Yorkshire's Designed Landscapes - A Miscellany

Previous series presented by Yorkshire Gardens Trust in association with the Gardens Trust have largely focussed on the great estates of the county. This series, presented by specialists in their fields, explores a variety of other types of designed landscapes through thought-provoking and meaningful presentations

Image: Bolton Priory from the Hartington Seat © Patrick Eyres

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This ticket costs £28 for the entire course of 4 sessions, or you may purchase a ticket for individual sessions, costing £8 via the links below. [Gardens Trust and Yorkshire Gardens Trust Members £21 or £6 each]

Ticket sales close 4 hours before the first talk

Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days (and again a few hours) prior to the start of the first talk (If you do not receive this link, please contact us), and a link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 2 weeks.

Please scroll down below the links to see the full details of each talk.

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Week 1. 17 September: The role of town memorials: collective memory, counter-memory, and forgetting in Barnsley. First of 4 online talks £8 each or all 4 for £28 (Gardens Trust and Yorkshire Gardens Trust Members £6 or £21)

Week 2. 24 September: Gale Common Artificial Hill of Fly Ash – a new landscape feature. Second of 4 online talks £8 each or all 4 for £28 (Gardens Trust and Yorkshire Gardens Trust Members £6 or £21)

Week 3. 1 October: 'One of the first that brought our northern gentry into the method of planting and raising all kinds of forest trees, for use and ornament’: the role of early Yorkshire nurseries in northern plantations. Third of 4 online talks £8 each or all 4 for £28 (Gardens Trust and Yorkshire Gardens Trust Members £6 or £21)

Week 4. 8 October: Bolton Abbey: A Picturesque Landscape Garden. Last of 4 online talks £8 each or all 4 for £28 (Gardens Trust and Yorkshire Gardens Trust Members £6 or £21)

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Week 1. 17 September: The role of town memorials: collective memory, counter-memory, and forgetting in Barnsley with John Land

Memorialisation is a fascinating topic. Several theories exist around how and why we memorialise in the ways that we do, and how processes of remembering and forgetting occur in competition but also relate to and condition one another. Furthermore, different opinions have developed around how these processes come to inform the ways that we understand our identities and sense of place. This talk will explore how different theories surrounding memorialisation can enable us to understand what people think the roles of memorials are in Barnsley. The focus of the talk will be on Barnsley’s coal mining and war history, and the ways that memorials can either successfully or unsuccessfully convey messages about the past and therefore inform people’s understandings of the past and their place in the present.

John Land is a final year PhD student in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Sheffield. His thesis explores the roles that memorials have for people in post-industrial communities and how landscapes of memory can be both sites of competing ideas and sites at which identity and a sense of place are moulded. His specific interest is in Barnsley’s memorial landscapes, and the ways in which coal mining heritage is memorialised in very different ways to the town’s First and Second World War heritage. The different ways these pasts are memorialised can tell us more about how and why some pasts maintain relevance across time and how certain pasts come to inform identity.

Image: Oaks Disaster Memorial, located in the grounds of Christ Church Ardsley, Barnsley, ©John Land

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Week 2. 24 September: Gale Common Artificial Hill of Fly Ash – a new landscape feature with Hal Moggridge

In 1961 Brenda Colvin was appointed, with engineers Rendel Palmer & Tritton, to design a new hill made from pulverised fuel ash from two coal fired power stations, together with waste shale from the nearby coal mine. It is 7 miles SW of Selby, beside the M62. The 50m high hill, 1.5km wide by 2.2km long, was designed to be constructed in three phases to an “unabashed and obvious artificial form” with the surface returned to agriculture, arable fields on top. Construction started in 1972 under Hal Moggridge, Brenda’s new partner; at first experiencing a number of awkward landscape problems and continued until the coal-fired power stations were closed. The brief gradually developed preferring nature conservation over economic land use, and on this basis Phase 1 was completed successfully in 2004. However, fuel ash has now become a valuable raw material so that the further parts of the hill which were commenced in the 1980s are not to be permanent features.

