Written by Martin Dixon on 01 December 2020.
Painshill Landscape Garden was created between 1738 and 1773, by the Hon. Charles Hamilton. It is one of England’s finest and a Grade I Listed Park and Garden
Born in Dublin in 1704, Hamilton, the ninth son and 14th child of the Sixth Earl of Abercorn, embarked on two Grand Tours across Europe before acquiring the land at Painshill. As well as landscaping, an artificial lake and exotic planting, the gardens boast a wealth of man-made structures.
These include temples, a waterwheel, a mausoleum and a grotto. There was also an ice house, built close to the lake from where ice would have been harvested during the winter months. The ice house, dating from 1830, has been restored and can be viewed close to the more obvious Gothic Temple.
The site is listed by Historic England.
Written by Neil Iosson on 12 August 2025.
Painshill is an 18th-century designed landscape near Cobham laid out by the Hon. Charles Hamilton between the late 1730s and the 1770s as “a living picture” of contrasting scenes: lakes, plantations and a sequence of architectural follies intended to be discovered on foot. Hamilton conceived the site as a staged progression of views and moods, an English-landscape exemplar that combines naturalistic planting with deliberately artificial structures.
Among those follies the Crystal Grotto occupies a singular place: an artificial cave built in the 1760s and finished in the later 1760s, executed as a constructed subterranean chamber faced and veneered to resemble natural cavernous mineral growths. The exterior is formed in tufa-like facing while the interior was lavishly encrusted with a wide range of crystalline minerals — quartz, feldspar and even the ornamental Blue John among other spar-like deposits — arranged as stalactites, pillars and chandeliers to catch and refract light. In its day it was described as one of the finest grottoes of the period and is routinely noted as among the largest grotto chambers constructed in England.
Technically it is an engineered cave and the main structure is brick. A tunnel passage and entrance arch give way to a main chamber whose illumination is largely indirect: openings onto the lake allow water to reflect daylight into the grotto so that the crystalline surfaces scintillate. Archaeological investigation during 20th-century restorations documented hidden hydraulic works — underground pipework and a pumped supply (conjectured to have used an Archimedes-type screw in a small pump house) that fed reflecting pools and cascades within the grotto: evidence that the feature worked as both spectacle and mechanical water feature.
Contemporary eyewitness and traveller descriptions emphasise the grotto’s theatricality: visitors recorded “transparent spars, stalactites, crystallisations… hanging pyramids, chandeliers and baldachins”. Such accounts speak to the 18th-century taste for controlled illusion.
Like many large Romantic gardens, Painshill suffered decline in the 19th and 20th centuries; the grotto lost much of its internal decoration and, after mid-20th-century neglect, roof damage and theft of leadwork left it derelict and the roof collapsed. Restoration under the Painshill Park Trust from the 1980s onward — a long programme of archaeological recording, reconstruction of lost elementry plantings and re-creation of the grotto’s crystal surfaces — has returned the chamber to something approaching its 18th-century appearance and reinstated its hydraulic staging. The site today is protected and interpreted as a designed historic landscape.
Further Information:
Painshill Crystal Grotto
