Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 230

This is the story of Watcombe house and estate, lovingly researched over twenty years by local resident and former Sandhurst and Dartmouth lecturer, Geoff Tudor, and brought to publication in commemoration of the bicentenary of Brunel’s birth by the wife of the general manager of what is now Brunel Manor, a Christian Holiday and Conference Centre.

It was characteristic of Isambard Kingdom Brunel that when he looked for a country seat at the height of his career in the 1840s, he disdained to buy any existing estate but was determined to create one for himself out of a bare, arid and exposed hillside above Torquay – a site he had discovered while engineering the building of the South Devon Railway. It provided enough problems for him to solve to satisfy his need for a challenge, and this book tells how he engineered his park and laid the foundations for his house before his financial losses over the calamitous construction of the SS Great Eastern forced him to initiate steps for its sale just before his untimely death in 1859, at the age of 53.

The account is largely formed around two documents – the Watcombe Estate map of 1859 in the Devon Record Office, and Brunel’s garden memorandum book in the Bristol University Library Brunel archive – and it is a useful case study of how a new park and garden was created in the Victorian period: the creation of a surrounding shelter belt of trees; the establishment of walks and carriage drives to encompass the best viewpoints both within and over the surrounding countryside; the engineering of a water supply from seven linked wells and raised nearly 300 ft by a gas-powered pump to two reservoirs 800 yards away at the top of the estate to feed a fountain and provide water in periods of draught for his plants; the purchase of thousands of trees and shrubs including all the latest specimens brought back from Asia and the Americas by the Victorian plant hunters, and the preparation of the soil for them, including use of the very latest fertilizer, ‘a plentiful supply of vegetable mould, wood ash and bone, with just a little Guano and soda and burnt clay’. Brunel intended his gardening to be as advanced as his engineering! His calculations for how many cubic feet of water were required to play his fountain for 12 hours a day, and his annual measurement of the growth of his plantings between 1853 and 1858 show how he threw himself as energetically into this project as all his others.

The book is profusely illustrated in colour, including plans for the never-built French Renaissance chateau-type house he had the country house architect William Burn design for him. Amongst the mine of information, this reviewer was amused to discover that Brunel, who had driven his railways through so many peoples’ back yards was a ‘nimby’ himself when faced with a proposal to build a cement works on the beach below his estate! The major regret to be expressed is the lack of referencing within the text, which abounds in interesting but annoyingly un-attributed quotations from his letters.