Early Years
The history of the Sugnall Estate dates back to the Domesday Book (1086), which was then known as Soggenhulle, or Bird Hill, although the Domesday scribes actually wrote “Sotehelle”.
At that time Sugnall was owned by two Saxons – Frane and Fragrin – but they were quickly replaced by Joceran, a Norman, who was then part of the new ruling elite following King Harold’s defeat in 1066.
Although there is no information about the location of his family’s house we know that he was a prominent landowner, with lands at Bishop’s Offley, Aspley and Chatcull, in addition to Sugnall. Within three generations, however, most of these lands had been given away. The overlord, the Bishop of Lichfield, then took Sugnall off Joceran’s family and by the 1280s he was letting it to several tenants.
The manor (by then with only a fraction of the land in Sugnall) was probably demised to the family of Charnes. Their property passed by marriage to the Younges, who still owned Charnes until the First World War.
1500-1640
By 1500 the manor of Sugnall had passed to the Badger family who lived in Pershall. They let out the manor house in Sugnall and in 1590 sold the manor of Sugnall with its manor house, or hall, to Thomas Pershall. Pershall was from a local family, a junior branch of the Swynnertons of Swynnerton, that took their name from Pershall in about 1320. Actually, although they held the manor of Pershall, they held very little land there, and their main property was centered on Chetwynd, near Newport. When much of this went to heiresses around 1440, the surviving male Pershalls were left with Horseley and Bishop’s Offley. They remained minor landowners till Thomas took up the law and made a fortune, in part by specializing in handling lands that had been confiscated, and by 1580 he was wealthy enough to start buying up land in Eccleshall parish and within a few years he had accumulated 3,500 acres.
The Badgers' land was a small part of this, but was to gain great importance under Thomas’s son, John. Not only did the Badgers' land include the site of the manor, but it was a wonderful situation for a house on a hill overlooking Copmere. John purchased one of the very first baronetcies in 1611, and was a major figure in Staffordshire society. The old hall at Horseley was inadequate and so he built a new hall here at Sugnall.
There are no pictures of his house, but it is easy to imagine it being in the Jacobean style. Fragments of the house survive in later stonework, and show that the windows were mullioned and finely carved. Sir John (as he was now) also flattened the top of the hill for formal gardens. The lower area, where the walled garden is, was probably orchards. The chain of pools towards Copmere were probably dammed by Sr John.
1680-1730
The third Baronet, another Thomas, was probably the builder in about 1680, of the Old Hall Kitchens, which survive to this day. Steps lead down to vaulted cellars under an area in front of the kitchens, and these may be another remnant of the Jacobean house. Sir Thomas’s heir was his granddaughter, Arabella, who in 1728 married John Campbell, the son of a Scottish Earl, and who was known by the courtesy title of Lord Glenorchy. He was a great improver of the estate, rearranging fields and planting. He subscribed to Stephen Switzer’s Practical Husbandman and Planter (1733), and at the same time purchased copies for his agent, Walter Noel (who looked after the estate when he was away), and for his gardener at Sugnall, Richard Brown, who died and was replaced by Stephen Wright that year.
Walled Kitchen Garden
Lord Glenorchy decided to establish a walled kitchen garden in the dip between the old hall and the main road. In 1737 brickmakers set themselves up in a field not far away and supplied over 250,000 bricks to Glenorchy. He purchased plants and seeds from a London nurseryman and by the summer of 1738 he had a fully functioning kitchen garden. The walls remain after 280 years in remarkably good condition, and two of the original doorways remain.
Stephen Wright was paid £18 per annum, and his under gardener, Thomas Hainshaw, or Henshaw, was paid £11 in 1736. We know where Henshaw lived – a black and white cottage that still survives in the garden of the present hall.
Another of Glenorchy’s improvements was the planting of woods from the hall to Copmere, where he built a Gothic boathouse. These woods were a long thin strip, wide enough for a ride from which he could observe what was going on in his fields, but widening at a point where there were the ugly scars of marlpits that were hidden with the planting. This type of layout was called an ornamented farm, or ferme ornée.
The walled kitchen garden had no glasshouses, and in the 1780s, the new owner, John Turton, decided not just to rebuild the hall, but also to build a vinery with backsheds. He chose the north-west wall to be the spine wall of his new building, and he rebuilt the outer wall in this location to be alongside the lane outside. In order to heat his new vinery he built a stack of hot air flues inside it. The arrangement of boilers and chimneys were removed when a hot water system was installed 60 years later (see below), but the scars on the spine wall tell us much about the flue stack.
The courses in the wall ran slightly downwards to the left, but lines of snapped-off bricks have been inserted irrespective of the original coursing. Some of these snapped-off bricks survive almost to their full length – and originally they were 18 inches long, twice the length of a normal house brick. This tells us that the flues were chased into the spine wall by 4 inches, were 9 inches wide and were supported by a 4 inch wall inside the vinery. Above the flue stack was rendering scored to simulate stonework – this mostly remains. Keeping the fires going meant constant attendance. Hence the backsheds included not just a potting shed and a tool store but accommodation for the undergardener. His bedroom must have been quite cosy, as it was close to the boiler, but he probably had to get up several times in the night to stoke the fire.
In the 1830s a new owner, Richard Hodges, evidently decided to update the heating arrangement. The old flue stack was removed and space made for a hot water boiler. This required a large stokehole behind the spine wall and a ‘saddleback’ boiler (still surviving). From here hot water was sent around the vinery.
