Deer-park
Knole Park is one of the few deer-parks in England to have survived the past 500 years (there were 700 in the 16th century) and the only one in Kent. The park was first enclosed by a fence in 1456 by Thomas Bourchier to indulge a passion for hunting, which was popular among the nobility of the time.

In some ways the Tudor deer-park marked a transition between the medieval game forest and the more ornamental parks of the 17th and 18th centuries. Elements of the medieval landscape survive in the hawthorn, oak, yew, hornbeam, silver birch, bird maple and ash trees that once dominated the woodlands of the Weald. And it is these that contribute to the timelessness of the park: to the fact that it has changed little since Thomas Sackville's death in 1608.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, timber from the park was sold to the shipyards at Chatham; wood was coppiced for hop-poles and for fuel for the local glass industry; some of the land was given over for grazing; and some ploughed for growing crops. But the soils were thin and the park remained substantially unchanged.

During the 18th century, many landowners decided to improve their parks, employing designers such as 'Capability' Brown or Humphry Repton to create self-consciously picturesque landscapes. Knole, however, largely escaped this type of treatment - partly because the deer themselves already made the place look ornamental enough and partly because of the same innate conservatism of the Sackville family that has led to the house remaining relatively untouched over the centuries. The only concessions to 18th-century taste were the planting of stands of beech and broad tree-lined avenues in place of the old coppiced woodlands.

©NTPL / Martin O'Neill

Some of the buildings in the park reflect the 18th-century passion for the picturesque, for example the fake ruins built in the 1760s, a couple of hundred yards to the east of the main garden. The octagonal Gothic Revival Bird House was another folly, built nearby around 1761. Less fanciful, however, were the walled kitchen garden, laid out in 1710-11 and an ice-house, which now forms a mound towards the top of the knoll on which the house stands and from which it takes its name.

During both Word Wars, areas of the park were used for military camps. But apart from the metalled roads built by the army and the bomb craters beside the golf course, which commemorate Knole's site astride 'Bomb Alley' between London and the Channel, there was little change. The 600-odd herd of deer continued to crop the turf between the hummocky ant-hills, the lighter-coloured fallow deer joined, since the 19th century, by the darker, shorter, stockier Japanese Sika deer.

The storm of 1987
The great storm of October 1987 wreaked real devastation. In the course of one night, 70 per cent of the trees in the park were lost and nearby Sevenoaks lost all but one of its seven commemorative oaks. Many of these trees were some 200 years old, which made them particularly vulnerable to the high winds.

But the storm also presented an opportunity. Over the next five years, on the initiative of the 6th Lord Sackville, the 1,000 acres were replanted at a cost of £1 million, of which Sackville family trusts contributed one half and grants the other half.

There had never before been a formal design for Knole Park and it was exactly this which made it unique. The plan for replanting, therefore, had to be extremely unobtrusive, since its aim was to return the park delicately to its former condition - unplanned, except for a few strategic sight-lines.