Boundary wall of Waterton Park, Walton, Wakefield

Summary

Boundary wall and gate piers. 1821 to 1826, built for Charles Waterton.

Reasons for Designation

The boundary wall and gate piers at Waterton Park, 1821 to 1826 built for Charles Waterton, are listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

Historic interest:
* the construction of the wall is documented by Charles Waterton who built it with the express intention of enclosing the park at Walton Hall to protect native wild animals and birds from predation by poachers and foxes for the purposes of conservation and research, thus creating what is widely considered to be the first dedicated nature reserve in the world;

* Charles Waterton (1782-1865) is a significant and pioneering early-C19 naturalist, researcher and adventurer, whose published writings on his scientific studies of natural history were widely read. He encouraged people from all walks of life to form a closer, beneficial connection with nature by visiting the nature reserve, and even instigated a long-running court case when it was threatened by pollution from a nearby industrial site.

Architectural interest:
* as an enclosing boundary wall built of sandstone that clearly shows phases of construction as it rises in height, relating to the sequential building by Waterton as funds allowed, with the best-shaped blocks used for the most visible sections and tall stone gate piers to the gateways.

Group value:
* the wall has a strong group value with the Grade II registered Waterton Park, and the numerous listed buildings and structures enclosed by the wall, including Walton Hall (Grade II*) situated on an island in the lake, and Charles Waterton’s grave (Grade II).

History

Charles Waterton (1782-1865), naturalist and explorer, was born at Walton Hall and educated at Stonyhurst, a Jesuit college in Lancashire. The Watertons were a leading noble family in the Middle Ages, later losing favour during the Reformation due to their Roman Catholicism, though retaining their property.

In 1767 Charles’ father, Thomas Waterton, had inherited the estate and replaced the medieval moated hall with a new Georgian house on an island, expanding the moat to become a scenic lake. The family also had sugar, cotton and coffee plantations in Demerara in modern-day Guyana at this time and in 1804 Charles was sent to manage his father and uncle’s estates, then worked by slaves. Waterton later demonstrated his antipathy of slavery, writing in 1825, “slavery can never be defended; he whose heart is not of iron can never wish to be able to defend it”. He did not inherit enslaved people or plantations and did not receive compensation when the practice ended in the 1830s. Having handed the plantation management back to his relatives in 1812, Waterton set off on an expedition into the Demerara interior where he obtained samples of the paralyzing curare; his subsequent research was ultimately to lead to the widespread use of the drug in anaesthesia in the C20. His studies and observations of the wildlife in an environment untouched by man also deepened his, then highly unusual, beliefs for a human balance with nature.

Waterton inherited Walton Hall in 1805 whilst abroad. In 1813 he returned home to live, though continuing with his worldwide explorations, which he referred to as “wanderings”, throughout his life, studying animals and birds, and writing numerous accounts and essays which regularly featured in the Illustrated London News. His influential “Wanderings in South America, the north-west of the United States, and the Antilles in the years 1812, 1816, 1820, and 1824” was published in 1825. His careful and detailed studies of wildlife also led to a series of highly regarded “Essays in Natural History” in 1838, 1844 and 1857, mostly about the wildlife of Britain. During his travels, Waterton also collected animal and bird specimens and he became a renowned taxidermist, developing a new technique using mercury chloride as a preservative. He taught the technique to John Edmonstone, a slave on his future father-in-law’s Guyana plantation, and once freed, Edmonstone settled in Scotland where he taught taxidermy to students at the University of Edinburgh, including Charles Darwin. Waterton established his own museum taxidermy collection (now owned by Stonyhurst College) at Walton Hall.

