Stourhead, Wiltshire

WOODLAND TO PARKLAND

Illustrator Alice Stevenson enjoys curious places and surprising perspectives in her travels around the country, seeking out puzzles and wonders with an artist’s eye

My hope was for crisp autumn sunlight today, but it is misty and damp in Great Bradley Wood. Most of my immediate surroundings are distorted in the fog, apart from a carpet of orange leaves with moss-covered branches randomly arranged underfoot, as if thrown to divine the future. Islands of star moss appear, and single lines of ivy wind up the trunk of an alder like decorative embroidery.

The mist makes the world ten metres away become indistinct, then entirely erased, creating a geographical disconnection to my surroundings. I am in a small woodland bubble floating through a white void. The trees to my right clear, revealing what should be a dramatic view towards Wiltshire and King Alfred’s Tower, but instead the fern-covered floor just stops, revealing only faint grey shadows of the pines on the downward slope. A single branch in the shape of a sinister dinosaur bird materialises from the edge of the flat land.

These ancient woods, part of the Maiden Bradley Estate, are a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Looking inwards, the spaces between the skinny young ash trunks are grey and smoky, as if there is a fire in the forest. The distant trees are blurred as if rendered in grey-green ink on wet paper or smudgy chalk pastel. This gives those that are closer an ultra-distinct quality, like they’ve been painted on the blurry backdrop with thick black ink.

I discover an abandoned book to the side of a path. This atmosphere of fairy-tale foreboding cannot help but make random things feel significant. I pass a group of dying foxgloves, loitering like a gang of delinquent youths. As we near the gate I find a hydrangea. The tips of its shiny green leaves are a deep red, as if they’ve been dipped in blood. The petals of its flowers vary from pale ice-blue to deep pink and purple, as if they have been tie-dyed or the rain has caused their colours to bleed.

On the road now I walk towards a tunnel of beech, the world melting away to blankness around it. The trees join to create a broad arch and at the end of the tunnel the indistinctiveness merges the branches of the two trees together, brushstrokes of yellow and green with dark marks in a curved formation, an illusion that dissipates as we walk through it. In the grounds of Stourhead, the view across the artificial lake is a perfect arrangement of tall Italian alder and western hemlock trees in a striking blend of brilliant red to muted green.

In spite of the mist, their edges burn with vitality. The elegantly angular ginkgo tree is surrounded by a deep golden halo of leaves. In the wooded area, leading to the grotto, I look out through a mesh of delightfully arranged and coloured foliage.

This composed scene is the vision of Henry Hoare II and was laid out between 1741 and 1780 in a classical 18th-century design that is typical of the landscape movement. It is beguiling here, but knowing that this atmosphere is entirely contrived takes the edge off the enchantment, especially after experiencing the way that the mist in Great Bradley Wood transformed my surroundings into a painted, fairytale stage set.