Picturesque landscape garden and parkland evolved to set off the neoclassical hall...
The present Millichope Park was built in the 1830s and completed in 1840s. The architect, Edward Haycock, built the house in the Greek revivalist Style, commissioned by Rev. Robert Norgrave Pemberton. Haycock’s Millichope as the initial view from across the lake suggests, was very much contrived as an instance in a Picturesque landscape. The southwest garden front bears this out, relying upon asymmetry in its elements and the controlled emphasis of its giant pilasters to provide architectural scenery from the gardens upon and below the terrace.
The Hall compliments earlier garden structures built by Thomas Moore (Pemberton’s predecessor but one), notably George Steuart’s rotunda, dated 1770, built to comemmorate two sons who both died in the Navy; one aged 42, John More of the 79th regiment who “died when shot by an arrow at the storming of Manilla in 1962.”
The earlier Elizabethan House’s gardens were in part retained to provide the setting for the new house, with a deep rocky gorge forming a dark approach to the house from the Craven Arms road. Having passed through this cutting the views open to the lake below and to the left, between giant redwood trees, the new house built of Grinshill stone.
The main entrance to the house was originally below the portico where the terrace wall was broken by a deep recess framed by two stumpy Great Doric columns.
In the 1970s when the Bury family moved back into the house (it was used as a school from after the war until the mid 1960s) the front drive was altered to bring visitors to the north wing via a ramp into a courtyard which previously was at ground floor level , but which takes one to a new front door at the piano nobile level. Further alterations were made by the present Bury family in 2015 notably a stone colonade joining the pavillion (wing) to the main house. Both generations of Burys have contributed to improvements and restoration in the gardens.