Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

This homage to Monk Lewis and Horace Walpole was an afterthought, built in 1772. Brick plastered over to simulate stone. Atkins is interested in brick. The jagged finish, with rodent toothmarks, reminds him of abandoned jobs of his youth, when contractors went bust or upwardly mobile Brummies ran out of readies. Contemporary excavations explain the choice of location for this one-room abbey: vaults and ducting were found beneath the floor. The abbey was built to conceal Hamilton’s brick kilns. Within the illusionist scheme of Pains-hill, evidence of mechanical and mundane things had to be suppressed or disguised. Figures in recorded views of the estate are schematic, at ease, caught in reverie. No record of manual labour was left for posterity. Fakes faked themselves into oblivion.

The game is movement. Walkers undergo a form of aesthetic analysis as they travel from folly to folly, a strict examination of their responses to the freakish sets with which they are confronted. The interval between wonders is nicely calculated; just enough time to compose a poem of celebration. Here, on English heathland, is an eruption of weathered limestone, the aftermath of a volcanic catastrophe. The grotto is shaped from outcrops of tufa, razor-sharp stone you might find on a barren Mediterranean island. Tufa needs heat, sunlight. The sea.

The grotto, after Pope, was the ultimate challenge for the landscape conceptualist: a retreat, a back reference, a geologically impossible shrine to the Muse. But it’s done as a gesture, a performance. You don’t mean it. Hamilton doesn’t really want to hide here. He isn’t soliciting trance or fugue. He invites his guests to admire the artifice. He wants their astonishment. He plays with the laws of physics. He constructs a fantasy cave with stalactites and crystals: in order to deliver an authentically metaphysical experience. By strolling out of sunlight into a dark place, where reflected crystals glitter beneath water, the excursionist is agreeably stunned, disorientated. Amazed.

Jennifer Potter (in her 1998 book, Secret Gardens ) commends Painshill Park for featuring her favourite grotto:

The first part is easy: a chink of natural light ahead makes the tunnel seem longer than it is. The wall to your left opens into a shimmering view of the bridge; an oeil-de-boeuf admits light from above, heightening the tension between earth and air, black slag below, crystals above. The gardener, meanwhile, has galloped round the outside to switch on the taps so that when you finally stumble into the main chamber, blinded by sunbeams, you see the water gushing down the walls and the lake opens up to view beyond spangly stalactites.

Pulling away from the too rapid succession of Hamilton’s conceits, we zigzag through the plantation at the western extremity of the estate. Conifer avenues remind me of South Wales, the densely planted darkness of pit prop forests good for nothing except rally driving and hunting foxes with shotguns. Painshill has been invaded with pylons. One of them has the impertinence to place itself directly in front of the red brick Gothic tower.

From the woods, as we climb towards it, the four-storey stump is a Romantic allusion, a nod to Samuel Palmer’s etching The Lonely Tower . Palmer, by the time he completed this work in 1879, was living in Furze Hill House, Reigate. His property stood 400 feet above sea level. The Palmer scholar Raymond Lister said that the South Downs and Kentish hills could be seen in the distance and, ‘on a clear day’, Chanctonbury Ring. Hamilton’s tower, seven or so miles from Furze Hill House, was well within range. Palmer had the habit of jotting lines of verse on to labels which he pasted to the frames of his canvases. Two years after The Lonely Tower , at a period when he blended remembered elements of Shoreham (foreground) with Italian hills (background), he quoted Milton’s ‘L’ Allegro’ as a form of dedication for his watercolour The Prospect .

Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures

Whilst the landscape round it measures…

Towers and battlements it sees

Bosom’d high on tufted trees .

The memory of stars and owls and lounging shepherds dissolves into a busy road. The A3, hurtling towards Junction 10 of the M25, is the graphic margin in our western view, a rude invader. The democracy of speed, pod culture, ensures that Hamilton’s hillside prospect is ignored. Motorists are trained to read signs, watch for hidden cameras, to ready themselves for disaster: the jam, the shunt, the swerve into a service station. They ignore landscape. It happens, but it is as featureless as television; no better, no worse. Narcoleptic resignation, postponed pleasure.

By a fortunate chance, we’re given access to the tower. It’s not the right day, but an official happens to be around and says that, if we’re quick, we can climb the circular stairs to the roof. From the castellated summit we gaze out over three counties — and, better yet, two motorways. The riptide where the roads merge.

Looking down on the pylon, the path between close-packed trees, we understand why Hamilton’s paid hermit felt the need to escape. The hermitage, on the escarpment, was a rustic hut with a thatched roof. I was reminded of Jack Kerouac, fire-watching on Desolation Peak. Too much transcendence gluts the soul. Grand views, elevating prospects, shrivel the human spirit. Kerouac was reduced to writing haikus about winter flies in a medicine cabinet. Hamilton’s salaried loner lasted a fortnight, his existence a spectacle, before he took off to town in search of ale.

The gate in the tree line, indicated on the map, was a chimera. Traffic on the A3 flashed between gaps in the forest screen. The road was a torrent to which we could find no access. From the battlements of the high tower, the motorway was a steel rule in an expanse of woodland, broken by a few small red patches of settlement. Shrubs and new plantings on the gradient of the roadside verge, the soft estate, struggled to disguise a sliproad. We were forced to trek back the way we had come, revisiting every highlight in Hamilton’s portfolio.

Beyond the Ice House, blind children were being led down the long avenue by sighted companions. They worked in pairs. An educational game. Supervisors with clipboards lurked, benevolently attentive, checking the blindfolds. This condition of blindness was temporary, induced. There must be no cheating. Tiny guides, in sports clothes and baseball caps, grinned. Both hands cupped around the leading hand of their unsighted friend. They leant forward, tugging — as if they had a sheep on a lead. The blind ones stretched back, arms flung wide, to ward off obstacles. Progress was slow. Between them, explainer and unseeing audience, they came to understand the ambivalence of Painshill Park.

There’s no help for it, we have to endure a section of road walking; Indian file, facing the oncoming traffic, pressing our body-prints into spiky hedges. A three-mile plod down the A245, through Cobham Tilt and Stoke D’Abernon (like routed Diggers). Vernacular architecture, Surrey brick (headers, stretchers, English Rose, Contra Dutch) proselytised by Marc, are quietly extinguished as we advance on the motorway.

The M25 is an old friend, a vagrant travelling with a special visa, under instruction to keep moving, keep its eyes to itself. The earth-sculpting and planting of the soft estates around Leatherhead Common and Junction 9 is majestic; Tony Sangwine of the Highways Agency can be proud of this one. Leaning on a five-bar gate, among golden fields of corn, to view the low hills and darkening sky, we wouldn’t know the motorway was there — if it wasn’t for the gently humped bridge, the hum of traffic. The road is a painless intervention in a complacent landscape.