One of the pleasures of attending the Chatsworth Arts Festival, Art Out Loud, is the opportunity to explore the grounds in between sessions. I have never really had a chance to appreciate the great West Front, which one sees from across the river and was designed post-Talman, possibly by Archer, or even the first Duke himself:-
The garden is, as ever, spectacular with the residue of the original formal garden as laid out by London and Wise:-
I have also never previously registered the first Duke’s greenhouse which dates back to 1697, not long after the construction of the house and at the time when lots of people, including Celia Fiennes, were visiting the garden and documenting their experience of it, not in terms of the picturesque, but as a sequence of visual adventures and curiosities:-