Hawkstone Park was Romatic refuge from Industrial Revolution [audio 11min]

As garden design grew ever more bold in the 18th and 19th centuries, the park at Hawkstone in Shropshire, built in the 1700s, served as a reminder of God's supreme power over man and nature. The follies of rock caverns and mountains covering 15 miles of rugged terrain in North Shropshire were built by the Methodist Richard Hill as a kind of temple to Nature and God. He opened the park to the public, and visitors came to Hawkstone to rediscover nature as society became more and more urbanised following the industrial revolution. In their book This Other Eden: Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History (Little Brown), Andrea Wulf and Emma Gieben-Gamal note that Hawkstone coincided with the Romantic period, a time when Europeans were discovering the joys of the wilderness, and mountains, keen to discover the thrills of experiencing nature in the raw. Wulf took Maggie Ayre on a tour of the park.