Prior Park Landscape Garden

About this place

There are only four bridges of this design left anywhere, and one of them stands over a small lake in a steep valley on the south edge of Bath. The Palladian Bridge at Prior Park, built in 1755 from the same honey-coloured Bath stone as the city itself, is the real reason to climb this hill: a colonnaded, roofed walkway across the water, with the Abbey tower and the Georgian terraces filling the valley behind it as if arranged for the photograph. Locals call it the best view of Bath, and they are not wrong. The man behind it was Ralph Allen, who made his fortune from the quarries that built the city and, from 1734, set about turning the combe below his mansion into a garden in the new natural English manner, taking advice from the poet Alexander Pope and later from Capability Brown. What you get is not a flower garden but a made landscape: a chain of lakes, a small Gothic temple, a stone grotto and a small cascade rebuilt after a long restoration of the dams. The mansion at the top is a private school and not open to visitors; the garden is the whole visit. The National Trust has run it since 1993. Entry is £12 for adults, £6 for children aged 5 to 17, £30 for a family of two adults and up to three children; there is no pre-booking, you pay at the gate, and members go free. The catch that trips up most drivers: there is no visitor parking, neither at the garden nor at the school that shares its postcode, beyond a handful of accessible spaces booked by phone and a small paid car park at the school on Sundays only. Take bus 2 from Dorchester Street by the railway station, which drops you right outside the gate in about ten minutes, or walk up from the centre in a steep 25 to 30 minutes. Anyone doing the circular Bath Skyline walk is a few minutes from the entrance. For families: the paths are steep and muddy after rain, and a pushchair is more burden than help, though children who can walk on their own will enjoy crossing the bridge and watching the ducks. The only refreshment is the Tea Cabin by the lower entrance for drinks and cake, so bring what you need. In summer the garden opens daily 10:00 to 17:00, dropping to 16:00 from the autumn; from November to mid-February it opens only at weekends, the light goes early and the paths turn slippery, so check the official calendar before setting out. One to two hours is plenty, and it works best as the end of a clear day in Bath rather than the start.