‘Exceeding Fine Country’: An Eighteenth Century Tour of Yorkshire Gardens

Dr Jemima Hubberstey

‘Exceeding Fine Country’: An Eighteenth Century Tour of Yorkshire Gardens

Summary:

This talk examines the travel accounts of Philip Yorke, later 2nd Earl of Hardwicke (1720-1790) and his wife, Jemima Marchioness Grey (1722-1797), focusing on their tours of Yorkshire – which Grey judged to be ‘exceeding fine country’. Both keen travellers, the couple often spent their summers touring the length and breadth of England, as they sought inspiration for their own garden improvements at Wrest Park in Bedfordshire. Their travel diaries, which they had begun in the early 1740s, reveal shifting attitudes to garden design - and engagement with the emerging discourse of the picturesque - which was particularly evident in their accounts of Studley Royal, near Ripon. While Yorke had praised Aislabie’s improvements when he first visited in 1744, by the time he visited again with Grey in 1755, both were critical of the way the…