The Yews of Prior Park

Ralph Allen made his fortune modernising Britain's postal system and quarrying the honey-coloured stone that built Georgian Bath, and in the 1730s he spent part of it building Prior Park, a landscape garden on the hillside above the city designed with advice from the poet Alexander Pope and, later, Capability Brown. A group of yews planted along the path east of Prior Park's Sham Bridge, a stone structure built to look older and more ruined than it is, dates to that same original 18th-century design, contemporaries of the garden's famous Palladian bridge rather than later Victorian additions. A second, similar band of yews marks the woodland's northern edge near the dam between the estate's middle and northern ponds. Yew is one of the few species that can genuinely outlast a garden's fashions without needing replacement, and these have simply kept growing in the positions Pope and Allen's landscapers chose for them nearly three centuries ago, dark evergreen anchors in a garden built to look like a series of paintings from every angle. In winter they draw one of the more unusual visitors to the grounds: hawfinches, a shy finch rarely seen in Britain, feed on yew seeds here.