Denbies
Denbies is a large estate to the northwest of Dorking in Surrey, England. A farmhouse and surrounding land originally owned by John Denby was purchased in 1734 by Jonathan Tyers, the proprietor of Vauxhall Gardens in London, and converted into a weekend retreat. The house he built appears to have been of little architectural significance, but the Gothic garden he developed in the grounds on the theme of death achieved some notoriety.
About Denbies in brief
Denbies is a large estate to the northwest of Dorking in Surrey, England. A farmhouse and surrounding land originally owned by John Denby was purchased in 1734 by Jonathan Tyers, the proprietor of Vauxhall Gardens in London, and converted into a weekend retreat. The house he built appears to have been of little architectural significance, but the Gothic garden he developed in the grounds on the theme of death achieved some notoriety. The estate was bought by Lord King of Ockham following Tyers’ death in 1767, and the macabre artefacts he had installed, including two stone coffins topped by human skulls, were removed. Joseph Denison, a wealthy banker, purchased the estate in about 1787, and it remained in the Denison family until 1849, when it passed to Thomas Cubitt, a master builder. Cubitt’s mansion was abandoned until its demolition in 1953, by which time the family was living in a Regency-style house converted from the housing of the garden and stable staff. What remained of the estate was put on the market in 1984 and bought by Biwater, a water-treatment company. Two years later the company chairman Adrian White established Denbies Wine Estate, using 268 acres on a south-facing piece of land to plant vines. In the nineteenth century Denison and later Cubitt served as local Members of Parliament, for West Surrey. The main feature was a wooded area of about eight acres, Ileros, which was a small hermitage known as the Temple of the Death.
It had a small entrance to the entrance to a small tributary of the Mole Mole, just outside the entrance of the River Mole. To the right-hand side of the entrance was a clock that chimed every minute in the words of William Bowyer, “Time is fleeting and even it is fleeting, even in the least of us that is even to be used”. To the left hand side was a fake stonework panels, each covered in verses reminding the reader of the shortness of human pleasures and insufficiency of pleasures, such as the words: “The Valley of the Shadow of Death’s entrance is hidden out of sight of the public.” The garden’s theme was ‘memento mori’ and the development was given the name of ‘The valley of the shadow of death’, which means ‘valley of the dead’ or ‘the valley of remembrance’. In 1734 Tyers installed a well beside the house; a note in The Gentleman’s Magazine of 1781 gives the well’s measurements, recorded on 4 October 1764, as being six feet in diameter and reaching a depth of four hundred and thirty-eight feet. On that day it contained water to a Depth of twenty-two feet supplied from a spring. The front of the house had a pediment in the central wing decorated with a coat of arms; the rooms were not large but were conveniently situated. According to historian Brian Allen the house was not architecturally significant.
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This page is based on the article Denbies published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
