Rose Garden

Narrator:

An old brick pillar is topped by a stone ball. It is an eye-catching feature on this curiously shaped wall - known as the Irishman’s Shirt. Bryan Hewitt will explain how it acquired its unusual name, after Bowles brought the Tudor pillar back here from nearby Gough Park.

Bryan Hewitt:

it was about eight or nine feet tall and was diamond shaped as seen from above and had some wonderful brickwork with very fine lines of cement which Mr Bowles greatly admired and Bowles said “yes, I’d like that and we can put it up in the garden!”.

So it was sawn in half somehow and it was bought here by a horse and cart …

And it was erected where you see it here to this day and Bowles capped it with a stone ball and he noticed when it was completed that the ball looks as if it wants to roll to the left as seen from one side and looked at from the right it looks as if it wants to roll to the other side. He went up it with a ladder and checked it with a spirit level and to his surprise it is absolutely square on that plinth, and it is simply an optical illusion caused by the diamond shape of the pillar. And Bowles…added a wall and a summerhouse, all built from reclaimed materials – bricks, columns, the tiles on the floor – and then beyond, heading east, the other wall and then it turned right with the wall and headed south a couple of feet and finished it with that wonderful serpentine brickwork that you see. And he called the whole thing the Irishman’s Shirt, because he’d heard a tale of a cheeky Irish tinker who’d knocked on a kindly old lady’s door and asked her if she’d be so kind as to sew a shirt onto his button…

Narrator:

Bowles grew many tender plants in the bed on the southern, sheltered, side of the wall - in the hope that they would survive the winter. To this day the gardeners at Myddelton use this area to experiment with growing unusual and exotic pants.