Aberglasney Gardens

[greenfinger]

Just visited Aberglasney Gardens in South-Wales. Something for the amateurs of garden archeology. Or as described in the booklet "Gardens of Wales", published by Premier Gardens Wales: " The story of the gardens of Wales is an evolutionary one. Some have a clearly recorded history; many others offer endless opportunities for imagination, discovery and growth." 
It's all too clear Aberglasney Gardens belongs to the last category. The mists of history give ample room for multi -interpretation of gardens and buildings. It goes back till before the War of Roses and facts unknown before have to be deduced from those the experts have found during their very recent restoration work.
"Indeed," my little book continues, " it demands detective skills to peel back the layers and reveal the history of the garden through time. Only 10 years ago Aberglasney, the garden lost in time, was drowning in a sea of weeds when the Aberglasney Restoration Trust came to rescue the sleeping beauty. The most exciting discovery was confirmation that the Cloister Garden dated back to the 1600s and was indeed a Jacobean/Elizabethan quadrangle - but it took painstaking research to verify this."

[greenfinger]

The drawing of the Abeyglasney mansion below shows it in its Victorian heydays.
The absence of much hard evidence gives ample room to sheer speculation and rumours. Probably a lot of documentation disappeared after 1950 when a period of nearly 50 years of decline and decay set in.
This gave free reign to mystification.
The yew tunnel itself was the subject of Chinese whispers.
Hyper-optimists dated its origine about 900 to 1000 years back. Modern dendrochronology however established its age between 245 and 275 years, still making it the oldest in the U.K.

[greenfinger]

Around the turning of the 16th century the Aberglasney mansion was owned by a Bishop - named Rudd - and 3 or 4 generations after him.
He bought it sometime between 1594 and 1613.
Bishop Rudd must have been an ambitious man, ready to make his way to the top of the politico-religious ladder. Born about 1548 in Yorkshire he studied in Cambridge. There he took his BA in 1566, in 1570 his MA, in 1577 the degree of Bachelor of Divinity. In 1584 he was made Dean of Gloucester to be consecrated Bishop of St-Davids in Pembrokeshire in 1594. He had gained the favour of Queen Elizabeth I.
A man of the Word, a preacher, he was on a course straight to the Archbishopric of Canterbury.
And then, my dear numerous and obliging readers, then .... it all went very wrong.
On 28 March 1596, and to be precise during his Lenten sermon that regrettable year.
 
Come and read the rest one of the following days, amen.

[greenfinger]

The Lenten sermon of Bishop Rudd excelled in references to the transitoriness of life, in casu "the most reverend age of my most deare and dread Soveraigne".
He stretched his poetical effusions to the point of i.a. describing how age had "furrowed her face and bespeckled her hair with its meal."
Aikin writes in his "Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth" that "to remark to her the progress of time was to wound her in the tenderest part, and not even from her ghostly counsellors would she endure a topic so offensive as the mention of her age."
Unconscious of having put his rhetorical foot on sensitive royal toes the Reverend Bishop continued and digressed on sacred numbers.
In "A garden lost in time" by Penny David one reads: "He spoke of three for the Trinity, seven for the Sabbath, seven-times-seven for a Jubilee - and was approaching seven-times-nine for the climacteric year, when (...)".
The Bischop was tout à coup struck by the ominious look of his "dread Soveraign". Her age was precisely sixty-three. The ecclesiastical penny dropped. The preacher feverishly tried to change the topic, but in vain. The Queen was not amused. "(She) muttered that he should have kept his arithmetic to himelf and went off in a huff."
Bishop Rudd didn't make it for Canterbury.