Dover · GB

Waldershare Park

Waldershare Park is a great early-18th-century country seat and its surviving formal gardens and landscape park about 10km north-west of Dover, near the Kent villages of Shepherdswell, Coldred and Eythorne. The red-brick mansion, begun in 1705 for Sir Henry Furnese and attributed to the architect William Talman, stands in roughly 400 hectares of C18 parkland, and both the house and the grounds are formally listed for their special historic interest. What makes the place quietly remarkable is how much of the original Baroque garden scheme still reads through the landscape: terraced lawns enclosed by yew hedges, an octagonal fountain basin, the stumps of a lime avenue, monumental early-18th-century iron gates, and a wooded 'Wilderness' whose rides still follow the pattern engraved for the estate back in 1719. A Grade I brick Belvedere of 1725, possibly designed with a hand from Lord Burlington, crowns the western valley and commands long views north and south. This is a private estate rather than a ticketed attraction: the mansion was divided into flats in the 20th century, so visitors come chiefly to appreciate the setting, the listed outbuildings and the Belvedere from the surrounding lanes and rights of way across the Kent chalk downs.