ヒントンインザヘッジの湖・トップ4

Public school-boy favourite for stone-skipping and a spot of fishing on the sly. We had a picnic on the bank - it's a lovely place.

Beautiful lake at the bottom of Stowe Gardens by the main entrance. There is accessible paths all the way around too.

One of the first areas of the garden that visitors may encounter is the Octagon Lake and the features associated with it. The lake was originally designed as a formal octagonal pool, with sharp corners, as part of the seventeenth century formal gardens. Over the years, the shape of the pond was softened, gradually harmonising it within Stowe's increasingly naturalistic landscape. Source: Wikipedia

Managed by the Banbury Ornithological Society, the Grimsbury Plantation Reserve is a 3.5-acre (1.4 ha) area of Scots pine and alder woodland. Look out for the Eurasian siskin wintering during the colder months, whilst summer is a good time to spot warblers. The nearby reservoir is popular with dog walkers, whilst the Oxford Canal runs adjacent to the reserve. If you bring your dog, ensure it is kept on a short lead on the reserve so as to not disturb the birds.

This is a delightful local nature reserve managed by the Adderbury Parish Council. Once a part of the ornamental garden for Adderbury House, the lakes were neglected until local efforts to restore them in the 1980s. Today, they are a haven for wildlife. Signs on the trails around the lakes inform you of what you might be able to see and when.

Free to visit

Wonderful site that most of our visitors usually miss. There’s a tunnel behind the cascade that leads into the centre of the lake. Resident bats reside here. Look in and see the pump – which uses water power from the lake to pump spring water around the garden.

Benton Seeley's 1744 Guidebook opens with a description of the Octagon Lake and then highlights this garden structure as "An Artificial Piece of Ruin cover'd with Ever-greens, under which lie the Statues of two River Gods; a beautiful Cascade of three Sheets of Water falls from the Octagon into a large Lake of 10 Acres." The Octagon Lake Cascade or Artificial Ruins Bevington notes that three arches for a cascade were built in 1728-29 and that the artificial ruins decorating them were added by 1738, probably from a design by William Kent. Kent's Shell Bridge in the Elysian Fields, though far less rustic in appearance, has a similar design and serves a similar purpose as a dam and cascade between the Alder River and the River Styx. http://faculty.bsc.edu/jtatter/cascade.html