Stourhead Gardens in Wiltshire

You're standing at Stourhead, an estate at the source of the River Stour in the southwest of Wiltshire. There's a stately mansion here, the little village of Stourton, and above all one of the most famous landscape gardens in England. For five hundred years the Stourton family lived here. They sold up in 1714, and soon afterwards the estate passed to Henry Hoare, son of a wealthy banker. He had the old manor house pulled down. Architect Colen Campbell designed a new villa in the style of the Italian Andrea Palladio, one of the very first houses of its kind. Take a look at that clean, classical front. The columned portico, by the way, was only added around 1840. In the early twentieth century the house was gutted by fire, but it was rebuilt in almost exactly the same style. The real star, though, is the garden. Henry Hoare the second wanted to create a three-dimensional painting. He took his cue from seventeenth-century landscape painters like Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin and above all Gaspard Dughet. The lake at the centre is entirely man-made, created by damming a small stream. Walk around it and you're following the hero Aeneas on his journey into the underworld. Hoare had one rule: on your walk you should never see the same thing twice. There's always a temple across the water tempting you onwards. Look out for the Pantheon, the Temple of Flora, the five-arched Palladian Bridge and the grotto. On one hill stands the Temple of Apollo. You might know it from the 2005 film of Pride and Prejudice, where Mr Darcy proposes to Elizabeth. Further off rises King Alfred's Tower, a brick folly fifty metres tall. So what's inside? Over some two hundred years the Hoare family gathered a large library and an art collection, and most of it survived the fire. In the Italian Room you'll find hand-coloured prints after Italian masters, done so skilfully that people once mistook them for oil paintings. Grandson Richard Colt Hoare later added the library wing. Stourhead has belonged to the National Trust since 1946, and the estate is open all year round. Do give yourself time for the walk around the lake.