Levens Hall is five miles south of Kendal, in the same limestone country as Sizergh and similarly at the gateway to the Lake District from the south. The house — an Elizabethan mansion built around a medieval peel tower — is exceptional. The garden is unique.
The topiary garden at Levens Hall was laid out in 1694 by a French gardener named Guillaume Beaumont, who had previously worked at Hampton Court and Versailles. It has been continuously maintained in its original form ever since — the same shapes, in the same positions, on the same paths — for over three hundred and thirty years. No other topiary garden of this period survives intact anywhere in the world.
The topiary shapes at Levens are extraordinary: massive forms of clipped yew and box, some of them four metres tall, in shapes that blend the geometric formality of French baroque garden design with something more idiosyncratic. There are cones, spirals, chess pieces, crowns, abstract forms and shapes that defy easy description — accumulated over centuries of slightly different interpretations by the sequence of head gardeners who have maintained them.
The cumulative effect of the garden, especially in autumn when the shapes cast long shadows across the trimmed lawns and the surrounding orchard and herbaceous borders are in their final colour, is of a place that exists at its own pace in its own time. The shapes are not natural and not artificial in any simple sense. They are the product of three centuries of continuous human attention.
The house at Levens is an Elizabethan mansion built around a peel tower of similar age and type to Sizergh's — the standard response to border insecurity in medieval Cumbria. The rooms contain fine collections of Jacobean furniture, portraits, needlework and curiosities accumulated by the Bellingham and Bagot families over four centuries.
Of particular interest is the collection relating to Colonel James Grahme, who acquired Levens in 1688 and commissioned the Beaumont garden. Grahme was Keeper of the Privy Purse to James II and followed the king into exile in France after 1688. He returned to England and to Levens after the Glorious Revolution, and the garden he commissioned in 1694 is partly a statement about permanence in the face of political upheaval — a man who had seen his king driven into exile creating something that would last regardless of who sat on the throne.
Like Sizergh, Levens has its own luck tradition. The luck of the Bellingham family was said to depend on two things: that a white fawn should be born in the deer park, and that the River Kent should freeze hard enough to be crossed on foot. Both traditions have been maintained, more or less, in the family's oral history.
The white fawn has been born occasionally over the centuries and is recorded each time as significant. The River Kent froze sufficiently hard in the winter of 1895 and has not done so since. The family has continued regardless.
Levens Hall is open April to October most days; the garden is open more widely than the house. Check the Levens Hall website for current opening times and admission prices. It is approximately twenty minutes from Windermere and forty minutes from Keswick.
The garden is at its finest in May and early June (the late spring colour in the surrounding beds, the shapes in full clip) and in October (the autumn light, the shadows, the contrast of dark yew and pale stone). A still, misty October morning at Levens is one of the finest garden experiences in the north of England.
Levens Hall and its extraordinary topiary garden can be included in a bespoke history and heritage tour.