Comments on: Cowper’s Summerhouse and Alcove, Buckinghamshire.

By: Editor

Editor — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 20:10:59 +0000

In reply to Kate Harwood. Hello Kate. We should all spend more time allowing our imaginations to roam. Thank you for sharing your thoughts about this second Cowper’s Seat.

By: Kate Harwood

Kate Harwood — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 17:26:27 +0000

William Cowper was a distant relative of the Earls Cowper of Cole Green and Panshanger in Hertfordshire. He often visited his ‘friends’ there and on the 1862 estate map is a small dot called ‘Cowper’s Seat’ overlooking Humphry Repton’s lake and the valley scenery as we; as the Atkinson house of Panshanger. Repton was not commissioned her until 1799 so Cowper, who died in 1800, would not have seen this landscape. Whether therefore, the Cowper of the seat is the poet is in doubt – he would have been sitting on a hillside at the edge of a Capability Brown landscape looking at a chalk stream and an Elizabethan/Georgian house. However, the Gardeners’ Magazine of October 1 1895 thinks so and mentions that the first seat decayed and the replacement is then in situ. Nothing remains now so we can let out imaginations roam

By: Editor

Editor — Sat, 26 Jun 2021 11:36:13 +0000

In reply to Susan Kellerman. Thanks Susan. I think it would be impossible not to be moved to compose a few lines sitting in the Alcove with that view. Future flâneuses will wonder at all the garden rooms that have popped up as a result of lockdown.

By: Susan Kellerman

Susan Kellerman — Sat, 26 Jun 2021 08:51:14 +0000

Such beautiful, idyllic scenes, and the idea that a poet found inspiration in such retreats make them all the lovelier. I wonder if a certain shepherd’s hut might in 200 years’ time be the subject of a blog from a successor to the Folly Flâneuse?