The Hermitage: Weirdest Garden Ornament Ever? by Lydia Flack

A late summer evening in Stowe gardens, and the Temple family are hosting a party. The guests dine in the garden’s grotto, an intimate space at the base of a waterfall. Despite the cold and damp, the party is well-attended and the guests in high spirits. Part of the reason for their cheer was a man most at odds with the well-dressed, affluent crowd, he dressed humbly, and kept his hair long and unkempt. Despite this, the figure was the life of the party, pouring wine and entertaining guests with tales. This was Stowe’s ornamental hermit. Hermits, historically, were individuals who retreated from society for one reason or another, usually spiritual or religious pursuits, or occasionally philosophy for the more scientifically minded. The practice is most commonly associated with Catholicism. They are also usually men. Paul of Thebes, also known, appropriately, as St Paul the hermit was the first Christian hermit in the 3rd century, and Anthony of Egypt, or Anthony the Great, was the most renowned, thanks to a bestselling biography by Athanasius of Alexandria, a Christian theologian from the 300’s. Hermits still knock about today, though the concept has separated itself from religion and now more generally refers to anyone who shuns society. Some hermits lived completely away from civilization, but there were some which were renowned as oracles, able to give insight into the divine and guide those who sought out their wisdom. Some earned disciples, surely counter-productive to their lifestyle. In the mediaeval era some even appeared to have held down jobs, as gatekeepers or ferrymen, transient roles that kept them separated from the rest of society. They traditionally lived in cells or hermitages, either manmade or natural, and presumably outfitted with only single beds. By the time that landscape gardening came into full force however, the Age of Enlightenment, championing the value of knowledge and the separation of church and state, was in full swing and the hermit lifestyle was largely removed as a sign of religious devotion. But you may well still be wondering, what was a man who shuns society doing living out of a noble family’s back garden?

For most of history, finding someone living in your garden would have been an unpleasant surprise, but for a short but sweet period of time in the 18th century, such a situation was a mark of pure taste. The hermitage was part of a series of garden buildings known collectively as ‘follies’, ornamental structures designed to decorate the landscape, often with whimsy or extravagance in mind. No country house garden was complete without at least a couple of ornamental buildings, and many larger gardens designed a narrative that played out through the follies in the name of beauty and for the benefit of guests. So why the hell would anyone want a man living in an ornamental hut in their garden? The gardens that would sit within or surround lavish estates up and down our green and pleasant land have always been designed to impress. Ornamental garden design appears to have migrated to England with the Romans sometime between 43–410 AD, or at least there is no record of the garden as a non-functional space before the conquest. Though little archeological evidence remains, what could be uncovered suggests that the Roman style was small courtyard gardens with space for dining and decorative statuary, water features and of course plant beds, not too dissimilar from a typical suburban garden today. Mediaeval gardens were used to grow herbs and food, and small gardens in castle courtyards did have lawns and flower beds, but were also used for recreation. Large spaces were designed for entertainment, and parkland used for hunting. Meanwhile, Tudor gardens were typically composed of a network of small plots designed around a particular theme and separated by walls or hedges, inspired once more by Italian Renaissance design. Typical themes were knot gardens or labyrinths, and architectural features from sundials to banquet houses became popular. This design morphed into the Stuart gardens of the 17th century, which were inspired by those found in France and Denmark, and were highly formal, filled with delicate bedding plants and navigated through by a series of regimented paths. The flower beds were laid out in an intricate design called a Parterre, intended to be seen from above. The move to Georgian ‘naturalistic’ gardens can be linked directly to the waning influence of the Renaissance and the rise of Romanticism and interest in the idealised ‘classical’ landscape in the mid 17th century. While at first gardens were designed formally, to contrast with the untamed parkland beyond, the fashion grew over the course of the 18th century to embrace the inherent beauty of nature and imagination in response to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, in comparison to which the past looked very peaceful indeed. The result was a championing of the classical Arcadian landscapes of Ancient Greece, as seen, or imagined, through artistic depictions. This was also likely fueled by the practice of the ‘Grand Tour’, a journey undertaken by young men of a certain social station and means to traverse Europe in the name of education and classical antiquity, inevitably turning the architecture and values of the era into a source of social capital, reflected in upper class tastes when the young men returned home. This new landscaping movement was also inspired by so-called ‘painterly’ ideals, the aim to create the most beautiful space possible, merging landscaping with the artistic. To achieve this, Georgian aristocrats turned to landscape gardeners, such as William Kent, one of the first to put such ideas to grass and hedgerow, and Lancelot 'Capability’ Jones, by far the most prolific gardener of his age. These men and their contemporaries would ‘naturalise’ an estate’s parklands installing features like streams and cascades alongside architectural follies. This style is known now as the Picturesque. Compared to the