A view of the double row of clipped topiary pieces in the yew garden from the top floor of the hunting lodge. Planted by her grandfather in the Twenties, the yew was shaped into these forms by Amanda’s father Basil in the Thirties and early Forties.Steeped in history and intrigue, Beckley Park is an extraordinary place. Only a few miles from Oxford, it feels as if it is in the middle of nowhere, stranded at the end of a long track on the edge of the ancient wetland landscape of Otmoor. Often shrouded in mist, the tall, narrow house – a 16th-century former hunting lodge – rises up from what is essentially an island in the middle of three concentric moats, its three towers, cobbled medieval bridge and mullioned windows giving it the look of a fairy-tale castle.
Originally a Saxon stronghold, built by King Alfred as a fortification against the Danes, it was first recorded as a deer park in 1175. In the 13th century, it became a Royal hunting lodge given to the Earl of Cornwall, brother of Henry III. The park and its manor later fell into decline until the 16th century when it was acquired by Sir John Williams, later Lord Williams of Thame, who built the current house around 1530. Occupied by tenant farmers in the 17th and 18th centuries, it escaped modernisation in that period and, as a result, remains largely as it was when it was built almost 500 years ago.
Today, Beckley is owned by Amanda Feilding, Countess of Wemyss and March, whose grandparents Percy and Clotilde Feilding bought the property in 1919 ‘for the romance of the place’. A colourful, bohemian couple who entertained friends such as William and Henry James and Aldous Huxley, Percy and Clotilde were both architects. Clotilde, a Cambridge-educated mathematician, was one of the first women to practise architecture internationally, beginning her career as an apprentice to the architect and landscape architect Reginald Blomfield, where Percy also trained. Known for his formal garden style, Blomfield had famously dismissed his contemporary William Robinson’s treatise The Wild Garden, favouring a much more structural approach, and his influence can be seen in the topiary garden Percy laid out at Beckley Park, a series of hedged rooms shoehorned into the confined space between the back of the house and the first moat. Having previously been a hunting lodge and farm dwelling, it had not had a garden before, so its design could be plucked out of the imagination.
The youngest of four children, Amanda grew up here and describes a childhood very much rooted in the place, running free round the gardens and letting her mind run wild. ‘As a child, the countryside and garden were a part of me,’ she says. ‘When my siblings went to boarding school, I was here on my own and experienced fantasy adventures. It was a strange, isolated world and its grip was strong. The house was very much a Sleeping Beauty castle, with everything overgrown except the topiary – even that was a jungle threatening to take over at any minute.’ Amanda’s richly imaginative girlhood was a formative influence: she went on to study art and mysticism, travelled widely and has, for the past 50 years, devoted her life to psychedelic science. Under the auspices of the Beckley Foundation, she has pioneered critical scientific research into the medicinal properties of psychoactive compounds to help neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, as well as addiction and mental illnesses such as depression. She also investigates how careful use of the psychedelics can enhance creativity, mindfulness and the mystical experience.