A paper for the session on the ‘Archaeology of Zoos’ within the theme 'Landscapes, Gardens and Dreamscapes' at the World Archaeology Congress, Washington DC, June 2003

PICTURES IN THE LANDSCAPE:

A VIEW FROM AN AVIARY

Matt Edgeworth, Albion Archaeology, Bedford, UK

Introduction

It is characteristic of archaeological evidence that it rarely reveals its secrets all at once. Rather the evidence – and our understanding of it – emerges only gradually through an unfolding interplay of exploration and discovery. Sometimes unexpected or surprising evidence forces fundamental shifts in perception. Networks of accumulated assumptions can collapse in the face of evidence that contradicts and challenges taken-for-granted beliefs. In this account of the investigation of an aviary, I try to take the reader through some of the changes in focus involved in archaeological practice - the ‘tiny revelations’ of emerging evidence and corresponding ‘partial enlightenments’ experienced by archaeologists in their interpretation of a site.

In the autumn of 2001 a team from Albion Archaeology was commissioned to investigate a ruined aviary structure, in order to inform the possible reconstruction of the building. The aviary is a part of the Swiss Gardens in the village of Old Warden, Bedfordshire. These were laid out for the 3^rd Baron Ongley in the 1820s or 1830s, though the names of the actual designers and gardeners are unknown. We first encountered the aviary in a ruinous state, only recently cleared of a tangle of shrubs and small trees. Its cage had long since been removed. All that remained was a low twelve-sided wall, the interior of which was filled with dense layers of accumulated leaf-mould. Sticking up out of this near the centre of the interior was the metal upright of a former bird-bath. There are few historical references to the aviary, although a local tradition insists that eagles were kept here. An early photograph of the aviary survives, but the view is too distant and fuzzy to be of much use. Basically nobody knows what the aviary originally looked like. None of the original plans survive. It was as though a little prehistoric period had opened up in the middle of the Industrial Age. Our brief was to obtain as much information as possible about the structure and design of the building, to aid the intended reconstruction.

Initial Assumptions

It is important to set out here our view of the aviary prior to excavation, and how we thought it fitted into the overall garden design. Being situated at the end of a vista on the eastern fringes of the gardens, we assumed that the aviary was a peripheral and largely ornamental feature. It may even have been a later addition and not part of the original garden design. At close range, it seemed obvious that visitors looked into the cage to view the captive birds inside. Garden layout, however, suggested that the aviary was also meant to be viewed from the Swiss Cottage, an ornate 2-storey terraced building on a mound right in the centre of the gardens. ‘Picturesque’ gardens often contain within their design contrived views or ‘pictures’ of the landscape, as seen from a particular standpoint. Indeed, looking down the vista from the Swiss Cottage to the aviary, this long range view (now partly obscured by trees) seemed to have been deliberately framed by a large floral arch.

Our initial understanding of how the aviary had once been perceived by garden visitors, then, can be summarised in the following way:

• It was a large but fairly peripheral structure located on the edge of the garden
• It was intended to be looked at from afar, possibly as part of a contrived ‘picture’ in the landscape
• It was situated at the end of a vista/walk, along which the aviary could be approached
• It was looked through from close quarters - the object of attention now being the birds inside the aviary cage.
• The direction of the visitor’s gaze was outside-in.

The Aviary Structure

It’s useful at this point to describe in detail the aviary structures, after the cleaning of walls and some excavation of the interior had been completed (Figure 1). The detail is important in that it illustrates our early focus on specific matters pertaining to the structure and design of the aviary, understood at that time as a kind of stand-alone building not particularly connected to the rest of the gardens.

Figure 1. Excavating the Interior

The twelve-sided red brick wall forms a structure exactly 12 yards across (I use old fashioned feet and yards rather than metres in this paper because that was clearly the unit of measurement employed by the builders of the aviary). Each side measures 3 yards along the centre line of the wall.

Importantly, three of the sides are about 1 foot lower than the other nine, giving the structure an open outlook to the west. There is no indication of a door or gate in the wall, which is continuous all the way round. Presumably there was a door in the cage itself. Indeed, a metal latch was found amongst cage fragments in the demolition deposit on the interior. Also found were numerous metal rods of various lengths and thicknesses (sawn through during demolition) which once comprised upright and horizontal elements of the cage structure, as well as artefacts related to the looking after of the birds themselves.