In 1817 Waterton returned again to Walton Hall after a trip to South America and Demerara. Dismayed by the effects poaching combined with a prevalence of foxes was inflicting upon the wildlife on his land, particularly wildfowl, he came up with the idea of turning the lake and park at Walton into a bird sanctuary. Nesting sites were prepared for birds, the keepers and their dogs were forbidden to enter the coverts during nesting season, no fishing was allowed on the lake between late autumn and early May, and the discharging of firearms within the park was strictly prohibited; also no vermin were to be destroyed except brown rats. In 1821, after returning from another trip to South America and Demerara, Waterton continued with his plan of turning the estate into a sanctuary for birds and other wildlife by commencing to build a high stone boundary wall around the park to keep poachers, foxes and badgers out, to create a safe environment for wildlife to flourish. In order to build the wall he appears to have purchased a quarry close to Walton Hall with a loan of £3,100 from his sister-in-law Eliza Edmonstone. Every time he had 500 guineas to spare, saved by his lifelong commitment of not drinking alcohol, he would employ masons until the money ran out, evidenced in the many phases of construction. The resulting wall was over three miles long and between nine and sixteen feet high depending upon the adjacent land. Completed in 1826, it cost around £10,000 to build.

Waterton’s aim was explicitly to protect the wildlife and he also built artificial nesting boxes within the enclosed park, and hides, or watch houses, from which to observe them without disturbance. An article published in 1835 in The Magazine of Natural History and Journal of Zoology, Botany, Mineralogy, Geology, and Meteorology (vol VIII) comments that Mr Waterton “did everything that love for birds could suggest, to make them come and settle there. This protection of birds enables them to perform their daily functions without fear and trembling”. He kept careful notes on the nesting and feeding behaviours of individual species, recording one hundred and twenty-three species who visited his sanctuary, and one winter counted over 5,000 waterfowl on the lake. In a letter dated 1849 he wrote “My carrion crows, herons, hawks, and magpies have done very well this year and I have a fine breed of kingfishers. They may thank their stars that they have my park wall to protect them. But for it their race would be extinct in this depraved and demoralised part of Yorkshire”. Another commentator writing in the same year described how, “Here roaming unconstrained and at free liberty, every bird and animal can be examined in its true character.” (The Naturalist by James Stuart Menteath published in The Mirror, 1835). In addition to his personal use of the park, Waterton actively encouraged visitors and local residents to visit the park to connect with nature, picnic in the grounds, often at the grotto where he had built a starling tower and other bird nesting areas, and to visit the natural history museum in his home containing his taxidermy collection. In one year alone 18,000 visited, including therapeutic visits from mental asylum patients.

Later, Waterton’s dedication to his wildlife sanctuary led him to become an early environmental campaigner, together with his neighbour Sir William Pilkington, fighting a long-running court case against a soap works owned by Hodgson and Simpson of Wakefield. Set up close to his estate in 1839, the works sent out poisonous chemicals that severely damaged the trees in the park and polluted the lake, as well as affecting the whole neighbourhood with crops failing, livestock sickening and watercourses poisoned. After three expensive court cases Simpson was forced to relocate elsewhere.

Charles Waterton died at Walton Hall on 25 May 1865 after a fall in the estate grounds and is buried at the south-east end of the lake. The estate passed to Waterton’s only child, Edmund Waterton, who, having run up large debts, sold Walton Hall in 1876.

The house on the island is now Waterton Park Hotel and in 1995 Waterton Park Golf Club opened with a course set around the lake within the park enclosed by the boundary wall.

Waterton’s pioneering approach to conservation was highly influential worldwide and Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada, now part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a biosphere reserve, is named after him.

Details

Boundary wall and gate piers. 1821 to 1826, built for Charles Waterton.

MATERIALS: sandstone.

DESCRIPTION: the approximately 105 hectare parkland of Walton Hall, now Waterton Park Hotel, is enclosed by a stone boundary wall of around nine to sixteen feet (2.7m to 4.8m) high, though varying in height in some places. It is constructed of stones of varying sizes, making phased construction clear in places. The wall is mostly intact in its circumference and remains readable as a boundary wall encircling the approximately lozenge-shaped park., though the southern section on the eastern side is more deteriorated and elsewhere there are patches of damage by trees and partial collapses. The west side of the wall is bounded by the disused Barnsley Canal, now partly infilled.

