Kitchen garden walls, including former vine house, greenhouses and bothies at Bettisfield Park

Cadw's description

Location

To the E of the main house and The Stables.

History

Bettisfield Park was the seat of the Hanmer family and is a house of at least C16 origin. A new S entrance front was built in the late C18, probably by Samuel Wyatt of London. In the mid C19 there were further additions, including a new entrance on the E side, an Italianate tower, and a Tudor-style tower with French pavilion roof.

The kitchen garden walls, including greenhouses, vine house and apple store, were built in the mid C19, part of the development of service buildings and Home Farm at Bettisfield Park, and are shown on the 1873 Ordnance Survey.

Exterior

Garden walls of brick with copings and intermediate square piers, enclosing an area approximately 80m square. Entrances in the S and E walls have boarded doors under segmental heads. In the centre of the N wall is a C20 entrance under a steel lintel. At the NW corner is 2-storey brick apple store, square with steep pyramidal slate roof. It has gabled dormer openings, all boarded up, and pointed boarded door on the E side. Next to it the N wall has an entrance with depressed arch and later iron gate.

The W side of the N wall has buildings against it and faces a raised walled terrace occupying the NW corner of the garden. It has a central former and now roofless vine house (or small orangery) of brick with rusticated stone quoins and a pediment. It has a wide and tall round-headed arch, which has half-glazed panel cast iron doors and small-pane glazing. It is flanked by round-headed niches occupied by sculpted male and female figures in classical dress. Above them are stone tablets with festoons. The pediment has a small roundel with re-used Coade stone medallion of a boy and wheatsheaf, with the partly legible date '179?'. To the R and L of the vine house are lean-to iron-frame greenhouses on brick dwarf walls, with half-glazed panel cast iron doors in the end walls.

The outer N side has 2 lean-to bothies, one under a hipped roof, and one of which retains a window with iron-frame Gothic glazing.

Reason for designation

Listed as mostly well-preserved C19 garden walls and associated buildings of a distinctive architectural character, including rare surviving C19 greenhouses and fine detail to the vine house, making an important contribution to the strong group of service buildings at Bettisfield Park.