental fragments. These the proprietor has picked from the rubbish with great care; and with infinite industry is now restoring to their old situation". The depth to which the deposits were disturbed was much less than we have been led to believe. Subsequent illustrations show that considerable accumulations remained in situ in most parts of the ruins, as a general rule at least 40cm above present ground levels. In the monk's refectory, and over the remains of the infirmary, there is even evidence to suggest that material was deposited rather than excavated; walls visible on an engraving of c1748 by Vivares were hidden when the infirmary area was painted in 1777. If a culprit for the wholesale removal of post-1540 archaeological deposits is sought, then it must be the nineteenth-century excavator, John Richard Walbran and not William Aislabie who stands accused.
Arguably more dubious was William's programme of "embellishments". Gilpin reviled the restoration of architectural detail to its original location - although this should be seen as a remarkably early example of monument restoration. Sadly, little of this aspect of William's work remains visible, most having been torn away in the 1850s. A notable exception is the arrangement of medieval tiles at the site of the High Altar, which most modern visitors imagine to be monastic. The same error was made by nineteenth-century writers describing it and the gazebo/gallery which Aislabie erected under the east window of the abbey church, giving opposing views of the nave and gardens, as monastic. Accusations of demolishing the reredos to provide materials for the gazebo are another libel; the 1748 plan of the abbey in Burton's Monasticon makes no indication that the reredos survived at that date.
Gilpin pours more scorn on the introduction of statuary to the ruins. A "Heathen statue" he refers to may have been one of the "Arundel marbles", fragments of Classical statuary thought to have been in the possession of the Aislabies. This might indeed be considered insensitively sited, standing in the crossing of the church. Significantly, it is not shown in watercolours by Moses Griffith dated 1777 (the only known illustrations of the ruins contemporary with William Aislabie's ownership), and was probably a short-lived experiment.
Watercolour of part of the claustral range
showing levelled interior surfaces and
architectural features of maintained stonework
embellished with 'gardened' vegetation
The Griffith watercolours depict a well-maintained monument with levelled interior surfaces, with an element of gardening to soften the expanses of revealed stonework. Having cleared the weeds, Aislabie's gardeners started to replant the ruins - especially the cloister - with flowers and shrubs in 1773. This probably included translocation of comparatively large trees both into the ruins and onto the buried south-western part of the infirmary. The ordered appearance - and in particular the plantings - were the aspects of William's design which Gilpin hated above all others.
Gilpin's agenda was - as in the rest of his writing - single-minded championing of the "Picturesque" taste. This preferred its ruins forlorn, melancholy and overgrown, redolent of man's short span. Sustainability of monuments in such condition was not an issue; that so much of the abbey survived is largely due to Aislabie choosing not to follow fashion. Gilpin also wrote from experience of landscape gardening fashions that had made no use of flowers and shrubs for the past 50 years; he may not have been aware of the work of William Mason whose gardening at Nuneham in 1773 was to see the reintroduction of the flower garden to English garden thought. There are interesting similarities between the finished appearance of the cloister and ideas put into practice at Nuneham, and elsewhere as the eighteenth century drew to a close.Sustainability and access visitors welcome in the eighteenth century
William Aislabie s whole approach to the management of the ruins diverges so far from contemporary fashions that a re-examination of his intentions is long overdue. Hints of antiquarian interests in the handling of other parts of the grounds may partly explain the careful investigations and restorations, which remain notably early examples of such practice. Yet more significant, perhaps, is the whole process of extending the visibility and - crucially - accessibility of the monument itself, rather than simply being concerned with its impact in the broader landscape setting. Both the nature of ground-keeping and the provision of "new" structures, like the viewing gallery, speak to this theme.
Access was not unrestricted; the system of doors and gates controlling access to the church and cloistral buildings installed by the Messengers was maintained, if not expanded (and indeed remained a feature of the control of the site into the early years of the present century). Although always intended to be shown to visitors, Studley was undoubtedly receiving ever increasing numbers of visitors during William Aislabie s ownership, and those perhaps of a rather different social position than had been originally anticipated. As early as 1769, there were sufficient numbers to spawn "professional" guides waiting at the gates. The need to secure the ruin from visitors (the gates also kept grazing stock out of the abbey, but this need does not explain the locks) perhaps indicates the pressure the site was already under. It must also have been this audience that the newly presented site was in large part intended to entertain and inform. The concept of monuments as monuments that we are familiar with today was to take perhaps another century to fully develop; the abbey, as William Aislabie saw it, was still but a feature of a broader landscape garden, explaining the planting work of 1773. Yet it was a component of the grounds apparently managed for very specific access-based purposes. If it was not a managed monument in the modern sense, it was not far removed from it.
Conclusion
The treatment of the abbey may have been the first example of the needs of Visitor Management affecting the designed landscape, but it was by no means the last. Most of the changes to the grounds since William Aislabie s death in 1781 have been informed by the needs and pressures of an ever-growing number of visitors. The most blatant - and also early - example of this influence at work was the rebuilding of the path on the south side of the river in 1848. This was specifically carried out in order to give visitors a birds-eye view of the ruins (by running a path up onto previously unaccessed slopes) before delivering them at the "correct" western side of the complex where medieval visitors would have arrived, supplanting the previous route over the buried Infirmary. It was the engineering works for this scheme which rediscovered the remains of the Infirmary, and inspired the 1848-57 Walbran excavations of the abbey.
The maintained area of William Aislabie s gardens has gradually shrunk around the areas visited by the "standard" guided tour, which had developed by 1850, and the modern visitor sees little more. Yet the very role of the visitor in the shaping of this place of beauty and tranquillity goes completely unnoticed - as indeed does the work of a pioneering conservator.
Bibliography:
Burton, T. 1758, Monasticon Eboracensis
Gilpin, W. 1772, Tour of the North of England, Vol.II
Marsham, R. 1773 Letter to Francis Naylor, 23rd September 1733,
Historical Manuscripts Commission (1895) Vol.38
Storer, W. 1830, Delineations of Fountains Abbey
Young, A. 1771, A six months tour through the North of England
Vol.II The estate papers referred to may all be found in the
Vyner Manuscript collection, held at the
West Yorkshire County Archives, at Sheepscar, Leeds.
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