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This is the tenth in a series of articles about the gardens that Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson created at Sissinghurst Castle. My previous article was about the Tower Lawn at Sissinghurst Castle . This article is about the Orchard.
The photo above shows the orchard, as viewed from the top of Sissinghurst's tower. 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. The Tudor manorhouse of Sissinghurst had three courtyards. My previous two articles in this series were devoted to the Entry Courtyard and the Inner Courtyard, but the third courtyard no longer exists, except as foundations buried in the present Orchard. The orchard occupies the area where the Medieval manorhouse probably stood. There are conflicting theories about whether the Medieval manorhouse was built of wood or of brick, and whether part or all of this manorhouse was incorporated into the servant's quarters of the later Tudor manorhouse, but the existing moat is almost certainly Medieval. The moat provides the northern and eastern boundaries for the orchard, while its southern boundary is marked by a brick wall which is known as the "moat wall" The moat wall was probably the southern foundation of the Medieval manorhouse, so we should picture the house arising from the water of the moat. By the time that the Nicolson's bought Sissinghurst, the southern arm of the moat had been filled in and the wall was almost completely buried under rubbish and brambles. I will be writing about the Moat Walk which they created below this wall in a later article, I am only mentioning it now because it is the orchard's southern boundary. In my previous article, I pointed out that the Nicolson's yew walk cuts the area that was occupied by the cour d' honneur of the Tudor manorhouse in half. The building on the right of the photo at the top of this article is now called the South Cottage, but it originally stood at the south-eastern corner of the cour d' honneur. As you can see in the photograph, the South Cottage is now within the orchard, and you may be wondering why the Nicolson's chose to make the Tower Lawn so narrow, rather than locating the yew walk to the South Cottage. This is partially because they would have had to tear down a toolshed, but it was also because they didn't want to remove the old fruit trees that they found in the orchard. |
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