WILLIAM STUKELEY’S HOUSE AND GARDEN IN GRANTHAM, 1726–9

After spending seven years practising as a doctor in Boston, William Stukeley moved to London in 1717. The following years were his most fertile, but by 1725 he had become disillusioned with Town and decided to move to Grantham in his home county of Lincolnshire. During his brief stay, 1726–9, he modernised his seventeenth-century yeoman’s house, and simultaneously developed ideas on the religion of the Druids and garden design that were unique and interacted with each other. Both were greatly influenced by the archaeological discoveries he had made at Stonehenge and Avebury (1719–24). At the same time he gradually changed his ideas on Christianity, which led to ordination in 1729 and a great change in his life.