Sissinghurst Castle - Part Three

The photo above is of the entrance range at Sissinghurst Castle, taken from inside the upper courtyard. The paved path, flanked by topiary yew trees, leads to the tower. The photograph was taken by Dave Parker and may not be reproduced in any way without his permission; his website features many beautiful photographs of Sissinghurst Castle.

When the Nicolson's bought the property, the only inhabitable parts of the castle were the entrance range, the tower, the South Cottage, and the Priest's House. At first they dreamed of creating buildings that would link the tower with the South Cottage and the entrance range, but these plans were abandoned as unaffordable, so they created a very unusual home among the remains of their castle and used the walls of the ruined parts of the Tudor manor house to separate their garden into "rooms". The idea of dividing up a garden into rooms was nothing new; it was characteristic of Renaissance gardens and revived by Gertrude Jeckyll and Edwin Lutyens in the gardens that they designed together between 1893 and 1912. What was unusual about the Nicolson's gardens at Sissinghurst Castle is that they lived in their garden as if the garden's rooms were actually the rooms of a grand manor house.

Via claimed the tower as her own private domain and no one ascended to tower stairs to Vita's writing room without her permission. If I had owned Sissinghurst. I would have transformed the entrance range into a home, but the Nicolson's weren't interested in doing that and they focused their attention on the south cottage and the priest's house. Part of the reason for this is that the entrance range had always been servant's quarters, while the South Cottage had been part of Baker family's living quarters in their manor house. Vita was descended from the Bakers and she always saw the South Cottage as the home of her ancestors. The upper floor of the South Cottage contained a bathroom and separate bedrooms for Harold and Vita, with their sitting room and Harold's writing room on the ground floor. The Priest's House had always been separate from the Tudor manor house; it probably dates from the seventeenth century when the Bakers were given permission to have their own chapel and chaplain. The Nicolson's had to wait until the Priest's House was restored before they moved into Sissinghurst Castle because the South Cottage didn't have a kitchen. The Priest's House, as restored by the Nicolsons, had a kitchen and dining room on the groundfloor; upstairs was a bathroom and bedrooms for their two sons.