19 Feb National Open Gardens

Stanway Fountain & Water Garden

Sunday, 17th May
2:00pm – 5:00pm
Stanway, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, GL54 5PQ

20 acres of planted landscape in early C18 formal setting. The restored canal, upper pond and fountain have recreated one of the most interesting Baroque water gardens in Britain. Striking C16 manor with gatehouse, tithe barn and church. The garden features Britain’s highest fountain at 300ft, and it is the world’s highest gravity fountain. It runs at 2.45pm and 4.00pm for 30 mins each time.

Stanway House is a charming, lived-in, golden-stoned jewel surrounded by beautiful parkland and villages and distinguished by one of the finest water gardens in England which now has a 300ft fountain – the tallest gravity fountain in the world. Stanway is a honey-coloured Cotswold village with a Jacobean great-house which has changed hands just once since AD 715. The garden rises in a series of dramatic terraced lawns and a rare, picturesque grasswork to the pyramid which in the eighteenth century stood at the head of a 190-metre-long cascade descending to a formal canal on the terrace above the house. This was probably designed by Charles Bridgeman, and exceeded in length and height (36 metres) its famous rival at Chatsworth (see entry in Derbyshire). Inside the house is a fascinating painting recording the cascade as it looked in the eighteenth century. The canal, the upper pond behind the pyramid, a short section of the cascade and the upper fall below the pyramid were restored in 1998, and a 100-metre-high single-jet fountain (the tallest garden fountain in the world) added in the middle of the canal. The medieval pond in the Lower Garden, recently restored, has enhanced the beauty of the fourteenth-century tithe barn. It is hoped soon to restore the upper cascade, a series of pools and waterfalls on the hillside east of the pyramid, from which magnificent views of the cascades, canal, fountain, house and vale of the Severn can be had. A high walk along the hillside above the cascade reveals the splendid park trees. In all 23 acres.