Wouldn't it be great to discover a grotto on your property . . . ?-------------
Tim Smit at Heligan in Cornwall showed how effective the "lost garden" tag could be when you want to draw in the punters. John Harris at Dewstow House near Chepstow, Gwent, has an even more extraordinary story to tell about the man who lived in his house in Victorian times and the garden he made there. What on earth was in Henry Oakley's mind when in the 1890s he commissioned the well-known firm of James Pulham and Son to burrow under the croquet lawn of his modest villa, with its long views over the Severn estuary? For his client, Pulham created an underground world of caverns and passages, grottoes and waterfalls, pools, stalactites and boulders, all spookily lit by concealed shafts of light coming through grilles let into the lawn above. Why did this unusual place so quickly and completely disappear from people's memories? And how did John Harris, the down-to-earth, practical farmer who now lives at Dewstow, get drawn into this weird fantasy world of Oakley's? More
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