The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

Art Of Landscape Architecture

And describing the scene more fully he writes in the same letter:

"The first glance at your feet falls on a broad simple carpet of turf, around which a softly winding gravel path leads to the entrance and exit of the gigantic edifice. Looking backwards, your eye rests on the two black towers of which the oldest, called Guy's Tower, rears its head aloft in solitary threatening majesty high above all the surrounding foliage as if cast in one mass of solid iron; the other, built by Beauchamp, is half hidden by a pine and a chestnut, the noble growth of centuries. Broad-leaved ivy vines climb along the walls, here twining around the tower, there shooting up to its very summit. On your left lies the inhabited part of the castle, and the chapel, ornamented with many lofty windows of various size and form, while the opposite side of the vast quadrangle, almost entirely without windows, presents only a mighty mass of embattled stone, broken by a few larches of colossal height and huge arbutuses which have grown to a surprising size in the shelter they have so long enjoyed. But the sublimest spectacle yet awaits you, when you raise your eyes straight before you. This fourth side, which has sunk into a low, bushy basin forming the court, and with which the buildings also descend for a considerable space, rises again in the form of a steep conical hill, along the sides of which climb the rugged walls of the castle. This hill and the keep which surrounds it are thickly overgrown at the top with underwood, which only creeps round the foot of the towers and walls. Behind, however, rise gigan- tic, venerable trees, towering above all the rock-like structure. Their bare stems seem to float in upper air; while at the very summit of the building rises a daring bridge, set, as it were, on either side within trees; and as the clouds drift across the blue sky, the broadest and most brilliant masses of light break magically from under the towering arch and the dark coronet of trees. . . . You must imagine the river at a great depth below the castle plain, and not visible from the point I have been describing. The first sight of it you catch is from the castle windows, together with the noble park, whose lines of wood blend on every side with the horizon. You ascend from the court to the dwelling rooms by only a few steps, first through a passage, and thence into a hall, on each side of which extend the entertaining rooms in an unbroken line of three hundred and forty feet.Although almost 'de plein pied' with the court, these rooms are more than fifty feet above the Avon, which flows on the other side."