Figure 2. Cage Fragments and Figure 3. Bird Bowl

Although nothing of the cage survived intact, the wall itself holds several important clues to its shape and design. Most of the cornerstones and some of the copings have shallow sockets, sometimes accompanied by small linear notches or grooves. These sockets, regularly spaced, show where the cage rested on the wall. They tell us that the main uprights resting on cornerstones were placed 3 yards apart, with subsidiary uprights resting on copings 1 yard apart.

Another important clue is provided by a metal band, which was discovered (by a combination of excavation and metal detecting) to run all the way round the outside of the wall. The band is thought to have acted as a kind of ‘girdle’, preventing the wall from collapsing outwards. This would not have been necessary if the cage uprights were vertical, since the structural forces would be pushing straight down onto the wall. However, a dome type of construction would result in forces pushing the wall outwards. The existence of the outer band, then, strongly suggests that the cage was in the form of a dome. If the metal dome was as high as it was wide, then it could have reached the imposing height of 36 feet - making the aviary an imposing structure that would indeed have been a prominent landmark when viewed from afar.

Figure 4. The Metal 'Girdle'

As can be inferred from the above description, our attention at that time was highly focused on structural details. Test pits were dug to reveal wall foundations, to facilitate the taking of soil and mortar samples, to search for external walkways, etc. Meanwhile the leafmould and demolition deposits on the inside of the aviary were being excavated down onto the upper surface of a former gravel floor.

Discovery of the Internal Building

It was while clearing the interior that unexpected evidence began to emerge. Brick walls of an internal building started to appear as the leafmould was trowelled away, taking the form of a six-sided structure (Figures 5,6 and 7). The western side, taken to be the front of the building is open - possibly for a door. Again, the unit of measurement appears to be the yard. The back wall measures 3 yards, which is also the distance from the back wall to the end-stones, either side of the front ‘entrance’. A test pit excavated against the outside of the building showed the foundations of the walls to be massive and deep. Clearly this was no flimsy bird-shed, but a substantial building in its own right.

Figures 5,6 and 7. Uncovering the Internal Building.....And Its Form Revealed

No floor level was located within the building and it seems likely that the former floor was pulled up long ago. A number of tiles which could have formed part of such a floor were found. Also discovered were several large pieces of slate, most probably used for roofing.

Figure 8. Tiles and Slates

Perhaps the most surprising discovery from inside the interior building was an assemblage of hundreds of pieces of coloured glass. Colours represented are blue, green, yellow, red and purple. Also found were many fragments of lead window came which once held the glass in place. Some of these still retained the diamond shape that must have once formed part of the window design.

Figure 9. Window Glass Fragments

What was the internal building for? Was its main purpose functional or ornamental?

And were birds its only visitors? The coloured window glass is there for humans, not birds. It would have been seen to best advantage from inside the building, with the light shining through from outside. What is more, the building seems to have been constructed on a human scale, with a human-sized entrance or door and space for several people to stand or sit inside. In which case, why was it sited inside the aviary? We will return to these questions in due course.

Surveying the Site: the Aviary in Context

The strange thing about surveying and planning a site is that it forces a different mode of perception upon archaeologists. Putting down our trowels and disengaging from the evidence in hand, we shift out of our embodied and situated perspective upon material things. Now we construct a picture of archaeological evidence as if we were looking down at it from directly above, from all points of view simultaneously. Figure 10 shows the act of surveying the aviary (the author is holding the staff) as viewed from directly behind the internal building looking west. Note in passing the magnificent red foliage of a Japanese maple that blocks the view; this will have a bearing on an argument developed later in the paper.

The process of surveying and planning the aviary brought home two points to us. First, the internal building was an integral part of the original aviary design – not a later addition. Second, the aviary itself, far from being a peripheral feature, was likewise an integral and critical part of the overall garden design. The key to this new understanding was the realisation that both the garden and the aviary structures (and some other structures such as the Swiss Cottage) were laid out upon the same axis. Consider, for example, the axis of symmetry that is embedded in the construction of the aviary buildings (Figure 11).

Note that the outer wall, the internal building, and a brick base (of a bird-bath or perch?) near the centre of the aviary are all precisely set out on/around an east-west axis. This axis of symmetry ties these three elements into a single overall structural design, strongly indicating that they are in fact contemporary and original features. By way of contrast, the metal base of a second bird-bath (the column of which still survives) is positioned slightly off the principal axis, indicating that this is in fact a later addition.

Now consider the position of the aviary within the garden as a whole (Figure 12).

