Denbies
A farmhouse and surrounding land originally owned by John Denby was purchased in 1734 by Jonathan Tyers, the proprietor of Vauxhall Gardens in London, and converted into a weekend retreat.
The house he built appears to have been of little architectural significance, but the Gothic garden he developed in the grounds on the theme of death achieved some notoriety, despite being short-lived.
The estate was bought by Lord King of Ockham following Tyers's death in 1767, and the macabre artefacts he had installed, including two stone coffins topped by human skulls, were removed.
The payment of death duties and the difficulty of maintaining a large domestic estate during the Second World War forced the family to begin selling parcels of land.
Two years later the company chairman Adrian White established Denbies Wine Estate, using 268 acres (1.08 km2) on a south-facing piece of land to plant vines.
[1][7] Set on top of a hillside about two miles (3.2 km) northwest of Dorking, the house had views of the Surrey landscape[8] and backed onto Ranmore Common.
[13] Tyers continued to live in his house in the grounds of Vauxhall after purchasing Denbies, visiting the latter only on Sundays, which, it has been suggested, may go some way towards explaining the garden's gloomy nature.
[14] The garden's main feature was a wooded area of about eight acres (3.2 ha), Il Penseroso,[c] which was criss-crossed by a labyrinthine network of paths leading down to a small tributary of the River Mole.
[12] It had a thatched roof and internal enclosures formed by fake stonework panels,[15] each covered in verses reminding the reader of "the vanity, the shortness and insufficiency of human pleasures".
[12] Chained to a sloping desk in the centre of the temple was a copy of Edward Young's poem Night-Thoughts and Robert Blair's The Grave, bound in black leather.
Executed in stucco and probably crafted by Louis-François Roubiliac, it depicted an angel blowing the last trump, causing a stone pyramid to crumble and revealing the corpse within to be rising from the dead.
[12] Visitors were met at the entrance to the wood by the Latin inscription Procul este, profani, which translates as "away all you who are unhallowed",[12] a quotation from the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid.
[12] The iron entrance gate was mounted between two upended stone coffins supporting the portico, each one topped by a human skull, one male one female.
[17] A large alcove close by in the garden, entered through a portal of grey Sussex marble, formed an amphitheatre that contained an effigy representing Truth crushing a mask, again probably the work of Roubiliac.
His son and heir by his first marriage was James II Whyte (1774–1852) of Pilton House near Barnstaple in Devon, who in 1805 at St George's, Hanover Square, married Frances Honoria Beresford, a daughter of the Irish statesman Hon.
[36] At the time he purchased Denbies, Cubitt was nearing completion of the work on Osborne House for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert on the Isle of Wight.
Cubitt's attention to detail was such that he even manufactured his own bricks at a brickworks he set up for the purpose, using lime extracted from the chalk quarries on the eastern edge of the estate.
[39] The flat roof was edged with a parapet embellished with balustrades,[39] and a matching decoration was incorporated round the first floor, both made from Portland stone.
The remaining rooms on the basement level were workshops, wine cellars and individual parlours for the butler, housekeeper and other principal servants, together with general storerooms.
[47] The grounds had been well maintained by the Denisons,[39] but Cubitt further enhanced and overhauled them;[36] large plantations of hardwoods and conifers were added,[39] and general improvements and development of the estate and farm were undertaken.
[54] During a period of expansion and prosperity under the ownership of Ashcombe a further 2,000 acres (8.1 km2) of land were secured, and gradually other acquisitions were made;[55] the estate then stretched as far as Birtley Court, near Bramley and Churt.
[55] He commissioned Sir George Gilbert Scott, a friend and regular guest at Denbies, to design an estate church on Ranmore Common.
[56][f] Ashcombe also ensured that the basic medical needs of his workers were attended to, by having a cottage built to serve as a dispensary and a place for physicians from the nearby towns to hold twice-weekly surgeries.
[58] A total of £30,400 was raised by the sale of sixty-nine lots – tallying around 232 acres (0.94 km2) – of land and property on the periphery of the estate just south of the railway line.
[61][63][g] Death duties and the Second World War impacted greatly on the estate: staffing was a problem, and maintenance and general repair costs were unsustainable.
[65] Hugh Pollock, husband of the author Enid Blyton, re-ignited his adulterous affair with Ida Crowe after arranging work there for her as a civilian secretary.
[64] Contractors were brought in to demolish the mansion in 1953; the company may have encountered financial problems, as the basement was not fully destroyed and was left filled with rubble from the higher levels.
[67] Henry's third marriage was to Elizabeth, the widow of his friend Mark Dent-Brocklehurst, in 1979;[69][i] she had inherited Sudeley Castle, and the couple made it their family home.
