Lamport Hall and Gardens

A mainly eighteenth century house with a park and nineteenth century garden, on the site of a seventeenth century house and garden. There is an 'Italian garden', made by Sir Charles Isham, with a large rockery. Brent Elliot writes that 'In 1881, an engraving was published showing a toy monkey swinging from one of the miniature trees, and by the 1890s the rockery was swarming with miniature china figures, mostly gnomes, of continental provenance. . . This is the first recorded appearance of gnomes in an English garden, and the motive for their addition was religious. Isham was an ardent spiritualist'. (Victorian Gardens, p 192-3)