Figure 12 shows that the aviary is situated on an east-west axis which is one of the main features of the overall garden design. Also on this axis is the Swiss Cottage itself - the principal structure and focal point of the garden - as well as the entrance into the gardens and a monumental vase on the western side.

The axis of symmetry of the aviary structures and the east-west axis of the garden are one and the same. What this means is that the aviary can no longer be considered a stand-alone or peripheral feature, an afterthought or later addition. More than just a bird-cage, the aviary structures (and the birds within) have to be seen as an integral part of the larger garden design, linked to other structures.

Figure 13 zooms in on the eastern part of this main axis, showing it to form one arm of a cross-axis. Now the aviary and the Swiss Cottage can be seen, along with a plinth on an island in a pond and a monumental cast iron vase flanked by stone lions, to form the points of this cross. The Broad Walk with its two rose bowers forms the north-south arms. The vista from the Swiss Cottage to the aviary forms the east-west arms. What is more, the aviary and the Swiss Cottage are facing as well as counterbalancing each other within this arrangement. Just as the entrance to the internal aviary building (and the aviary itself, with its lowered walls on its western side) faces the Swiss Cottage, so the door and verandah of the Swiss Cottage face directly towards the aviary.

An interesting point to note here is that, on this cross-axis, it is the internal building (not the central point of the aviary) which is equidistant with the Swiss Cottage. Another hint, perhaps, that the internal building is a structure of some importance.

It seems incredible now that we had tried to understand the aviary separate from its context - its situation within the Swiss Gardens as a whole. Indeed, the theme of birds emerges elsewhere in the gardens. There is a rock edifice, for example, known as the Eagle Redoubt. There are two stonecast eagles flanking the floral arch between the aviary and the Swiss Cottage. Another eagle (Figure 12) overlooks the plinth on the island in the pond. Even today peacocks and other birds wander over the lawns, and there is a flourishing ‘bird of prey’ centre (apparently unconnected) in the grounds of the Shuttleworth mansion nearby, where the Ongley house once was. In order to understand the aviary, then, we might have to try and understand (the rationales and the modes of vision embedded in) the gardens as a whole.

The gardens clearly try to evoke the atmosphere of Switzerland, albeit in the distinctly non-mountainous terrain of Bedfordshire. The neighbouring village of Old Warden received the same treatment, with many of the estate cottages rebuilt in rustic style and planted round about with fir trees. To inhabit this dreamscape, Lord Ongley occasionally required his tenants to wear tall hats and red cloaks whenever visitors passed through. Not just birds, then, but people too were on display!

The cult of all things Swiss and rustic was only an aspect of a Picturesque movement which had deeper and more serious philosophical themes running through it. There is not the space to do more than allude to these here. But the making of landscapes in the manner of pictures (a reversal of landscape painting, which made pictures in the manner of landscapes) was a major development in garden design. Though much underrated today, the extraordinary achievement of the Picturesque movement was to subvert the conventional mode of vision that was – and still is – so dominant in western thought and practice. It was a reaction against the austere geometric layouts of Capability Brown and others. It always strove, perhaps unconsciously, to place the viewer inside the scene – to make the viewer an intrinsic part of that which is being viewed. Without ever stating it explicitly, it challenged the notion of the detached observer.

That such a radical move should occur within the context of landscape improvements by aristocratic landlords like Lord Ongley is perhaps surprising. But it was in the education of the rich that current thinking on the arts , philosophy and science came together. The creative impulse behind Picturesque gardens was provided, on the one hand, by thinkers like Gilpin, Knight and Price – although their debates centred on fairly dry theoretical issues like definitions of beauty. On the other hand there was the much more practical input of a host of gardeners and architects. Famous names like William Kent and J.B Papworth are remembered, but many garden designers have been completely forgotten, their surviving work being their only monument.

The cultivation of a rustic quality to buildings and scenes was made into an art form. In a picturesque garden, what seems to be the most natural – the most rugged, rough, or rustic – is actually the most cultural. Strangely enough, this is also the central paradox of zoos. Drawing inspiration from landscape paintings (of Salvatore Rosa, Gaspar Poussin and Claude Lorraine), the designers of the picturesque introduced into their gardens two qualities which they believed were crucial in the composition and arrangement of scenery – ‘variety’ and ‘connection’.

