"An Account of the Improvements in the Gardens & Park at Cannonhall, the Time when begun, when finished & the Expense[s] thereof."

£8,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

John Spencer III (1719-75) inherited the Cannon Hall estate at Cawthorne, near Barnsley in South Yorkshire from his father William in 1756. The family had made their fortune in the local iron industry and the late 17th or early 18th-century Hall, set in a park through which the Daking Brook runs, was five bays wide and three bays deep. Four years later Spencer invited the well-known landscape architect Richard Woods (1715/16-93), then of Chertsey, Surrey, to redesign the gardens and park at Cannon Hall. Richard Woods arrived on 1 April 1760 and John Spencer recorded the progress of his work in diaries and account books, now in the Spencer Stanhope family archive at Sheffield Archives (the diaries are Sp.St.60633/13-18). From those original diaries and accounts John Spencer extracted the most important entries relating to the improvements to his gardens and park and the house from 1760-65 and transcribed them into the present volume. Writing of the original diaries Fiona Cowell has noted: “John Spencer’s diary provides this commission with a unique aspect, a glimpse from the employer’s side into the process of landscaping a park. Surviving documentation elsewhere is in the form of accounts, or memoranda and letters written by Woods himself, but here Spencer’s own evident enjoyment and delight in the progress of his improvements is clearly expressed in this diary.” Also exceptional is Spencer’s close personal involvement with the gardens themselves as he devoted days to working

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