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40
Historic Gardens 2010
BCD Special Report
Magnificence, would by alluring the Eyes
of Strangers, deprive them of those profuse
Pleasures which Nature has already provided.
Again nature seems to play a prominent
role. Although the gardens are created
through artificial design, like the grotto at
Stourhead, they are seen as more natural
than the artifice of the bath house.
This desire for a more natural experience
was associated with the knowledge that cold
bathing went back to ancient times. Floyer
argued that, ‘I publish no new doctrine, but
only design to revive the Ancient practice of
Physick in using cold baths.’
10
Many of the
writers use this historical lineage as evidence of
the veracity of cold bathing, and at Painswick
the statue of Pan used to stand guard over the
cold bath. However, one should perhaps not
take this association too literally. Pan could
relate to both ideologies; classical and natural.
As Robin Price has suggested, the link with
antiquity ‘is likely to have been no more than
an added and subliminal recommendation to
those already wishing to return to the primal
simplicity of nature’s laws’.
11
At Stourhead
there is a more complex use of classical
iconography with statues of the river god and
a sleeping nymph behind the cold bath. All of
this is complicated still further by the religious
meaning found in John Wesley’s advocation
of cold bathing and Floyer’s statement that he
saw bathing as a baptismal cleansing. These
can be seen in correlation to the growing non-
conformist movement and, as late as the 1800s,
the Quakers running Brislington House, an
elite lunatic asylum on the outskirts of Bristol,
were using cold baths as a central therapeutic
agent in their attempt to cure madness.
12
There were also concerns over the
weakening of health through the indulgence
in luxurious lifestyles. Cheyne and Jean-
Jacques Rousseau were among those who
raised concerns about the link between mental
health and the onward march of civilization.
Rousseau postulated that as civilization
developed, men alienated themselves from
nature and that primitive man was superior,
and less likely to develop mental illness,
because he was closer to his natural state.
A dip in the cold bath in a garden setting
could, therefore, be considered a method of
connecting with an earlier, more primitive,
and ultimately healthier, way of life. Other
writers used examples of the hardiness of
other nations and to argue in favour of the
benefits of cold bathing. Locke wrote: ‘let
them examine what the
Germans
of old, and
the Irish now, do to them, and they will
find, that infants too, as tender as they are
thought, may, without any danger, endure
bathing, not only of their feet, but of their
whole bodies, in cold water. And there are, at
this day, ladies in the Highlands of
Scotland
who use this discipline to their children in the
midst of winter, and find that cold water does
them no harm, even when there is ice in it.’
This represents an idea of Spartan living
and of hardening one’s physical state which
is quite different to Henry Hoare’s rollicking
in the cold bath at Stourhead! However, the
utilisation of all these structures represents the
age old search for health and longevity, and is
still with us in the form of open-air lidos and
the annual Christmas day wintry swim of the
Serpentine Swimming Club, amongst others.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to The Leverhulme Trust (www.
, without whose generous
support through funding The Historic Gardens
& Landscapes of England Project (see p47) the
research for this paper would not have been
possible. Thanks also go to Professor Timothy
Mowl of Architectural History & Conservation
Consultants
),
and Laura Mayer for reading early drafts
and providing helpful suggestions.
Notes
1
Thanks to Laura Mayer for permission
to include this element of her doctoral
research relating to Wynnstay.
2
Smith, 2007
3
Mowl, 2004
4
Smith, 2007
5
The Spectator
, 411, 1712.
6
Quoted in Woodbridge, 1970
7
Mowl, 2004
8
Anonymous,
The Constant Use of the Cold
or Swimming Bath of Great Importance in
the Prevention of Disease and Preservation
of Health
, J Haddon, London, 1834
9
Woodbridge, 1970
10
J Floyer,
An Enquiry into the Right Use and
Abuses of the Hot, Cold and Temperate Baths
in England
, R Clavel, London, 1697
11
Price, 1981
12
This latter case is discussed in its
political context in Jenner, 1998.
Recommended Reading
F Cowell,
Richard Woods (1715–1793):
Master of the Pleasure Garden
,
Boydell, Woodbridge, 2009
C Hickman, ‘The “Picturesque” at Brislington
House, Bristol: The Role of Landscape
in Relation to the Treatment of Mental
Illness in the Early 19th-Century
Asylum’,
Garden History
, 33:1, 2005
M Jenner, ‘Bathing and Baptism: Sir John Floyer
and the Politics of Cold Bathing’,
Refiguring
Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the
English revolution to the Romantic Revolution
,
ed K Sharpe and S Zwicker, University
of California Press, Berkeley, 1998
T Mowl and D Barre,
The Historic
Gardens of England: Staffordshire
,
Redcliffe, Bristol, 2009
T Mowl,
Historic Gardens of Wiltshire
,
Tempus, Stroud, 2004
R Price, ‘Hydrotherapy in England,
1840–70’,
Medical History
, 25, 1981
V Smith,
Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene
and Purity
, OUP, Oxford, 2007
K Woodbridge
, Landscape and Antiquity:
Aspects of English Culture at Stourhead,
1718 to 1838
, Clarendon, Oxford, 1970
Dr Clare Hickman
manages the Historic
Gardens project, co-authoring
Historic Gardens
of England: Northamptonshire
with Professor
Timothy Mowl. She was awarded her doctorate
from the University of Bristol for her thesis:
‘
Vis Medicatrix Naturae
: the Design and Use
of Landscapes in England for Therapeutic
Purposes Since 1800’, and she teaches an
optional unit for the MA Garden History course
at Bristol. Email
.
The mid 18th century plunge pool at Painswick, near Stroud is unenclosed, giving views across the Rococco gardens; pool-side
activities were originally presided over by Jan Van Nost’s magnificent statue of Pan, below. (Photo: John Horsey)
(Photo: Paul Foch-Gatrell)