Lodge Park's Hidden Secrets with Roger Davies MBE QGM

About the talk

Lodge Park near Sherborne is known for its grandstand, its deer course, and Bridgeman's plan of 1729. Far less is known about the ground beneath all three. Bridgeman arrived to find it already shaped by others. This talk re-examines the archive material, alongside a detailed cartographic and geometric study of the landscape itself.

The results are surprising. Ground first marked out in prehistory was reused in the Anglo-Saxon period. Oaks planted in the 1490s still stand on one of those older alignments. Later designers took up points already fixed in the ground.

Two periods take the foreground. The first is John 'Crump' Dutton's enclosure of the park in the 1620s. The second is Charles Bridgeman's adaptation of that landscape in the 1730s. What was built there does not match his surviving plan of 1729. Something later guided the work, and it has never been identified.

Within both lies remarkable hidden geometry, either long forgotten or never recognised. Barrows, boundary points, ancient oaks and avenues fall into relationships that look deliberate rather than accidental.

Taken together, the evidence invites a re-evaluation of Lodge Park. One discovery sits at its centre, unrecognised for three hundred years. Bridgeman set a single figure across everything that came before. What that figure is, the talk will reveal. The pattern lies deeply hidden, with the oldest structures at its heart. Plotted out, it is instantly recognisable.

About the speaker

Roger Davies MBE QGM is a retired army officer and businessman. His interest in historic landscapes grew from where he lives. Home is Sherborne, Gloucestershire, with the parklands of Sherborne and Lodge Park close at hand.

He has undertaken meticulous surveying and close analysis of archived material. He also draws on his military past, interpreting landscapes in innovative and unusual ways. He characterises the features within them to discover new insights. His approach begins with how people have used and observed the ground they lived in across the ages.