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THE Old
Walled Garden was part of the gardens laid out by Richard Wilbraham
after he built his family house on the adjacent site in 1580 during
the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.
James Hall, in his "History of Nantwich" writes: “The
Wilbraham family were long resident in the Town of Nantwich and were
never failing guardians of its rights in bygone days.”
The
Wilbraham family were resident in the house for two centuries and we
know that (to quote Hall) the “gardens with high walls of brick were
ornamented with stone carvings of armorial bearings and grotesque
devices.” The Wilbraham archives have been researched and tell us
the many and varied features which the garden contained - for
example, an arbor, a banqueting house, columns, flower pots, canals,
etc. The original bee boles are still intact in the southern wall.
[See background page on this subject.] They would have contained the wicker beehives in days gone by.
On August 27, 1617, King James I of England was a guest in the house
and visited the nearby brine workings (the salt producing houses) of
Nantwich. He almost certainly walked in the gardens and probably
used the old door into the field in the north wall to walk to the
brine works.
This
doorway had “projecting stone dressed brick piers and a massive
stone lintel with chamfered and slightly cambered head surmounted by
a coved coping” - words written in a
Department
of the Environment report on August
1, 1986.
The wall
itself is of “small red bricks in English Garden Wall Bond with
stone dressing,” says the report, adding that the enclosure is of
“quadrangle form with walls up to three metres in height. High stone
plinth, of two brick thickness, with wall reducing to one-and-a-half
brick thickness above the stone brick cornice. The two-section-wide
overhanging stone coping has coves on the underside and weathered
upper surfaces to the lower section. The upper section is stepped up
with weathered upper surfaces flanking a central roll. Both the
plinth cornice and the coping return vertically at the many steps in
the level of the wall.”
The
wall is a Grade 2 listed building.
Part of the site of the Wilbraham gardens was used in the 19th
century for magistrates' offices and a police station. The Old
Walled Garden is all that remains of this historic site. In the 19th
century, a stone gateway with carved lionesses, leading to the
garden was removed and re-erected at Dorfold Hall in Nantwich.
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