UK: Kent – Hever Castle

🌞A Scorcher in Kent: Hever Castle and the Edenbridge “Market” That Wasn’t

It was another scorcher, the kind of day where the sensible British response is to potter about close to home rather than do anything ambitious, so we’d decided to keep things local. We were staying in Dormansland at the time, on a housesitting job, and Hever Castle was only a short hop up the road, so it rather selected itself as the day’s outing. There was no great rush about it either, which is one of the small joys of being on holiday rather than at work: you can have a proper lie-in, a leisurely cup of tea, and still call it a productive morning if you’re dressed by half ten.

We rolled out eventually and pointed the car towards Hever, and on the way we passed through Edenbridge, a tidy little Kentish village that I’d never had cause to visit before and probably wouldn’t have stopped in at all had it not been for a hand-painted sign promising a “Thursday Market.” Now, I am constitutionally incapable of driving past a sign like that without investigating, so we parked up and went for a look, expecting bunting, bustle, and possibly a man selling kettle corn.

What we got was five stalls. Five. One of which was a single enormous trestle table heaving under the weight of fruit and vegetables, which I suppose technically counts as a market if you’re feeling generous, but it was hardly Borough Market on a Saturday. I won’t pretend I wasn’t a bit let down. Still, you put a brave face on these things, don’t you, so we wandered off through a little alleyway into the High Street to see what else Edenbridge had up its sleeve.

Karen, eternal optimist that she is, made straight for the local charity shop, the way she always does, on the basis that you never know what gem might be hiding on the rails. On this occasion, nothing fitted and nothing tempted, so she came out as she went in, empty-handed and slightly crestfallen. We had a potter up and down the rest of the High Street after that, more out of duty than expectation, and it was at this point that I fell, as I so often do, at the first hurdle of a bakery. I emerged a few minutes later with a vegan sausage roll and a slab of bread pudding, which I considered, on balance, to be a perfectly reasonable consolation prize for a morning of retail disappointment. Some men collect stamps. I collect baked goods from disappointing villages.

🏰 Arriving at Hever, and a Quick History Lesson

By the time we actually got ourselves to Hever Castle it was pushing one o’clock, which tells you something about how leisurely our “leisurely start” had actually been. We paid the entry fee, which felt like the sort of sum that would once have bought you an actual castle, and wandered in through the grounds. A notice board near the entrance informed us that there was a talk on Hever’s roses scheduled for two o’clock, down by the walled garden on the far side of the park, which sounded like exactly the sort of gentle, sit-down activity that suited the heat of the day, so we decided to wander in that general direction at our own unhurried pace, saving the castle itself for later.

The grounds on the way down were genuinely impressive, not least the topiary, which must require the sort of patience I simply do not possess. I can barely keep my own privet hedge in a straight line, let alone coax a yew bush into a recognisable shape over a period of years, so hats off to whoever’s job that is.

Now, a word on Hever Castle itself, because it has rather more history packed into its modest Kentish footprint than you might expect from the outside. It began life in 1270 as little more than a gatehouse with a walled enclosure, built under James Fiennes, the first Baron Saye and Sele, and for a couple of centuries it stayed a fairly unremarkable defensive structure of that sort. Everything changed in 1462, when Geoffrey Boleyn, a former Lord Mayor of London and the ancestor of a rather more famous Boleyn, bought the place and set about converting it into a proper Tudor manor house. His grandson Thomas inherited Hever in 1505, and it was here, in this unassuming corner of Kent, that young Anne Boleyn spent a fair chunk of her childhood, long before she caught the eye of Henry VIII and managed, more or less single-handedly, to trigger the break with Rome and the creation of the Church of England. That is, when you stop to think about it, an extraordinary amount of world-altering consequence to have its roots in one modest house in the Weald of Kent.

As Anne’s relationship with the King became more scandalous through the 1520s, the castle apparently served as something of a bolt-hole for her, somewhere to retreat to whenever the endless gossip and scrutiny of court life became too much to bear. Several of the seventeen love letters from Henry to Anne that still survive today were sent here, which gives the place a peculiar sort of romantic-historical weight that you don’t really feel until you’re standing in the rooms in question.

After Thomas Boleyn died in 1539, the castle reverted to the Crown, and Henry, in one of history’s more pointed gestures, later handed it over to Anne of Cleves as part of her divorce settlement from him. I can only imagine the conversations that produced that particular arrangement; it strikes me as a rather backhanded sort of leaving present; here’s a castle, now please go away. After that, Hever drifted through a series of owning families — the Waldegraves, the Humphreys, the Meade-Waldos — slowly falling into disrepair, until by the late nineteenth century it was little more than a picturesque, half-ruined shell let out to tenants who presumably didn’t have the funds or the inclination to do much with it.

Its fortunes changed dramatically in 1903, when the American millionaire William Waldorf Astor, reputedly the richest man in America at the time, bought the place and proceeded to throw a serious portion of his considerable fortune at restoring it.

🌳 What Astor Did to the Garden Is the Real Story

Here’s the thing that genuinely surprised me: what Astor did to the grounds is, if anything, more astonishing than what he did to the castle. When he arrived in 1903, there was barely a garden worth the name, just boggy marshland hugging the old walls. His response to this was not modest. Between 1904 and 1908, he employed over a thousand men on the estate, including a dedicated workforce of around eight hundred labourers who spent two solid years digging out, entirely by hand, a thirty-eight acre lake. Two years. By hand. For what is, when you strip away the romance of it, essentially a very large ornamental pond at the end of what would become the Italian Garden. It’s the kind of Edwardian extravagance that makes you simultaneously admire the ambition and wince slightly at the sheer scale of manual labour involved.

The Italian Garden itself was designed by the architect Frank Loughborough Pearson specifically to display Astor’s substantial collection of Roman and Greek statuary, and it includes a Pompeiian Wall lined with niches holding various antiquities, alongside a shaded Pergola Walk dotted with grottoes and ferns on the opposite side. As if that weren’t enough horticultural ambition for one man, Astor also commissioned a yew maze in 1906, grown from a thousand six-foot saplings imported specially from Holland, and an equally remarkable topiary chess set, with each piece shaped on metal frames in a nursery for three years before finally being planted out near the Tudor Garden, where it still stands today. We’d get a proper look at that chess set later in the afternoon, and I can confirm it remains every bit as impressive as the history books suggest.