Hawkstone - a Gothic Day Out It's difficult to see how Hawkstone could have escaped our attention up to now. Trying to find things to do on my late sojourn in Shropshire, I scanned the Ordnance Survey map, and noticed the 'castle' and 'follies' recorded at Weston. Wednesday 17th October came, and off I went, traversing the lanes of Shropshire to reach my destination. The owner of Hawkstone in the mid-18th century, Sir Rowland Hill, saw the potential of the local landscape south of his house, with its valley between two towering red sandstone cliffs one of which was ringed by the remains of a real medieval castle: it had every capacity of improvement from what was already an interesting reality to the most exciting fantasyland. Between 1748, when he laid out a walk around the Red Castle, and his death in 1784, Rowland constructed a remarkable range of follies which became quite a tourist attraction. Dr Johnson even named one item on the tour - the 'Awful Precipice', which appeared on the itinerary after he wrote about it. Rowland's son Sir Richard carried on the work, including discovering and digging out 'The Cleft', a dramatic narrow gorge on the hilltop which could excite the most interesting feelings. Like all good aristocrats, the Hills went bankrupt, the Hall's contents were auctioned and gradually the estate was sold off and the follies were forgotten. The Hawkstone Park Hotel company acquired the parkland in 1990, and over the next three years restored as much as possible of what they were pleased to refer to as 'England's first theme park'. The Red Castle is still inaccessible at the moment, but the rest of the park (apart from an outlying tower to the east) is now open. It helped that on my visit it was a lovely sunny day and not yet half-term, so I saw no more than a dozen visitors on my whole tour.

Although modern visitors enter the Park at the south end rather than sweeping along the old carriage drive in from the north, the current owners have arranged the route rather cleverly. The visitor centre is in the 'Gothic Greenhouse', from which you get not the slightest hint of what lies in wait - apart from the glimpse of the White Tower on the hilltop (yes, I know it isn't white!).

But once around the corner you enter the central valley with the Red Castle on the left and the follies on the right. That in itself is quite a surprise! One of the delightful things about Hawkstone is the gradual revelation of prospects and environments.

The White Tower (with plastic residents), Obelisk and Swiss Bridge provide spectacular views and thrilling sensations of danger ...

The Cleft, the narrow gorge on Grotto Hill. 18th-century visitors imagined the 'violent convulsions of the earth' which had formed this amazing feature, and fantasized about the rocks closing in on them ...

Grotto Hill boasts the largest grotto in an English landscape park, topped by the Gothic Arch ...

Views, up at the towering rocks and out from the hilltops, are an important part of the whole Hawkstone experience ...

I spent a couple of hours touring the park, delightedly moving from one landscape to another, enjoying my own enjoyment of ever-so-slight feelings of danger that the odd people who tweaked this environment in a Gothic way clearly intended me to feel. The Hills (Sir Richard was particularly crackers, and, wonderfully, was ordained deacon but was refused ordination as a priest by no fewer than six bishops, which is pretty good going) didn't describe their work in writing, but the accounts of others continually compare Hawkstone to the works of dramatic landscape painters - Claude, Poussin, and of course Salvator Rosa - and demonstrate a close relationship with that whole Gothic visual imagination. Compare Hawkstone with that other great manufactured landscape, Stourhead, which was created a couple of decades earlier. Stourhead is dramatic, but gentle; the grass sweeps down to the lake, Grecian temples scatter the landscape (not even ruined ones) and sweet reason reigns. Hawkstone comes (largely) after Edmund Burke's Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, and goes instead for the shudder and the thrill. Stourhead is Classical. Hawkstone is Gothic! More information here.