Reaching towards the horizon

The inspiration for the garden of The Manor, Priors Marston, Warwickshire, was to create a landscape to meander through, with talking points along the way, reveals Tiffany Daneff

- Tiffany Daneff

WE wanted a landscape garden, something that framed the house and would, in that old-fashioned phrase, create a series of rooms through which one could walk for five or 10 or 20 or 30 minutes.’ Mark Cecil is describing the vision he and his wife, Katie, had for Priors Marston. They had never intended to move to Warwickshire, but the late-Georgian manor seemed to have them in its sights. In 2001, a year after Mrs Cecil first spotted it in the pages of this magazine (and rejected it for being too far from London), the agents wrote to say it was still on the market. That time, they decided to drive up to have a look for themselves—and bought it that same day.

There was no garden to speak of then, other than a 12ft-wide concrete rill that ran from the front of the house down to the lake. The 1810 house was surrounded by mature leylandii and the original 1,100-acre estate had long since been broken up, leaving 11 acres of land, which included the lake, then full of weeds and silted up. Leylandii obscured the principal view from the drawing-room to the water and the hill that rises beyond it; the old walled garden was being used as a donkey paddock. The two small cottages in the grounds were derelict, the outdoor pool was poorly sited, as was the tennis court, and the house itself was in much need of help.

The village of Priors Marston contains several substantial houses, having profited from being a staging post on the Welsh Road, the old drovers’ route from Wales to Northampton, but the manor is the foremost, standing back from the road at the main village junction.