Stackpole Court gardens lie 5km to the south of Pembroke town. The house and gardens lie within parkland, the estate having origins dating from at least the twelfth century (npren 700003). The last house on the site was demolished in the 1960s (125). It was from the early eighteenth century onwards that the landscape was developed towards its present configuration. The scope and range of the gardens, and plant material within them, are fully described in an Edwardian article in ‘The Gardener’s Chronicle’ of April 1909 (see register account).

The extant gardens lie mainly to the west of the house site, the whole area referred to as ‘Lodge Park’ on early maps. Within Lodge Park is an enclosed area, a quarter circle, with the curved perimeter wall to the south and west. It was referred to as the ‘Flower Garden’, later ‘Lady Caroline’s Garden’. Its partly-intact walls are mostly of stone, around 1.75m high with two ornate, pillared, entrances still extant on the soutrh and east. Within the latter is a rose pergola. A small pavilion or summerhouse, which probably dates to the late eighteenth century, lies facing the house to its west. Towards the northern boundary is a semi-circular seat. Near the centre of the garden a clump of beeches once defined  ‘..a circle, their heads in a dome, and constituting a grand temple’, as described in 1909. Other surviving plant material include holm oaks, sycamores, hydrangeas, Lawson’s cypress, and rhododendrons. The woodland surrounding the garden, with its network of paths, includes sequoia and Spanish chestnut. In the north-west corner is a former ice house (405509).

Lakes and lily ponds over 80 acres surround the house site on the north and east, extending south towards the sea. Lodge Park is linked to Belvedere Hill by a path onto the main drive across a bridge spanning the northern fish pond. To the north-east of the garden, opposite Stackpole village, is a picturesque grotto with associated arch and walling, reached from the garden via the ‘Hidden Bridge’ crossing the pond.

Immediately in front of the house an upper and lower terrace linked by a flight of steps survives, flanked on the front (east) by a dressed low stone wall and a taller one on the west.

Sources:

Cadw 2002: Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales, Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire, 310-16 (ref: PGW(Dy)44(PEM)).

Ordnance Survey six-inch map: sheet Pembrokeshire XLIII (editions of 1864 & 1906); second-edition 25-inch map: sheet Pembrokeshire XLIII.5 (1906).

RCAHMW, 16 November 2020