Private tour · entry included
Levens Hall and Gardens —
a private afternoon
The oldest topiary garden in the world, and a house to match
Private tour · entry included
The oldest topiary garden in the world, and a house to match
Duration
3½ hourshalf day, afternoon
Topiary
1694the world's oldest
Collected
1:30pmfrom your hotel · back about 5pm
Entry
Includedhouse and gardens
Gardeners
11head gardeners since 1694
Where
5 milessouth of Kendal
£459per group · entry included
Check availability & book Choose your date · your party only
Step into the topiary garden at Levens and the world turns strange and wonderful: giant yews and box clipped into domes, spirals, arches and crowns, some of them four metres tall, all of them in the places a royal gardener set them out in 1694. No other topiary garden of that age survives intact anywhere in the world. Then an Elizabethan house, built around a medieval tower, with four centuries of family treasures inside.
“We’re so glad we weren’t driving.” Our guests often tell us so.
The road south past Kendal is quick but busy. Your driver watches the road; you watch the limestone country open out.
Experienced, qualified drivers who know every lane and bend, in every kind of weather.
Entry is arranged before you arrive. Nothing to book, nothing to find.
Laid out in 1694 and never redesigned. Eleven head gardeners have looked after it since, each leaving the plan as they found it.
Domes, spirals, crowns and arches, some four metres tall, standing in brilliant beds of spring and summer flowers. Nobody walks round it without smiling.
A royal courtier and a royal gardener both lost their places in 1688, and came north to make this garden together. Your guide tells the rest.
Elizabethan rooms around a medieval tower, full of Jacobean furniture, portraits and needlework, and still the family's home.
Across the road, Levens Park holds black fallow deer and a herd of rare Bagot goats under an avenue of old trees.
Close to Windermere and Oxenholme, so more of your afternoon is spent in the garden and less in the minibus.
Three hundred and thirty years of clipping. The same garden, shape for shape.The oldest topiary garden in the world
What there is to see, in the garden, the park and the house.
01
The topiary
Since 1694
02
The yew arch
Crowned in green
03
The borders
Summer colour
04
The house
Elizabethan rooms
05
The park
Deer and Bagot goats
Domes, spirals, cones, crowns and shapes nobody has ever quite managed to name, in yew and box, some of them four metres tall. They stand where Guillaume Beaumont set them out in 1694, and in spring they rise out of beds of bright flowers. It is like walking into a dream that has been carefully looked after.
Colonel James Grahme was Keeper of the Privy Purse to James II. When the king lost his throne in the revolution of 1688, Grahme lost his place at court, and that same year he bought Levens. He brought with him Guillaume Beaumont, who had been gardener to the king and worked at Hampton Court. The two of them spent the next decades making the garden you walk through. Two men out of a job, and a masterpiece.
Every autumn, from September until Christmas and often beyond, the gardeners reclip every shape by hand. Eleven head gardeners have looked after it since 1694, each one handing the same plan to the next. Come in spring and the shapes are at their sharpest.
Beyond the topiary lies the Beech Circle, a ring of clipped beech hedges. Further out, where the garden meets the parkland, the ground drops away into a sunken boundary wall that keeps livestock out without spoiling the view. Beaumont is thought to have made it around 1693, which would make it the oldest recorded ha-ha in England. Look for the point where the garden seems to fall away into the park.
The house grew from a medieval tower into an Elizabethan mansion, and passed from the Bellinghams to Grahme, to the Howards and, since 1885, to the Bagot family, who live here still. Inside are Jacobean furniture, family portraits and needlework, and a collection relating to Colonel Grahme himself. It feels like a home, because it is one.
Across the road, Levens Park runs down to the River Kent under an avenue of old trees. It is home to black fallow deer and a herd of Bagot goats, a rare breed with long black-and-white coats and sweeping horns. Bring the camera.
If you like Levens, add another garden for the morning. Choose our private morning tour of Sizergh Castle, a few miles away, with the largest limestone rock garden the National Trust owns, or of Holker Hall on the Cartmel peninsula, with its cascade and woodland garden.
For gardens in the north, on another day, our private tours to Dalemain in the morning and Hutton-in-the-Forest in the afternoon make a full day together.
Or make it part of a bespoke tour, tailor-made for your party.
This tour can be added to, or adapted as part of, a bespoke tour — tailor-made for each individual booking, around the places and the people you most want to see.
Find out about bespoke toursEvery tour is led by one of a small team of local guides — Tim, Gillian, Sandra and Steve — who live in Cumbria. The team rotates, so we can't promise a particular guide. We are based in Kendal, five miles from Levens; our minibuses are licensed for private hire, and we are fully insured.
This page was checked by Phil in .
Photographs via Geograph and Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0): Kevin Waterhouse, Colin Park, Barbara Carr, Sarah Charlesworth, Norman Caesar, Karl and Ali, Ruth Riddle; The wub (CC BY-SA 4.0). Placeholder photography — to be replaced with our own.
