This venerable pile, one of the oldest continuously-inhabited houses in
England, stands upon a knoll of rising ground at the southern end of the
tract of rich alluvial land known as the Vale of Berkeley, that
stretches away for ten miles or more north-eastward in the direction of
Gloucester. Within two miles to the west is the Severn, already a mile
across and rapidly widening to its estuary. On the side of the higher
ground the town creeps up to the shelter of the Castle and the grand old
church, on the lower is a level stretch of water-meadow.
Seen from the meadows some half-mile away it looks like some great
fortress roughly hewn out of natural rock. Nature would seem to have
taken back to herself the masses of stone reared by man seven and a half
centuries ago.
The giant walls and mighty buttresses look as if they had been carved by
wind and weather out of some solid rock-mass, rather than as if wrought
by human handiwork. But when, in the middle of the twelfth century, in
the earliest days of the reign of Henry Plantagenet, the castle was
built by Robert, son of Harding, he built it with outer walls ten to
fifteen feet thick, without definite plan as it would seem, but, as the
work went on, suiting the building to the shape of the hillock and to
the existing demands of defensive warfare.
When the day is coming to its close, and the light becomes a little dim,
and thin mist-films rise level from the meadows, it might be an
enchanted castle; for in some tricks of evening light it cheats the eye
into the semblance of something ethereal--sublimate--without
substance--as if it were some passing mirage, built up for the moment
of towering masses of pearly vapour.
So does an ancient building come back into sympathy with earth and
cloud. Its stones are carved and fretted by the wind and rain of
centuries; tiny mosses have grown in their cavities; the decay of these
has formed mould which has spread into every joint and fissure. Here
grasses and many kinds of wild plants have found a home, until, viewed
from near at hand, the mighty walls and their sustaining buttresses are
seen to be shaggy with vegetation.
These immense buttresses on the meadow side come down to a walled
terrace; their foundations doubtless far below the visible base. The
terrace level is some twelve feet above the grassy space below. The
grass then slopes easily away for a distance of a few hundred feet to
the alluvial flat of the actual meadow-land.
Large fig-trees grow at the foot of the wall, rising a few feet above
the parapet of the terrace, from which the fruit is conveniently
gathered.
It is in the deep, well-sheltered bays between the feet of the giant
buttresses that the most interesting of the modern flower gardening at
Berkeley is done.
White Lilies grow like weeds in the rich red loam, and there are fine
groups of many of the best hardy plants and shrubby things, gathered
together and well placed by the late Georgina Lady Fitzhardinge, a true
lover of good flowers and a woman of sound instinct and well-balanced
taste respecting things beautiful both indoors and out.
The chief relic of the older gardening at Berkeley is the remains of the
yew hedge that inclosed the bowling-green on three sides; the fourth
side having for its boundary the high retaining wall that supports the
entrance road beyond the outer gate. The yews, still clipped into bold
rounded forms, may have formed a trim hedge in Tudor days, and the level
space of turf, which is reached from the terrace by a flight of downward
steps that passes under an arch of the old yews, lies cool and sheltered
from the westering sun by the stout bulwark of their ancient shade.
The yew arch in the picture shows where the terrace level descends to
the bowling-green. The great buttresses of the main castle wall are
behind the spectator. A bowery Clematis is in full bloom over the steps
[Illustration: THE LOWER TERRACE, BERKELEY CASTLE