The world's oldest topiary garden. An Elizabethan house around a medieval peel tower. Five miles south of Windermere.
This is a private morning guided tour of Levens Hall — exclusively for your group of up to seven guests — departing at 9:30am. You visit the hall and its world-famous topiary garden, five miles south of Windermere, with house entry included and the expert storyteller’s full attention on your group alone. £459 per group, with free cancellation up to 24 hours before the tour.
The topiary garden at Levens Hall was laid out in 1694 by Guillaume Beaumont — a French gardener who had previously worked at Hampton Court and Versailles — and has been maintained in its original form, without interruption, for over three hundred and thirty years. No other topiary garden of this age survives intact anywhere in the world.
The house itself is an Elizabethan mansion built around a medieval peel tower, filled with four centuries of Bellingham and Bagot family possessions. The combination of the house and the garden — the extraordinary, slightly surreal topiary shapes and the intimate domestic interior — makes Levens one of the most unusual and memorable visits in the north of England.
This private morning tour brings your group here exclusively, with your expert storyteller explaining what you are looking at and why it matters, before returning to Windermere by early afternoon.
Massive clipped forms of yew and box — cones, spirals, chess pieces, crowns and shapes that defy easy description — some four metres tall, in the same positions they have occupied since 1694. The cumulative effect is of a place operating at its own pace in its own time.
Jacobean furniture, family portraits, needlework and the collection relating to Colonel James Grahme, who commissioned the garden in 1694 after following James II into French exile following the Glorious Revolution.
The Bellingham family luck depends on two conditions: a white fawn born in the deer park and the River Kent freezing hard enough to cross on foot. The Kent last froze in 1895. The family continues regardless.
We collect your group from Windermere station or Oxenholme Lake District station.
Arrival at Levens Hall, five miles south of Kendal. Your expert storyteller introduces the history of the house and garden before you enter.
A full guided tour of the garden — the 1694 layout, the Beaumont commission, how the shapes have evolved and been maintained across three centuries.
The Elizabethan interiors, the peel tower, the Grahme collection and the family history spanning four centuries of continuous occupation.
Depart Levens Hall for the return journey, arriving back by approximately 1:00pm.