Hagley Park, Worcestershire
[1] Planned as part of an 18th-century enthusiasm for landscape gardening, especially among poets, the park brought many distinguished literary visitors to admire the views, as well as poetic tributes to their beauty and Classical taste.
The charm of the grounds was further underlined by the creation of buildings in diverse styles: some that recreated ancient Greek and Roman examples, another being a gothic folly.
Instead there was a circuit often described in contemporary works, such as the introduction to Thomas Maurice’s Hagley: A Descriptive Poem (Oxford 1776), which guided the reader along a route through alternating light and shade, open and closed prospects, rises and descents.
[13] The circuit of the grounds as described by Thomas Maurice began at the parish church, which in the 18th century was entirely lost behind trees, and took a path "to a gloomy hollow, whose steep banks are covered with large rocky stones, as if rent asunder by some violent concussion of nature."
[15] Ascending the left bank, one reached a grotto of "grotesque stone alcoves and seats shaded with laurels" above a cascade decorated with glittering vitrified slag from the old glass industry in the area.
Continuing within the park, rather than leaving by the gate to Clent Hill, one next encountered a pebble-floored rustic hermitage composed of roots and moss and near it a curved seat of contemplation with its Latin name (sedes contemplationis) spelled out in snail shells.
[30] One other visitor was Henrietta Knight, Lady Luxborough who, while she lived, was at the centre of the circle of local landscaping poets, and who came to view the newly constructed "Giant's Castle" in 1748.
The inclusion of the last of these was an aesthetic announcement of the new taste in landscape gardening there which, eschewing European artificiality, took its lead from the description of Eden in the fourth book of Paradise Lost.
Within the Hermitage was inscribed the description of the "mossy cell" to which the devotee of melancholy will withdraw, taken from Il Penseroso; while on Milton's Seat, with its broad outlook over the countryside, appeared the passage beginning "These are thy glorious works, parent of good" from the fifth book of Paradise Lost.
But even before Lyttelton had begun work on it in the valley above his house, James Thomson had recognised its Classical possibilities and christened it This was written following his first visit to Hagley in 1743 and introduced the following year into the Spring section of his revised The Seasons.
Thomas Maurice exclaims And James Heely follows him at greater length: Not that I would mean to throw the least reflexion on the confinement of a spot, replete with such beauty as this is…but I may lament, from the pleasure it afforded me, that the same flowery taste did not spring even from the rough scene preceding that of the alcove, which had it taken effect, instead of the present reservoirs, would have risen (properly conducted) the most delectable scene the powers of genius and taste have to give.
[43] The association was deepened by Lyttelton's monody "To the memory of a lady lately deceased", which is set in the grounds at the start, and whose fifth stanza, beginning "O Shades of Hagley, where is now your Boast?"
[44] In its wake came references to Lyttelton's sorrow as the burden of Hagley's streams in Mason's "Ode to a Water Nymph" and to his monody in Maurice's descriptive poem.
[46] Maurice's descriptive poem dated from after Lyttelton's death and closed with the patriotic hope that Britain will triumph against its continental rivals, lately allied against it during the American Revolutionary War.
Some three years later, at a time of damaged national confidence, the second Baron Lyttleton finds in Hagley a place of retreat from Parliamentary strife and ambition.