Walk around the winding paths of the Swiss Gardens and you not only find yourself moving from scene to scene (literally through the pictures in the landscape), you also find on your journey a remarkable variety of structures which attract attention as pictures in their own right. There is an Indian Temple, a thatched Tree Shelter, a tiny Chapel nestled into the side of a bank, the Swiss Cottage itself built on top of a knoll, a Grotto and Fernery, and so on. In most cases the designers have gone to immense effort to make these structures ‘picturesque’ to the eye, to be prominently visible from various vantage points, and to fit harmoniously into the setting of the garden. I call this the objective aspect of garden structures.

There is however another and equally important aspect to these buildings, and that is indicated by the fact that they are very difficult to walk past without going inside. Grotto, fernery, Indian temple, chapel, summer house – these were clearly intended to be entered and explored by the garden visitor. Each provides an enclosed space within which a particular kind of embodied experience is possible.

I call it embodied because you have to be there to experience it. It is not at all like looking at a painting, where the viewer is essentially separate or detached from the scene that is viewed. You are inside the picture, not outside of it. You are a part of the scene, not a-part from it. Your viewpoint, far from being static (as in the case of the spectator of a painting) is provided by the shifting stance and posture of the body moving through the internal space of a doorway, cave entrance, room or tunnel. And because you are a moving and embodied presence – an active perceiver rather than a passive one – the spaces and surfaces unfold before and around you in a moving panorama in which the configuration of things is always changing. You are no longer dependant on vision alone. Unlike the smooth canvas of a landscape painting, the wonderfully tactile surfaces of fern, shells, pebbles, bark and fir-cone invite you to touch. And the overall perception, on a hot autumn day, is that of a journey from the heat of the sun into the great coolness of the interior – an embodied sensation that can never be completely conveyed by contrasts of light and dark on a painter’s canvas. I call this the subjective aspect of garden structures.

The two aspects are connected. Once inside one of these structures, the doorway, entrance, window or whatever is frequently orientated so as to provide a framed view of the very structures and landscape features which provide a point of view to it. A famous example of this from another garden is afforded by the grotto at Stourhead, which has a contrived view of the lake framed in the cave mouth (supposedly evoking the cave in a haven near Carthage where Aeneas and his followers took refuge in a storm). But the Indian temple in the Swiss Gardens provides an equally good example. Sitting on the seat within, you find yourself looking directly across bridges along a contrived vista towards the plinth on the island in the pond. This is looking from the inside-out, as opposed to looking from the outside-in.

One of the ways in which designers of Picturesque landscapes brought the disparate elements of a garden together into an integrated whole was to link the subjective aspect of one structure to the objective aspect of another, each providing a point of view to and a point to be viewed from the other. As William Gilpin said of the Rotunda at Stowe:

(Dialogue upon the Gardens at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, 1748)

Just as a network of invisible lines of force bind together the pieces on a chess-board, so a network of intangible lines of perception link together the many structures and landscape features in the design of a Picturesque garden. The aviary has to be understood, not just as a structure in its own right, but as part of such an integrated overall design.

The objective aspect of the aviary has always been clear. Viewed from the Swiss Cottage, the aviary is the structure at the end of the vista, to be viewed from afar. Accordingly, we had thought that the aviary cage might have been an elaborately ornate as well as an impressively large structure (though as it happens nearly all the fragments of cage found are fairly plain and functional). As visitors approached the aviary, however, its objective quality would have shifted onto the birds inside. Looking through the cage at the birds, the visitor would perhaps have circled the aviary (hence our concern to look for external walkways). The logic of cages in modern zoos and aviaries remains secure. After all, cages are generally supposed to separate the cultural observer or viewer (the visitor) on the outside from the natural object or viewed (the birds or animals) on the inside. To think any other way contravenes in some fundamental way our common sense ideas (neatly ordered by the cage itself) about the relative places of observers and observed, subjects and objects, cultural beings and natural things.

Looking at the objective aspect of the internal building can help us to interpret this structure too. It could also have been viewed from the Swiss Cottage, though the degree to which the cage would have obscured the view at that distance is not known. Excavation has provided enough structural evidence, in the form of wall footings, tiles, roofing slates, coloured glass, other window components, etc, to suggest that it was an ornate and ‘picturesque’ building in its own right. The depth of foundations indicate that it was quite tall. Indeed, it could be argued that it was the main structural feature of the aviary, designed to attract the visitor’s attention, especially when viewed from close-up ( the cage from this viewpoint being essentially a transparent structure to be looked through rather than at).

