If you were a wealthy gentleman back in the 18th and early 19th centuries, simply owning a grand country estate with elegantly landscaped gardens wouldn’t be enough to impress and astonish your guests. What you needed was an ornamental hermit.
An ornamental hermit was not a real hermit, but rather a man that was employed by the estate-owner to reside in a contrived hermitage for a period of time and make scheduled appearances on the grounds to the pleasure of the employer and to be seen and marvelled at by guests.
It sounds crazy and Monty Python’esque today – but it apparently seemed like a good idea at the time. These living curiosities became part of an estate’s grand design, lending a touch of mystery and philosophical gravitas to the manicured landscapes of the Enlightenment. As the Age of Reason collided with a growing fascination for nature and contemplation, the idea of the wise, solitary figure communing with nature gained cultural traction. Ancient hermits and monks had long symbolised simplicity, reflection and withdrawal from worldly corruption.
Professor Gordon Campbell, of the University of Leicester, author of the 2013 book The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome suggests that the practice started somewhere in southern Europe and that Francis, a Roman Catholic friar from Paola in Calabria was among the first of the trend, living as a hermit in the early 15th century in a cave on his father's estate. Thereafter, throughout France, estates of dukes and other lords often included small chapels or other buildings where a resident hermit could remain in attendance.
But it would be the British aristocracy who would push the trend up to the next level.
Estate owners like the 18th-century English aristocrat Charles Hamilton of Painshill Park constructed rustic hermitages as part of their picturesque gardens. These were designed to evoke an idealised wilderness – a carefully crafted imperfection that counterbalanced the order of formal landscaping. Hamilton advertised for a hermit willing to take up residence for seven years, under strict conditions: no speaking, no washing, no cutting of hair or nails, and no leaving the grounds. The reward was £700, a fortune at the time. The story goes that Hamilton’s first hermit lasted only three weeks before being dismissed after being spotted drinking in the local pub.
Not all ornamental hermits were failures, and not all were entirely real. Some landowners used mannequins dressed in robes to give the illusion of a resident sage glimpsed through a window or doorway. [Ed: Doubly fake. Cheating!] Others hired gardeners or servants to play the part when guests were expected. The theatricality of it all fit neatly into the broader culture of the English landscape garden, which prized staged “discoveries” – the ruin half-hidden by trees, the Gothic folly (decorative structure) by the lake, the hermit in his cave, etc.
Yet the phenomenon was not without irony. The hermit, an ancient symbol of renunciation and humility, was being commodified as garden décor and celebrated by the very class whose wealth and leisure made true solitude unthinkable. Some social commentators of the time recognised this contradiction, mocking the practice as absurd. The satirist Thomas De Quincey and others used the ornamental hermit as shorthand for the eccentricity and moral emptiness of the gentry.
Still, the fad reflected some genuine anxieties of those times. Industrialisation and urbanisation were beginning to change the world. The ornamental hermit embodied a yearning for authenticity, for a simpler existence supposedly closer to nature – even if only simulated. In this way, the hermit’s hut was both a retreat and a pastoral fantasy set against the encroaching modern world.
By the mid-19th century, the fashion for living and breathing ornamental hermits had faded as landscaping tastes shifted and realism replaced romanticism.
Story Idea: Hugh Ramage
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References
wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_hermit
guild-of-ornamental-hermits.com/
atlasobscura.com/articles/the-history-of-hermits-in-gardens
hermitary.com/lore/ornamental_hermits.html
mentalfloss.com/article/500916/short-lived-british-fashion-ornamental-hermits
painshill.co.uk/about-painshill/hon-charles-hamilton
Images
1. John Bigg, the Dinton Hermit (via Wellcome Library) and a representation of an ornamental hermit in Germany in the late 18th century
2. John Bigg, the Dinton Hermit
3. Charles Hamilton of Painshill Park
4. Hermitage in the 18th century garden at Painshill Park in Cobham, Surrey. Image credit: Alamy
5. Hermitage at Waterstown, County Westmeath, Ireland
6. Ad for an ornamental hermit: no nail clipping, hourglass provided!
7. Book: The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome by Gordon Campbell, 2013
