Lullingstone Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

Despite its name, Lullingstone Castle is not a fortress but a brick manor house in the Darent valley, about one kilometre south-west of Eynsford, in the Sevenoaks district. The estate, recorded as early as the Domesday Book, has belonged to the same family line since the late Middle Ages, today represented by the Hart Dykes. The ensemble combines a three-storey house, built in the 16th century and extensively remodelled in the 18th, an imposing red-brick gatehouse with polygonal turrets, listed Grade I, and the small church of St Botolph, which preserves the funerary monuments of the Peches, the Harts and the Dykes. It was in the mid-18th century, under the Dykes, that the house took the name "castle". The park, laid out in the 18th century on the former deer park, retains pollarded oaks and hornbeams, a lake, an ice house and a so-called Queen Anne's bath. Since the early 21st century the walled garden has housed the World Garden created by Tom Hart Dyke, which displays thousands of species arranged according to a map of the world.