Remedial works to ornamental ponds within a historic park

Abstract

Prior Park is a historic landscaped garden situated in Bath, funded in the 18th century by Ralph Allen, and designed by the poet Alexander Pope and the landscape architect ‘Capability’ Brown. The gardens include a Palladian Bridge and three man-made lakes, two formed by embankments and the third by a weir situated beneath the bridge. Following decades of decline, the National Trust was gifted the park in 1994, and has since set to restoring the park to its former glory. This paper focusses on the restoration of the lakes and describes how overflow spillway capacities from the lakes were increased to allow flood water to pass safely downstream. It also describes how the embankments were repaired and strengthened without impacting upon the vision of the park set by the original architects. The engineering works included reinforcement of grass turf with geotextile, using stilling basins hidden in chambers below the embankments, and restoration of a cascade feature to one of the dams.