comparatively small formal gardens, the new picturesque style made use of far more land, merging the ‘garden’ of the manor with the parkland beyond ‘without line or level’. So at a glance, the Georgian landscape garden is parkland embedded with ornamental buildings and naturalistic features. Hallmarks of the style were serpentine artificial water features, elegant vistas, rustic Greek temples, and stylised treescapes. Often these ornamental structures would speak a language of the upper class, invoking the likes of classical myth, morality, or simply wealth and influence. Though the effect was remarkably rural, the gardens were in fact highly thought out, and designed to guide the eye across the landscape through lines created by the hills, waters and architecture. And of course, they were crafted to be perfect, elysian settings and would surely never have really existed in the classical world. The upper classes were able to perfect nature. The gardens were not just created to look nice however. Though the architecture was often purely decorative, many follies also had a hidden practical purpose and were often fully functional, though perhaps not in the way they might be implied at first glance. A ‘ruin’ might actually be a bathhouse, as at Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, or a decorative barge might be used for taking tea, as was the case at Shugborough in Staffordshire. In keeping with the neoclassical fashion, most follies resembled the structures of the past, with some pragmatic owners even designing around pre-existing ruins. Those who did not have appropriate historic structures would simply create their own. At Studley Royal Water Gardens in Yorkshire, the owner John Aislabie redesigned his gardens to incorporate the ruins of Fountains Abbey, once Britain’s largest and most profitable monastery, making the building a folly for his estate even though it was actually on land belonging to his neighbour! Inevitably, at this time taking a tour round private gardens was a common pursuit for artists, aristocrats and middle-class tourists, some country house owners even drew up guidebooks and maps. Canny servants would often charge for the pleasure of a tour, and some owners went as far as to install tearooms to offer refreshment to visitors and profit further from their attentions. Though this sometimes backfired, as was the case when Horace Walpole, owner of Gothic masterpiece Strawberry Hill in Twickenham found the incessant visits becoming a nuisance and complained in a letter to a friend that his ‘whole time is passed in giving tickets for seeing it, and hiding myself when it is seen’. Follies were also carefully curated to reflect a certain narrative. Many landscape gardens would have a series of ‘vistas’ that visitors would stroll through, a kind of ‘room’ where landscaping and gardening would be combined along a particular theme, not unlike Tudor gardens, but without clear delineation. At one of the most prolific country house gardens, Stowe in Buckinghamshire, the Cobham family divided the estate along two routes, the Path of Virtue and the Path of Vice. This allegorical traverse is best understood by those with a healthy understanding of both ancient Greek and Roman mythology and 18th century Whig politics, so a guidebook is at this point almost essential. So imagine for a moment a tour of Stowe House in the late 18th century. You arrive at the Bell Gate, and have to choose which path you wish to explore. On the left, the Path of Vice; a scandalous trail down structures dedicated to the likes of Venus, Roman goddess of love, and telling sordid stories of excessive partying and seductive women. On the right, the Path of Virtue, which leads the visitor through heaven on earth, the Elysian Fields, stopping along the way at solemn structures including the Temple of British Worthies, and crossing a great many bridges. And if you do decide to sidle off down the path to vice, only three doors along you will come across the Hermitage.

At first, hermitage’s were exclusively non-manned structures, often built as a retreat for owners to enjoy solitude or rest from the summer heat. In this way the nucleus of the hermitage in the 18th century garden shared its purpose with its spiritual predecessor. The hermitages in the 18th century was a result of the combination of Enlightenment ideals of rationality and philosophical self-consciousness combined with the Romantic notions of a simpler, more rural way of life. They often represented a return to simplicity and a virtuous life, ironic considering the lavish pleasure grounds they stood within. As such, the hermitage at Stowe was less of an addition to the frivolity and excess of the Path of Vice, and more of a spiritual helpdesk, where visitors were encouraged to sit and contemplate the folly of immorality. The idea for the hermitage originated in Southern Europe, but physicist William Stuckley was the first to build a hermitage in England in 1727 at his home in Grantham, driven by his fascination with druids and their beliefs. Appropriately the hermitage itself was modelled after a druidic cave within a grove. Perhaps the most prolific early hermitage was designed by Queen Caroline, wife of George II, who built the then-pioneering structure in her gardens at Richmond Lodge, London in 1730. The Queen was an enthusiastic and cutting-edge gardener, and though her home country of Germany was not renowned for its interest or prowess in the practice, Caroline quickly acquainted herself with the landscape style. The hermitage was a result of her religious devotion and interest in the language of garden design and its value as a reflection of British morality conveyed through a lens of classical antiquity. The hermitage at Richmond combined formal classicism with rustic ‘Saxon’ architecture, distorting the physical features of the classic and adorning the structure with vegetation to represent age. However, inside, the interiors would not have been out of place in Versailles. The central room contained busts of the Queen’s favourite theologians, the