Colvin & Moggridge, the oldest active landscape practice in the UK, was founded in 1922 by the late Brenda Colvin. Hal Moggridge joined her as partner in 1969; Chris Carter became partner in 1981. Both are now consultants to the practice which continues thriving under younger directors, with a staff of 15. (www.colmog.co.uk)

Hal Moggridge OBE VMH PPLI FIHort RIBA was president of the Landscape Institute (1979-81) and for many years LI delegate to the International Federation of Landscape Architects. He has served on the Royal Fine Art Commission (1989-99), the National Trust’s Architectural Panel (1991-2009) and both UK and International ICOMOS Cultural Landscapes Committees. He was awarded the Landscape Institute Medal.

The practice’s work has always included large-scale industrial landscapes, power stations, quarries, reservoirs, as well as gardens and parkland, such as consultancy to Inner London’s Royal Parks and the masterplan for the new National Botanic Garden of Wales.

Image: A view from the hilltop looking east towards Eggborough and Drax power stations, 2005, ©Colvin and Moggridge

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Week 3. 1 October: 'One of the first that brought our northern gentry into the method of planting and raising all kinds of forest trees, for use and ornament’: the role of early Yorkshire nurseries in northern plantations with Gillian Parker

Garden history often assumes that landowners looked to London for their horticultural needs until the early 19th century. This presentation shows that this was not necessarily the case and that Yorkshire nurseries transformed landscapes from the late 17th to early 19th centuries by fulfilling orders for and planting thousands of trees that, in places, are still evident on the ground.

Archival evidence about large Yorkshire nurseries, garden histories researched by Yorkshire Gardens Trust members, and contemporary maps demonstrate how nurseries contributed to the radical reworking of northern estates. Modern maps and satellite images show the plantation footprints that still exist, evidencing the lasting impact of the nurseries and the landowners who bought from them and the economic interdependence of early nurseries, enclosure and plantations.

Since retiring from a career in social policy research, Gillian Parker has been studying garden and landscape history. She completed a PGDip in Garden and Landscape History in 2020 (Institute of Historical Research, University of London). Between 2021 and 2024 she was a part-time PGR student in the Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Sheffield, supervised by Dr Jan Woudstra, and is continuing in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, supervised by Professor Jonathan Finch. Her research explores the social, economic and horticultural history of the Backhouse Nursery of York. She is a Trustee of the Yorkshire Gardens Trust, a member of its Research and Recording group and a volunteer at the George Dillistone Garden – Goddards - in York.

Image: Nathan Drake (c.1728-1778), The New Terrace Walk, York, 1756, York Museums Trust, Public Domain, via ArtUK

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Week 4. 8 October: Bolton Abbey: A Picturesque Landscape Garden with Patrick Eyres

Bound by high moorland, the wooded valley of the river Wharfe at Bolton Abbey has been a popular beauty spot for over two centuries. The place began to attract visitors once the Reverend William Carr opened up Bolton Woods as a landscape garden, during the 1790s, by introducing paths interspersed with seats that offer a series of surprise views. Hackfall, on the river Ure, was the notable Yorkshire precedent. The seats were named to invoke the landowning dynasties, and were placed to reveal views of natural spectacle, such as The Strid and High Strid, as well as the historical ruins that framed this stretch of river: Bolton Priory and Barden Tower. The talk will focus on the representation of the place by artists and authors. In his History of Craven (1805), Dr Whitaker hailed Bolton Abbey as a Picturesque tour de force that combined natural splendour with historical associations, as did the numerous guidebooks that followed. The artist, J.M.W. Turner, and poet, William Wordsworth, made several visits, inspired both by the place and by the financial benefits of the tourist market. Wordsworth’s poetry dramatized the history of the ruined priory and the mortal hazards of The Strid. Turner’s watercolours were engraved for poetic and topographical publications. Unbeknown to most visitors today, Bolton Abbey remains a Picturesque landscape garden.

Dr Patrick Eyres is editor and publisher of the unique New Arcadian Journal, in which artists and writers explore the landscape garden. The current, 56th, is the penultimate edition. On behalf of The Gardens Trust, he set up the annual New Research Symposium and chaired it for the first ten years.

Image: The High Strid at Bolton Abbey, ©Patrick Eyres

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