The Walled Garden and Pleasure Grounds project at Berrington Hall

As we have shown in previous posts, the Wessex Archaeologists paid a visit to Berrington in the January and February of last year. Here’s is another little set of some of their findings. This is some of the bones of different animals that were found in the walled garden. Here we have cat bones and even fowl bones. This indicates that they did have cats here at Berrington. They would have been both useful in the gardens for catching rats, as well as potentially domestic pets. Also in the collection photographed here is a small shard from a clay pipe. Pipe may have been used by the previous head gardener, or maybe by one of the servants. Although we can’t be sure who it belonged to, it’s interesting to note that it did belong to some who was at Berrington when the original family who built it were here. These are just little parts of Berrington’s past that we wanted to share with you. We hope you like them.

Last year Berrington was joined by Wessex Archaeology who carried out an excavation around the grounds. We are now pleased to share with you some of their findings. We wanted to start off by showing you some of the glass that was a small portion of the groups findings. Amongst the many fragments of glass they also found three small window fragments from garden soil which are in a greenish glass. They broadly date as post-medieval. It is extremely possible that some of the older pieces belonged to the 100ft long glasshouse that once stood here. The other glass fragments that were found include window and bottle/jar glass of the nineteenth century or later. We will keep sharing with you their findings, so remember to check for any updates.

We were joined by a group of Level 2 Diploma Students from The Hereford College of Arts. They came to Berrington to assist Nick Winney, Gardener-in-charge at Berrington Hall, with a series of garden tasks that needed to be completed in the orchard. This proved to be a successful partnership for it is estimated that the work the students did in the garden equated to 25 hours or 3.5 days’ work of staff and volunteers time. This work included heavy lifting, apple picking and collecting windfalls. You can read more about it in the article below.