While considering the objective aspect of the internal building, it is worth noting that one of the functions of the many-coloured windows could have been to let light out as well as to let light in. A powerful light source placed within the internal building would have had a magical effect when viewed along vistas or glimpsed through trees by someone walking through the garden. While modern zoos and aviaries tend to close as darkness falls, it is known that evening was one of the times when Lord Ongley invited guests into the gardens. This is in keeping with one of the aims of the Picturesque movement - to transform a landscape into fantasy, literally a dreamscape, where magical effects and optical illusions of all kinds were possible.

Coloured lamps are mentioned in the diary of Cecilia Ridley, a visitor to the gardens in the 1830s, as one of the means through which a ‘fairyland’ effect was achieved. She does not mention the aviary, but described the garden as the "most extraordinary garden in the world made out of a bog, full of little old summer houses on little round hills, china vases, busts, coloured lamps – in short quite a fairyland" (Ridley 1990). At night a lamp in the internal building at the back of the aviary, behind what could have been a bird perch, may have had the effect of silhouetting large birds against the light source. Or it could have had the equally startling effect of casting the shadows of the birds in flight upon the leaves of the encircling trees, illuminated in a pool of light.

Even when looking at the objective aspect of the aviary, then, it becomes impossible to see it as an isolated structure, separate from the surrounding environment. But if the aviary is to be understood in the wider context of the gardens as a whole, surely it should have the same double-aspect as all the other garden structures. Why, unlike the other buildings, does it have an objective aspect but not a subjective one? Indeed, the aviary seems to be the only structure meant to be viewed from the outside and not intended to be entered into and explored from within - apparently located at the end of a vista and not at the beginning of one. Why should it not provide a standpoint or point of view as well as a point to be viewed from elsewhere?

Could it be that our assumptions themselves form a kind of cage, framing our perception in a particular way and preventing us from seeing a fundamental truth about how the aviary was used? There is of course no reason at all why visitors should not have been invited into the aviary, in much the same way as into a grotto or fernery. In fact the aviary would have been full of exotic vegetation as well as birds (during excavation we encountered the roots of some of the trees and bushes that had been planted here). This was not a modern zoo, dealing with large numbers of people who have paid to enter and view but have to be kept apart from captive animals and birds. Practical problems of keeping visitors out of cages did not apply in the same way. The whole idea was for the visitor to go in with the birds. Each visitor was a privileged and specially invited guest. And the aviary, like other garden structures, was designed as part of the embodied experience of the ‘Picturesque’ that guests were invited into on their journey round the gardens.

Once we admit visitors into the aviary cage (it was, after all, our own preconceptions that formed the cage that kept the visitors out), a radically new interpretation of the internal building becomes possible. Always difficult to conceive of as a structure just for birds, it can now be seen as similar in many respects to the Indian Temple, the Swiss Cottage and the Chapel. It was a place, a kind of small pavilion if you like, for people to enter into on their journey round the gardens. The only difference is that it was situated inside the aviary cage, and so was surrounded by the birds and the plants that the cage enclosed. Viewing this constructed ‘natural’ world from within rather than from without must have been very different from the experience provided by modern aviaries and zoos.

The view of the aviary down the vista from the Swiss Cottage was reciprocated by a view of the Swiss Cottage from the internal building in the aviary in the other direction. The two views are reflections of each other. If you had stood at the back of the lower room of the Swiss Cottage a hundred years ago you would see the aviary framed not only by the floral arch but also by the doorway to the room itself (the site of the excavation is hidden by the red foliage of the Japanese maple just visible in the background).

Now let us move the other side of the tree - refer to the second of the two photos below (Figure 18) still on the east-west axis and still looking in the same direction. This is something like the view of the Swiss Cottage that would be seen from the aviary if the tree was not there. The view has been lost, at least from the vantage point of the aviary, for as long as the maple has stood in the way - probably about forty or fifty years. Framed by the floral arch (not visible in this picture), and by the doorway of the internal aviary building itself, it was a wholly contrived picture in the landscape, the creation of which formed a basic rationale for the layout of the structures in this part of the garden.

Like all the other structures, the Swiss Cottage too has both objective and subjective aspects. It provides a vantage point from which to view other structures and layouts, while at the same time it also serves as a focal point to be viewed from elsewhere. As the two views in Figures 17 and 18 show, it provides a good example of the kind of optical illusion the designers delighted in achieving. View it along the main axis from the west (first view) and it seems a tiny one-storey cottage. View it along the axis from the east or aviary side (second view) and it presents itself as a much larger two-storey structure with verandah - almost a different building entirely.

