It seems ironic that in Cumbria’s wild and craggy Lake District, made so fashionable by the Romantic poets and local lad William Wordsworth, there should exist one of the best surviving gardens of the pre-Romantic era. For Levens Hall is that rare and wonderful thing: a formal garden from 1694, never swept away by the 18th-century fashion for landscape gardens and kept to its original design to the present day. You could call it a time capsule, but for the fact that it is also a garden very much alive.
The owner in 1694 was one Colonel James Grahme, who had been privy purse (personal financier) to King James II, England’s last Catholic monarch, until James was deposed in 1688 under the Glorious Revolution.
