The photo above shows the view from the Cottage Garden over the clipped hedge that backs the the Sissinghurst Crescent, down the grass walk towards a statue of Dionysus which stands on the opposite bank of the moat. The photographs in this article were taken by Dave Parker and may not be reproduced in any way without his permission; his website features many beautiful photographs of Sissinghurst Castle.
In my article about Sissinghurst's Orchard, I mentioned the Medieval wall which is the orchard's southern boundary. A medieval manorhouse once stood in the area that is now occupied by the orchard. This manorhouse seems to have risen directly from a "U" shaped moat on its northern, eastern and southern sides, and the Medieval wall probably supported the southern wall of the house. The northern and eastern arms of this moat are still filled with water, but by 1930, when the Nicolson's bought Sissinghurst, the western part of the moat had been filled in and the wall was almost hidden by brambles. We know that these had been cleared away by October 16th of that year, because on that evening Vita wrote to Harold from her room in the tower (it was the first night that she spent at Sissinghurst) with the news that one of their gardeners had "cleared the moat walk, and a lovely wall has come into view."
Vita's letter clearly shows that even at this early date, she and Harold were thinking of this area as their "moat walk". I would have wanted to excavate the western arm of the moat so that it could be filled with water, but they don't seem to have seriously thought about doing that. I suppose that they valued the wall so highly that they wanted to be able to walk along it. I also suspect that excavating the moat might have threatened the stability of the ancient wall.
In my previous article, I wrote about the garden that the Nicolson's created on the western side of the South Cottage. This cottage is on a different angle from the Moat Walk and in order to unite them, Harold used a designer's trick that he learned from the great architect Edward Lutyens (who had been in love with Vita's mother and was close with the Nicolsons). Harold created a semi-circular terrace at the west end of the Moat Walk. This has always been called the Sissinghurst Crescent, after a housing project that Harold admired; I suspect that the Nicolsons were laughing at their own pretensions. As you can see in the photo below, the steps leading up to an elegant bench at the back of the crescent give a dramatic terminus to the walk, but it has a grandeur that contrasts oddly with the adjacent Cottage Garden. In the photo, some tall flowers in the Cottage garden can be seen above the clipped hedge which backs the bench. In this photo, you can also see two of the four Irish yews that form the focal point of the cottage garden.
