Grottoes

Grottoes as Garden Features

From ancient shrines to 18th century entertainment spaces we explore the development of grottoes in gardens.

Ancient Gardens, Garden Features, Garden History, Landscape Design

Roman

Ancient, Elizabethan, Georgian, Medieval, Roman, Stuart, Tudor

Worldwide

18th Century, BC

The first man-made grottoes

For the ancient Greeks, grottoes, or nymphaea, were originally shrines built over sacred springs in natural caves, later developing into purpose-built temples.

The Romans followed this idea and also started including grottoes as features in their villas, often decorating them with shells. Wherever they were, water was a must.

Marble Hill Grotto

Nymphaeum in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum. By Andrea Schaffer from Sydney, Australia - Herculaneum, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75232159

The grotto at Fontainbleu. Print from Various views of the Château et des bâtiments de Fontainebleau (series title). Rijksmuseum, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Shell House

Sketch of Pope's Grotto, by Alexander Pope, 1740. Image: Daderot, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Renaissance

The Renaissance in Europe from the 14th to the 16th centuries was a time of looking back to the ancient Greek and Roman civilisations and improving on their achievements in areas such as medicine, art and architecture. In Italy, this included introducing grottoes into gardens.

16th century Italian Renaissance garden grottoes were often elaborate structures, decorated inside with items such as shells and pebbles. They contained fountains and niches with statues of deities connected to water.

When Renaissance garden design spread to France this included grottoes. One of the earliest to be built, in the early 1540s, was the “grotte des pins” at the Chateau do Fontainebleu.

By the 17th century, grottoes, or shell rooms as they were sometimes called, were being built in Britain, often as indoor rooms, for example in the undercroft of the Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace and also at Woburn Abbey. The latter can still be seen today.

18th Century

Starting in the 17th century and reaching its peak in the 18th century, it was common for wealthy young English gentlemen to make a grand tour of Europe to complete their cultural education, spending long periods in both France and Italy. Whilst there, they admired the Renaissance gardens and on their return often built grottoes in their own pleasure grounds.

Pope’s Grotto
One of the earliest was that built by the poet Alexander Pope in 1725 at the entrance to a tunnel built under the road which linked his Thameside house in Twickenham to his garden. It contained a natural spring and was decorated with shells and glass. He later extended this decoration to the tunnel itself including various rocks, minerals and mirrors.

Goldney House
The grotto at Goldney House in Bristol, built between 1737 and 1764, has several chambers decorated with rare shells and quartz crystals and divided by encrusted pillars. The central chamber not only contains a statue of a River God overlooking a rock pool with cascades and giant clams but also statues of a life-sized stone lion and lioness. From the roof hang artificial stalactites.

Painshill
Sited on an artificial island, the grotto at Painshill in Surrey, built in the 1760s, is also richly decorated. The entrance through a dark passage is in sharp contrast to the interior, where minerals such as gypsum, calcite and quartz cover the cavern’s walls and drip from the ceiling in artificial stalactites that sparkle when the sun shines on them through carefully placed openings in the walls.

Fall from fashion
As gardening tastes changed again in the later 18th century, shell and mineral decorated grottoes became less popular with artificial limestone caves taking their place only to be replaced themselves with caves made from natural rocks and Pulhamite, a popular artificial stone.