What's left of Redgrave Park today appalls me because I am old enough to remember what it was once like, over fifty years ago. My family had owned it since 1702, had shaped it with a landscape designed by Capability Brown: the wonderful lake was their idea, as was the Neo-Classical mansion and the parkland buildings inspired by Palladian architecture. The ancient wood-pasture and woodlands were inherited from the past and conserved for purposes of lordly leisure - but conserved they were.
Times change. World War Two began the rot by building sprawling hospital and prison camps there. The Hall was pulled down in 1947. My family sold the Park in 1971 to finance a divorce. Meanings are scrambled, unmade, reshaped. Land is ploughed and trees are felled. Families break up.
In the case of Redgrave Park I think too little has survived from the past; present meanings share very little of the historic richness. Maps, photographs and memories may create resonances in sympathetic souls, but the Park today is tragically detrital and ugly. It is a landscape which has lost most of its heritage, its soul. Not even the truly ancient oak trees were immune to transmogrification: they were cut down and not replanted. Belts of trees were felled. Buildings were allowed to rot.
Twenty years ago I distilled what I know of the history of Redgrave Park into a website. Eventually it was taken down when the digital platform changed. Forged in HTML code communicated by dial-up modem, it now survives as a ghost ship berthed in the Wayback Machine, a repository where abandoned websites await the resurrection.
Here is the access code: Redgrave Park - an historical tour. I have tried to communicate something of the rich history of the place. I hope you will find something to stir your imagination.
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