Boughton House park plans

The collection

Boughton House, the Northamptonshire home of the Duke of Buccleuch a few miles from our studio, is known as the English Versailles. Its park was laid out in the French manner at the turn of the eighteenth century, with avenues, canals and a great formal pool, the Grand Étang.

In 1749 the estate passed through marriage to other families, and for more than two hundred years the waterways silted up and the formal layout faded into grass. What survived was paper: an unusually rich set of plans and estate maps from the early 1700s, recording the park as it was designed.

What we did

The plans are large, rolled and fragile, their colours faded by three centuries. Each was unrolled and flattened with care, then captured full size and in full colour on our large-format scanner, without anything pressing on the sheet.

We then restored the colours on the scans, leaving the originals untouched. Restored, the plans were sharp enough to tell the variety of each tree, and printed copies went out to be used on the ground. The Duke keeps one rolled up in his car, to check against the park.

What the plans revealed

The plans held a surprise. A ditch running into the lake in front of the house turned out, once enhanced, to be a channel 50 feet wide with reinforced sides. The Duke had the ground opened and found the old wall, and the channel is being reinstated.

The park today

The plans are one of the references for Boughton’s long restoration of its landscape. The Grand Étang has been rebuilt, with a jet rising more than 75 feet, hundreds of avenue trees have been replanted, among them a mile of limes, and work on the Star Pond began in 2023.

It is the kind of work we were founded for: Northamptonshire history, close to home, kept and put back to use.