In a large and rambling farmhouse garden, the brief was to design something unusual – almost a folly – as an additional fun element to the scheme. A serpentine wall was constructed using reclaimed materials found on site from old farm buildings had been demolished over many years, and the whole site was filled with rubble of all shapes and sizes.
Rather than dispose of them off-site, I decided to design features that could utilise them with the customer’s permission, and the combination of a fun feature and rubble retaining walls gave me the opportunity to create this stepped pathway feature – leading nowhere!
By using height and a curved flight of steps constructed simply out of genuine reclaimed railway sleepers, secured with steel rods inserted into the ground and also built into the walls so they were not visible, a set of curved steps was constructed, each slightly narrower than the previous one as the flight rose out of the ground, and by gently turning the pathway until the terminal could not be seen from below, it came to a sudden and abrupt end – just out of sight.
The inclusion of the steps added greater interest to the garden walls and helped to give more scope for breaking up the planting, almost as a visual plant neutral zone.