Sherborne Park

I am staying for a few days in a village close to Burford in west Oxfordshire to explore the locality. Yesterday afternoon we went for a circular walk in Sherborne Park.

The Windrush valley was looking picture-postcard beautiful under blue sunny skies. There is nothing natural about the Cotswold landscape. Since circa 1522 the Duttons built elegantly, made stone walls and planted extensively to create a spectacular parkland.  Along the way the Duttons were politicians and earned a Peerage in 1784. Lord Sherborne of Sherborne Park sounds a great deal better than Mr Dutton of SP. As so often happens the wheels came off their wagon quite suddenly. The 7th Baron died in 1982 and left the estate to the National Trust. He was succeeded by a cousin who died without issue two years later, so that’s that in the Lord Sherborne department.

The walking is beautiful but there’s only so much one can write about the rolling Sherborne acres. Some of the houses on the estate were worth photographing and of course the main house and St Mary Magdalene beside it.

Fortuitously the church was open. The tower and spire are late 13th century or early 14th century, according to Pevsner, but most of the rest of the church was re-built in the 19th century. If I may digress, my Pevsner for Gloucestershire: The Cotswolds is in fact written by David Verey and only edited by Pevsner himself. David Verey was married for forty-five years to Rosemary Verey, doyenne of garden designers.

The church has two outstanding funerary monuments. On the North wall of the sanctuary is this memorial to James Dutton by Richard Westmacott the Elder (1791). It depicts a life-sized angel holding a medallion with profiles of the deceased and his wife trampling a prostrate figure of Death.

Opposite, on the south side, is this elegant memorial by Rysbrack (1749) to Sir John Dutton; also signed beneath his tootsies.

Now we must drive some two miles SW and turn the clock back to the 17th century. The Dutton of the day, another John, was a friend of Cromwell – not relevant – and a sportsman – highly relevant. He enclosed a Deer Park within high stone walls and built Lodge Park, similar to Swarkestone Pavilion, the Landmark Trust property I rented in Derbyshire two years ago. Now, let the sport commence. Deer were corralled and slipped from a beech spinney about a mile away. They were coursed by greyhounds and the Lodge was used as a grandstand to watch and bet on proceedings. Killing deer (if indeed they were killed) is preferable to regicide.