The principal entrance to the park is on the west side of the boundary wall. The drive crosses over the late-C18 Walton Hall Canal Bridge (Grade II, NHLE:1135575) and passes through a slightly inset section of wall containing a wide gateway flanked by tall square gate piers of squared blocks with moulded stone caps (left-hand gate pier presently covered in ivy). On the north side of the gateway a short section running behind the golf club building outside the wall has been reduced in height and an archway incorporated to allow access to a pedestrian footbridge over the former canal. The high wall to the north, continuing to the north-west corner, is of coursed, squared sandstone blocks with stone coping. It contains a pedestrian gateway with a shaped stone sill, monolithic stone jambs and lintel, with a later iron railing gate. On the south side of the gateway the high wall is angled down to incorporate the outer rubblestone wall of a lodge (now demolished) with a tall round-headed window overlooking the canal, before returning a short distance towards the canal and continuing along the eastern edge of the former canal as far as Haw Park Bridge (Grade II, NHLE:1200056) to the south. The wall then has a short dogleg before again running parallel to the canal and the road (Sike Lane) which passes over the bridge. In this corner is a wide gateway with two tall, square gate piers of squared blocks with stone pyramidal caps and modern wooden double gates. Between the right-hand gate pier and the left-hand corner of a line of single-storey, stone buildings the short stretch of boundary wall is ramped higher and is constructed of rubblestone and narrow, roughly-shaped stones, with shaped stone coping. The boundary wall then continues from the right-hand corner of the rear of the buildings. It is covered in ivy; where it is visible towards the south-west corner the wall is constructed of rendered rubble stone.

At the southern end of the park the boundary wall turns away from the line of the canal in a south-easterly direction through the north end of Haw Park (woodland), turning on its east side in a north-easterly direction along the edge of fields. This section of the boundary wall is mainly constructed of roughly-coursed rubblestone, which is partly rendered; where the render has worn off the rubblestone is deeply weathered in places. Coping is of triangular-shaped stones and in places the wall is stepped. There is a blocked pedestrian doorway in the wall to the right of Haw Park which may be secondary as it is less well formed.

The eastern side of the boundary wall contains an entrance for a former track across the fields to Nostell Priory around 4km to the east (shown on 1:10560 Ordnance Survey map surveyed in 1849-51). It has tall, square gate piers of squared blocks with pyramidal caps. The wall to the south of the gateway is more extensively collapsed though parts remain where diagonal buttresses of stone blocks have been built against the inside of the wall. To the north of the gateway the tall wall is squared sandstone blocks, with some shaped coping; this section particularly shows several phases of building in the courses of stonework which differ in the size and shape of the stone blocks. There are a number of diagonal buttresses of stone blocks built against the outside of the wall.

At the north corner of the boundary wall is a large, square pier. The wall returns down the hillside in a south-west direction to join with the north-west corner. It is constructed of coursed, squared blocks and towards the right-hand end is a round-arched archway enabling the Drain Beck to exit the park.

Mapping note: the wall is mapped with a 0.25m buffer (as per HE mapping guidelines) and incorporating gateway openings. It abuts the rear of the single-storey buildings close to Haw Park Bridge.

Sources

Books and journals
Christian, G, Naturalist in Advance of His Time. Charles Waterton (1782-1865) in Country Life, (May 27, 1965), 1290-1291
Lever, C, Father of Wildlife Conservation. Charles Waterton (1782-1865) in Country Life, (June 3, 1982), 1698-1699
Wright, P, A History of Walton, (1985)
Hobson, H, Charles Waterton: His Home, Habitats, and Handiwork, (1866)

Websites
Foote, Y, Waterton Charles (1782-1865), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 Sept 2004, revised 26 May 2016, accessed 6 November 2023 from https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/28817

Other
Menteath, J S, The Naturalist. Some Account of Walton Hall, the Seat of Charles Waterton, Esq (The Mirror, 1835).

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