Midsummer Picnic at Skipwith Hall

We were invited by long standing YGT member Ros Forbes Adam to hold our summer picnic at her family residence, Skipwith Hall. After arrival coffee and cake, we were introduced to the garden and had ample opportunity to wander in the garden and grounds before our picnic lunch followed by strawberries and cream provided by YGT. 

Skipwith Hall started life as a Jacobean farmhouse. It took shape as a Queen Anne manor house for the Parish of Skipwith around 1700, and the mulberry tree in front is likely to have been planted when the upper storey was added during the time of prosperity in the 1770s following the Agricultural Revolution when the hall was the centre of a working estate.

The family of the current owners bought Skipwith in 1898 and moved there in 1929 when Irene Forbes Adam set about a major refashioning of the house and garden. With the help of garden designer Cecil Pinsent, she fashioned a garden around the ancient mulberry in front of the house, made the sunken Italian Garden with dry stone walls, and Richard’s Garden was created against the old hot walls in memory of a grandson.

Her grandson Charlie and daughter-in-law Rosalind came to live there in 2002 and invited Miranda Holland-Cooper to re-design the kitchen garden and many of the borders. The Italian Garden has been restored and Rosalind’s growing interest in gardening for wildlife is reflected in the ongoing management of the garden as a wood meadow. Their landscape architect son Hal Forbes Adam has helped create a new gravel meadow to compliment Cecil Pinsent’s terrace garden in front of the old ‘hot walls’.

A link to an illustrated report of this visit will appear here shortly