Rousham House (also known as Rousham Park) is a country house at Rousham in Oxfordshire, England. The house, which has been continuously in the ownership of one family, was built circa 1635 and remodelled by William Kent in the 18th century in a free Gothic style. Further alterations were carried out in the 19th century.
The celebrated gardens are open to the public every day; the house is open by appointment. [1]
In the 1630s Sir Robert Dormer bought the manor of Rousham. He immediately began construction of the present house but work was halted by the start of the English Civil War. The Dormers were a Royalist family and the house was attacked by Parliamentary soldiers. [2]
In 1649 the estate was inherited by Robert Dormer's son, also Robert. He left the house much as his father had created it, only repairing the damage of the Civil War. However, he did more to restore the family fortunes by marrying twice, each time to an heiress. His second wife was the daughter of Sir Charles Cottrell, a high-ranking courtier of Charles II.
Colonel Robert Dormer-Cottrell, the grandson of the house's builder, inherited Rousham in 1719 and began the huge transformation of the gardens to its current appearance. Initially he employed Charles Bridgeman to lay out the gardens in the new and more naturalistic style that was becoming popular. Bridgeman's layout of the garden was completed circa 1737. Rousham was then inherited by the Colonel's brother, General James Dormer (1679–1741), who called in William Kent to further enhance and develop the garden that Bridgeman created. This Kent did with considerable success over the next four years.
On the death of James Dormer in 1741, unmarried and without issue, the estate passed to his first cousin Sir Clement Cottrell-Dormer(1686–1758) (the son of his aunt Anne Cottrell) who added the surname Dormer to his patronymic. [3] [4] At this time Kent also embellished the house itself, with crenellations and two wings containing a drawing room and a "delightful" library, according to Horace Walpole who said of Rousham in 1760 "it reinstated Kent with me; he has no where shewn so much taste". [5] The interiors were altered a century later but the hall, the principal room of the house, has survived alteration by successive generations unchanged, and remains as completed in the 17th century. Kent's exterior work is today almost as built, but in 1876 the original octagonal paned glazing was replaced with innovative large sheets of plate glass, during a heavy-handed restoration of the house by the architect James Piers St Aubyn. The house contains fine collections of Jacobean and 18th-century furniture, paintings and statuary, all displayed in a domestic setting.
The gardens, created by Bridgeman and then Kent, overlook a curve of the River Cherwell. Bridgeman had laid out the garden, with meandering walks through the woods, and pools of varying degrees of formality. Kent's theme was to create and transform the naturalistic landscape created by Bridgeman by introducing 'Augustan' traits to recall the glories and atmosphere of ancient Rome. Thus the Roman Forum was to be recreated in the verdant English countryside. "The garden is Daphne in little", Walpole told George Montagu: "the sweetest little groves, streams, glades, porticoes, cascades, and river, imaginable; all the scenes are perfectly classic." [5]
Away and unseen from the house, Kent's garden extends past classical temples, follies and statuary representing the spirit of that era, dying gladiators, a horse being savaged by a lion and other statues depicting similar themes. Paths lead through woods where the abundant water from the Cherwell is fully utilised: small rills lead to larger ponds and formal pools, classical statuary of Roman gods and mythological creatures are skilfully positioned to catch the eye as one progresses from a cascade to the cold bath and on to the next temple or arcade, each set in its own valley or glade, a succession of picturesque tableaux. The statues are by Peter Scheemakers. [6]
Among the most revealing and thought-provoking of the follies is a grotto with a small cascade with the inscription: "In Front of this Stone lie the Remains of Ringwood an otter-hound of extraordinary Sagacity": this shows that while the English squire who created this garden attempted to achieve Arcadia, his interests and loves remained hunting and hounds.
The largest structure in the gardens is the Praeneste. Based on the Temple of Fortuna Primigenia in Palestrina, Italy, the Roman-style colonnade provides views across the Cherwell. A separate garden closer to the house evokes the spirit of the Tudor and Stuart eras of English gardening. Box-edged beds and borders of old roses and herbaceous plants are surrounded by walls of ancient red brick; here an historic circular dovecote still retains its doves and close by through a small gate is the parish church where generations of Cottrell-Dormers are buried. One memorial in the church commemorates three sons of the family killed in combat in the First World War.
The house and grounds have been used as filming locations for productions including ITV's Lewis (episode "The Dead of Winter") and BBC's 2021 miniseries The Pursuit of Love . [7] English horticulturist Monty Don considers Rousham his favourite garden in England. [8]
Rousham House is still the home of the Cottrell-Dormer family.
Oxfordshire is a ceremonial county in South East England. The county is bordered by Northamptonshire and Warwickshire to the north, Buckinghamshire to the east, Berkshire to the south, and Wiltshire and Gloucestershire to the west. The city of Oxford is the largest settlement and county town.
William Kent was an English architect, landscape architect, painter and furniture designer of the early 18th century. He began his career as a painter, and became Principal Painter in Ordinary or court painter, but his real talent was for design in various media.
Lancelot Brown, more commonly known as Capability Brown, was an English gardener and landscape architect, who remains the most famous figure in the history of the English landscape garden style. He is remembered as "the last of the great English 18th-century artists to be accorded his due" and "England's greatest gardener".
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Charles Bridgeman (1690–1738) was an English garden designer who helped pioneer the naturalistic landscape style. Although he was a key figure in the transition of English garden design from the Anglo-Dutch formality of patterned parterres and avenues to a freer style that incorporated formal, structural and wilderness elements, Bridgeman's innovations in English landscape architecture have been somewhat eclipsed by the work of his more famous successors, William Kent and Lancelot "Capability" Brown.
The English landscape garden, also called English landscape park or simply the English garden, is a style of "landscape" garden which emerged in England in the early 18th century, and spread across Europe, replacing the more formal, symmetrical French formal garden which had emerged in the 17th century as the principal gardening style of Europe. The English garden presented an idealized view of nature. Created and pioneered by William Kent and others, the "informal" garden style originated as a revolt against the architectural garden and drew inspiration from landscape paintings by Salvator Rosa, Claude Lorrain, and Nicolas Poussin.
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Shipton-under-Wychwood is a village and civil parish in the Evenlode valley about 4 miles (6.4 km) north of Burford, in the West Oxfordshire district, in the county of Oxfordshire, England. The village is one of three named after the ancient forest of Wychwood. The others are Milton-under-Wychwood immediately to the west of the village and Ascott-under-Wychwood about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) to the east. The 2011 Census recorded Shipton-under-Wychwood's parish population as 1,244.
Events from the year 1738 in Great Britain.
Rousham is a village and civil parish beside the River Cherwell in Oxfordshire. The village is about 6+1⁄2 miles (10.5 km) west of Bicester and about 6 miles (10 km) north of Kidlington. The parish is bounded by the River Cherwell in the east, the A4260 main road between Oxford and Banbury in the west, partly by the B4030 in the north, and by field boundaries with Tackley parish in the south. The 2001 Census recorded the parish's population as 80. Rousham was founded early in the Anglo-Saxon era. Its toponym is derived from Old English meaning Hrothwulf's ham or farm.
Nicholas Stone was an English sculptor and architect. In 1619 he was appointed master-mason to James I, and in 1626 to Charles I.
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Anne Dormer, was an English letter writer. She was the spouse of Robert Dormer (1628?–1689) of Rousham in Oxfordshire. Her correspondence with her sister Elizabeth has been used in several recent histories on the domestic concerns of seventeenth century women and their legal and romantic relationships with men.
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