But there is something missing from this second view. It was a general practice, in setting out a 'picture in the landscape', to compose the picture in terms of foreground, middle ground and distance (in the manner of certain landscape paintings). In this case, if it was the floral arch that would have framed the Swiss Cottage in the distance or background, it was the low aviary walls themselves that framed the foreground to the picture. By reference to the plans in Figures 11-13 the reader is invited to imagine themselves going into the cage and entering the internal building, then turning back to look westwards along the east-west axis towards the Swiss Cottage (at some time before the maple tree was planted). Now you are literally inside the picture, no longer a detached observer but an embodied and situated one.

From this perspective, the birds would have been captured as part of the scene. They surround you - the sounds and smells and perhaps the occasional brush of their wings as well as the sight of them. They too are part of the picture. And so are all the trees and plants inside the aviary cage. We have no proof that eagles were kept here (it could have been ravens, or other large birds that might be associated with mountains and Switzerland, or a whole variety of different birds). But using the cage to bring them into the foreground of this contrived view, with the Swiss Cottage and the setting sun at the end of the vista in the background, would have been a typical ploy of the designers of the Picturesque.

Could the aviary, then, have been intended to hold not just captive birds but also a captive image or picture, to be viewed from inside the aviary? The idea that the aviary was designed to serve as a foreground to a deeper view or vista goes a long way towards explaining the configuration of structures within the aviary – the relation of the internal structure to the external wall, the lowering of three of the outside wall sections and the open aspect of the aviary on that western side.

This paper, ostensibly about the excavation of an aviary, has actually been about perception –the many ways that created landscapes and material structures can be used to configure, shape, channel, limit, surprise, deceive, sometimes delight and occasionally transfigure the awareness of the (embodied and situated) human perceiver. Not just the perception of garden visitors in the past, but our perception too. Most of the assumptions and preconceptions which we brought to the aviary and the gardens have been inverted, turned inside-out or upside-down. Now we are looking out from inside the aviary, as well as into it from outside. Cages in particular serve as material devices for structuring perception in specific ways. A cage can also be a metaphor for the constraints imposed upon perception by existing categories of thought, the tendency to see the world from entrenched points of view. If there is one lesson that the designers of Picturesque gardens and structures can teach us through their surviving works, it is that there is always more than one way of looking at things.

The excavation was carried out by Steve Thorpe, Mark Littlewood, Keeley Hale, Richard Jones, Caroline Clarke and the author (all Albion Archaeology) with the help of Rosemary and Nick from the garden staff. Martin Edwards surveyed the site and Joan Lightning produced the plans. Sally Wileman, Brendan Chester-Kadwell, Frazer Chapman, Martin Oake and Drew Shotliffe all played major roles in facilitating the project. It was Brendan who recognized the significance of the aviary in the first instance, carried out important research and remains the principal motive force in the aviary restoration project. Steve Coleman provided useful information and Clive Richardson advised on structural issues. However, there are many possible interpretations of the aviary and its place in the garden. The argument put forward here, while based to a large extent on the work and ideas of others, represents my own personal view of the meaning of the evidence. The excavation was funded by Bedfordshire County Council and was part of their ongoing restoration of the Swiss Gardens.

Albion Archaeology, 2002, The Aviary, The Swiss Garden, Old Warden, Bedfordshire: Archaeological Investigations. Report no 01/56, Project 783

Batey, M, 1977, "An English View of Switzerland" in Country Life, Feb 17^th

Batey, M. and Lambert, D, 1990, The English Garden Tour: A View into the Past, 263-265

Chester-Kadwell, B, 2001a, "Notes on the Aviary at the Swiss Gardens, Old Warden, Bedfordshire" unpublished paper

Chester-Kadwell, B, 2001b, "A Reconstruction of the ‘Aviary’, the Swiss Gardens at Old Warden, Bedfordshire" unpublished paper

Chester-Kadwell, B, 2001c, "Notes on the Aviary at the Swiss Gardens, Old Warden, Bedfordshire" unpublished paper

Debois Landscape Survey Group, 1992, "The Swiss Garden: a Survey of the Landscape" Bedfordshire County Council

Gilpin, William, 1748, A Dialogue upon the Gardens of the Right Honourable the Lord Viscount Cobham at Stow in Buckinghamshire http://panther.bsc.edu/~jtatter/gilpin.html

Ridley, C, 1990, Cecilia: Life and Letters of Cecilia Ridley, 1819-45, Spredden Press

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