Painshill Park

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Painshill Park, near Cobham, Surrey, England, was developed between 1738 and 1773 by the Hon. Charles Hamilton, 9th son and 14th child of the 6th Earl of Abercorn. It is one of the finest examples of an 18th Century English Landscape Park.

Hamilton was born in 1704 in Dublin, was educated at Westminster School and Oxford, and went on two Grand Tours, one in 1725 and a further one in 1732.

In 1738 Hamilton began to acquire land at Painshill and, over the years, built up a holding of more than 200 acres.

His park was among the earliest to reflect the changing fashion in garden design prompted by the Landscape Movement, which started in England in about 1730. It prompted a move away from geometric formality in garden design to a new naturalistic formula.

Hamilton eventually ran out of money and sold the estate in 1773.

Henry Lawes Luttrell, 2nd Earl of Carhampton (7 August 1743 – 25 April 1821) bought Painshill in 1807 from William Moffat. Luttrell lived at Painshill Park after having fled from the magnificent ancestral Luttrellstown Castle near Clonsilla outside Dublin, where his notorious role in crushing the Irish Rebellion in 1798 made it unsafe to stay. (His ancestor Colonel Henry Luttrell had been assassinated in Dublin in 1717 for betraying the Irish to King William III of England.) After his death in 1821, his wife Jane lived there until her death in 1831 when it was sold it to Sir William Cooper, High Sheriff of Surrey.

Sir William Cooper, High Sheriff of Surrey and his widow lived there until 1863, and installed both Joseph Bramah's suspension bridge and water wheel, plus John Claudius Loudon's arboretum.

Until the Second World War the Park was held by a succession of private owners; however, in 1948 the estate was split up and sold in separate lots for commercial uses. The Park, as such, soon disappeared and its features fell into decay.

By 1980 the local authority, Elmbridge Borough Council, had bought 158 acres of Hamilton's original estate and the work of restoring the Park and its many features could start. In the following year the Painshill Park Trust was founded as a registered charity with the remit "to restore Painshill Park as nearly as possible to Charles Hamilton's Original Concept of a Landscaped Garden for the benefit of the public."

The restoration of this Grade I landscape is continuing, further progress being dependent on the availability of funding.