gardenhistorygirl

• The Elizabethan Snail Mount

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• The viewing mount at the Garden of Cosmic Speculation (see previous post) is of particularly illustrious ancestry, being a type favored by the Elizabethans who conferred upon it a typically emblematic meaning.

  Sir Francis Bacon’s garden (c. 1620) had ‘in the very middle, a fair mount, with three ascents, and alleys, enough for four to walk abreast; which I would have to be perfect circles…and the whole mount to be thirty foot high’

  A mount of this height had to be ascended by stairs (expensive) or by circular spiralling paths (cheaper), leading to the name ’snail mounts’.

  The best surviving example, shown above, is at Lyveden New Bield in Northamptonshire, where twin snail mounds arise from a moated landscape surrounding Thomas Tresham’s haunting, never-finished Trinitarian retreat.

  (Highly recommended for a visit as one of the most intact Tudor landscapes.)

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