The Alley

The Alley, 1974

Looking towards the Sundial

Sybil weeding in the Alley

Lying to the left and at right angles to the summer house is the Alley. 

In her tape recording 'York Gate 3' Sybil says "Much of our garden is modelled on Hidcote, our favourite garden, and at Hidcote they have an alley. I'm not sure but I think it's yew. It is modelled on Versailles. Now ours is modelled on Hidcote so it just shows how you can scale ideas down to fit your site."

In his account Robin wrote “The Allee is a surprise, perhaps the only real surprise in the garden.  Having walked up to the summer house and looked into its interior, you notice a door on one side: through the glass panes in the upper half you behold a long path of flagstones, set alternately narrow and wide, in a narrow strip of mown grass which slopes down on either side, within tall beech hedges cut with a slight batter, receding up the hill.  The whole is in such very human proportions that if you stand in the middle of the path and stretch out your arms you can touch each hedge.

Base for the Sundial at end of the White Garden, 1968

Robin's drawing of the "twist column sundial"

Sundial in front of the ha-ha and meadow,1968

Robin with visitors, 1968

Looking towards York Gate house, 1979

Robin in 1978

At the head of the path is a ball standing on a wobbly pillar.  Intended as a mild joke, it is in fact a sundial about eight feet high.  The ball has a bronze arrow ‘shot ‘through it, and around the circumference is numbered 1 to 12 to the East, and 1 to 12 to the West.  The arrow, nothing to do with time telling set to true North.  Mr C.A. Newham, the author of a guide to Stonehenge, very kindly helped us set the dial, on the June solstice.  The sundial, of the simplest kind, works on the principle that a ball is always half in shadow, and that the place where the shadow falls across the band of figures should tell the time. It works after a fashion, but never to an accuracy of more than twenty minutes.

It all began when, visiting  London, I saw just such a sundial, in Portland stone…..It was for sale, but the price was high; I came home, pondered, looked at the bank balance, and had to decide ‘no’.  Then I bethought myself of the local masons and went to see them.

I gave my masons a drawing and asked if they could make a sundial.  They said they could and quoted me a figure a third the price of the one I had seen in London…..It was all carved from solid blocks of stone, not roughly turned by machine in any way, and I suspect the  cutting of a sphere is a very demanding test of the mason’s skill….I sometimes wonder if the grey-white of Portland stone would have been better than the brown green of the local stone.  I chose local stone on purpose, as I thought it would have looked more at home; but I now think the white stone might have given a better contrast, and been a more appropriate foil for the white garden which opens out of the Allee at this point.

The curved wooden seat was designed by Robin

Curved seat in front of beech hedge, 1979

Behind the sundial, the Allee is closed with a semicircle beech hedge with a semi-circular teak seat set in front of it.  All is simple, the effect achieved by mown grass, stone and neatly clipped hedges, a welcome contrast to the variety and lushness of plant growth elsewhere.  There are breaks in hedges on either side of the sundial; one gives onto a ‘ha-ha’ only twelve feet wide, with the open fields beyond, the other aligns with the path which passes down the grey and white garden and is centred on the kitchen window.”