other two rooms were places for rest and relaxation, inviting religious and scientific contemplation of a simpler life within luxurious settings fit for a queen. Though contemporary reviews of Queen Caroline’s hermitage were mixed, the idea soon caught on and this new folly entered the mainstream, becoming a must-have of the Georgian landscape garden roster. There was never any definitive architectural style for the hermitage, and grottos or root houses were also commonly used for the same purpose as all drew inspiration from rustic, pastoral designs and incorporated elements of the natural world, such a tree branches and roots, or stones, to both mimic age and settle the building into the surrounding landscape. Root houses in particular were often solely built from wood. It is important to keep in mind that all hermitages pulled double duty as an aesthetic garden folly, so were designed to please the eye above all. However, a hermitage built for solitude for the owner, rather than a mystic figure, was soon to change. In short order, those looking for solitude in Queen Caroline’s hermitage may have been disappointed by the presence of Stephen Duck: the royally-appointed hermit. From a poor background, Stephen made a modest name for himself as a poet and met Caroline through one of her ladies-in-waiting, gaining the queen’s favour and the role of Official Hermit at Richmond. It wasn’t long before wealthy landowners were putting adverts in local newspapers for the services of a man to live in rustic isolation in their hermitage, a position soon known as being an ornamental hermit. There is no one reason why employing a living breathing ornament became the fashion. Some appointments could probably be attributed to the desire to create a sense of magic and perhaps gain historical legitimacy for the structure itself, and it has been suggested by historian Edward S. Harwood that the hiring of a hermit was a way for the gentry to prove their own legitimacy. It was common in the 16th century for hermits to live on the edges of grand estates, and in keeping with the Romantic ideals of returning to the past, the contemporary landowners could hark back to a time of patronage and reaffirm their status. A hermit was also a source of amusement. The De Grey family at Wrest Park delighted in tricking their guests, and there is evidence on the estate of a root house in a glade also containing an altar and, contemporary reports assert, a harp hung in the trees, hidden from visitors. As wind and branch hit the strings, the harp would produce disembodied heavenly tunes, lending the clearing an ethereal atmosphere. The hermit here was required to run out of his abode when visitors appeared, ranting and raving in the fictional Mithraic language, to chase them off. History does not record if he allowed them time to appreciate the elaborate staging first. Such commitment was not necessarily uncommon either. Often hermitage’s were set up as if a man had just left the room, leaving a book or a candle out to suggest the presence of hermit even if the estate has no one employed in the role. One of the most renowned ornamental hermits, Father Francis of Hawkstone in Shropshire, was such a tourist trap in the 1780’s that historical accounts even tell us that when the man was ‘out of office’ to eat or sleep, a moving, talking automaton took his place. There was no official dress code for the hermit, though druid robes were common, presumably lending an air of whimsy and historical authority. Commitment was expected from a hermit in return however. For example at Painshill Park in Surrey owner Charles Hamilton stipulated that the man employed as his ornamental hermit must take a vow of silence, never wear shoes and refrain from cutting his hair or nails for a period of seven years. Legend goes that after only three weeks, Hamilton found his new hire in the local pub. Some hermits were even consulted for advice, the idea presumably tied to the way in which the role of a hermit was historically the abandonment of material possession in favour of spiritual enlightenment. Though what advice a man who answers a newspaper ad about dressing up like a druid and living in isolation may have to share remains dubious. This highlights the paradox of the hermit, a figure that historically secludes themselves from society, but in the context of a landscape garden has been appointed for the sole reason of being observed. One great house, sadly unidentifiable, listed an advertisement for a hermit who would need to ‘remain bearded and in a state of picturesque dirtiness for six months in the year in an artificial cave at a suitable distance from the house—just far enough (but not too far) for the fashionable house-party, with its court of subservient poets and painters, to visit, walking there in the afternoons, peering into the semi-darkness with a little thrill of wonder and excitement.’ Such a stipulation points to the fundamental purpose of the hermit in the country house garden as nothing more than aesthetic, an ornament like any other. By the start of the 19th century, the hermit craze was on its way out. In truth the vast majority of hermitages were unmanned, the minority of great houses actually employing a full time hermit. Under pressure from rights groups and in the face of changing fashions and the role of the garden, times moved on. Over the interceding centuries too, many of the more delicate structures, like root houses, succumbed to time or the elements, and almost no contemporary examples of these features remain. Some historians argue that the hermit still survives to this day, in the form of the venerable garden gnome, though this seems unlikely, as gnomes have been found to have roots tracing back to dwarf statues originating in the Black Forest, Germany in the 19th century. Meanwhile, the hermitage lives on. The stone structures that remain may now be bereft of their hermit, and the mystical adornment and whimsy once able to wow their contemporaries, but they can still offer modern visitors their most base feature: solitude.