Hodges died in 1873, and the estate was sold. The particulars listed: “A large walled-in Kitchen Garden about two acres in extent, abundantly planted with Fruit Trees, now in perfection; large Pine Pits, Vineries, Greenhouses, Potting Houses, &c”.
The new owner was an iron master from Dudley called Walter Williams. One of his main products was chains. He was in many ways typical of industrialists who sought to join the landed gentry. He took a keen interest in hunting and built a gamekeeper’s cottage with adjacent kennels in order to house the hunt’s dogs. In 1880 Williams was Sheriff and from 1881 an honorary major in the Staffordshire Yeomanry. By 1879 he had demolished John Turton’s house, except for the kitchen wing, together with most of the stables and farm buildings, intending to rebuild in Italianate style. An architect’s sketch view remains at Sugnall Hall. However he proceeded no further than a set of carriage houses and he subsequently added the eastern part and the billiard room to Sugnall House, where he was residing.
Another great interest was exotic plants. He brought the gardener he had employed at previous properties, Joseph Dovey, to Sugnall and built the gardener’s cottage in a Swiss style into the wall of the kitchen garden for him and his five children. William’s new glasshouses included a lean-to double peach house planted with peach and nectarines, an Azalea House, a fernery, a Camellia House, a span roofed cucumber house in two compartments, an adjacent plant house, an orchid house, a stove house, a range of ten-light pits, and ranges of cold frames. Williams also converted the cellars of the Old Hall to a glass-covered fernery.
Peach, pear, plum, fig and cherry trees were trained on walls, and lead labels were provided for identification. There were also pyramid apples and pears, bush fruit, and a small pond at the centre, having a fountain and water supply from a cast-iron tank outside the walls, fed by rams at the dams of two of the pools in the woods.
The Walled Garden Since 1900
In or just before 1890 Joseph Dovey’s place as head gardener was taken by George Dean, a Cheshire man, but who had been working as a gardener in Worcestershire and then back in Cheshire. He must have had a staff, but the only one we know about was his boarder in 1891, the 20 year-old Edward Baker. When the Lowe family purchased the Sugnall estate in 1893 they found Dean in place, but he appears to have become ill in 1900. Before he died in 1901 his replacement was found, Frederick Flatman. He was originally from Somerset, married his wife Ellen who was from Yorkshire, and settled down at Sugnall, having a number of children there.
The Lowes probably found that all Williams’s greenhouses were proving costly to maintain, so in 1908 Mrs Lowe replaced a number of them by a flower display house from the firm of Foster and Pearson from Nottingham. Their glasshouses were the best that could be bought, with very carefully designed ironwork making tasks easy. In those days glasshouses were made in panels at the factory, sent by train to be picked up by horse and cart, and assembled by the owner.
Annie Hudson, who went to work at Sugnall Hall in 1926 as a 13-year-old scullerymaid, and living in the servant’s quarters on the top floor, remembers the gardens as they were in about 1930. Mr Flatman was still head gardener, and there was Mr Dix, Alfred Lowe, and Tommy Barrow. Although Mr Flatman lived in the gardener’s cottage, the others had to walk to work from up to a mile away. Mr Flatman’s career at Sugnall came to a sad end when he was dismissed by Mrs Lowe for selling produce. Although it had always been a perk for gardeners that they could keep or sell produce that was surplus to the requirements of the ‘big house’, evidently the scale of his sales angered Mrs Lowe who must have considered them inordinate. We will never know precisely what happened.
At that time the north-west wall had peaches, apricots and figs, the north-east wall had pears, and the south-east wall had cooking cherries. One pear remains – the sole survivor. There were gooseberries along the track to the gardener’s cottage. The dwarf pyramids around the quarters had grown out through lack of training. Victoria plums, black plums, damsons, greengages, cooking apples and eating apples including russets are remembered. A cut flower border was found in the border under the south-west wall.
During the Second World War the head gardener was Mr Young. Because of a lack of staff the garden began to go downhill. After the war Mr Young took on a lease of the garden, and Mrs Young used to sell produce to passers by at the crossroads. The garden was difficult to let, as market gardening on this scale was simply not economic. Starting in the 1960s, a series of tenants took on the gardens with varying intentions as to the horticultural use of the garden, but no venture made much money. The most successful was the tree nursery run by Richard and Dilys Johnson during the 1990s. Being a specialist in grafting Mr Johnson did not require a huge area, and the walled garden suited.
The Walled Garden Today
The Sugnall Estate regained control of the garden from the start of 2006 and spent that year sorting out the paths, electricity and water, ready for planting 200 apple and pear trees in the spring of 2007. There were also 50 wall fruit planted. Also during 2007 the lavender was planted as an edge between the fruit trees and the paths, and a start was made on laying turf between the fruit trees and the cultivated areas. In 2007 and 2008 the major problem was getting rid of the weeds, of many types, infesting the ground. The solution was to lay membrane.
In 2009 a start was made on serious production of vegetables, strawberries and other soft fruit, and today we grow a wide range of crops including: apples, pears, cherries, raspberries, tayberries, strawberries, rhubarb, globe artichoke, asparagus, French, broad and runner beans, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cabbage, cucumber, marrows, courgettes, pumpkins, Swiss chard, spinach, lettuce, leeks, onion, shallots, beetroot, carrot, parsnip, potatoes, tomatoes, herbs, peppers, companion planting, sweet peas, marigolds and nasturtiums.
