Charles Waterton and Walton Hall

The BBC News website reported back in March that the park at Walton Hall, on the southern outskirts of Wakefield, has been added to the Historic Englands list of protected parks and gardens. The article can be read at 'World's first nature reserve' joins heritage list

Walton Hall was the ancestral home of the pioneering naturalist and proto - environmentalist Charles Waterton, and who created at Walton “the Worlld’s first nature reserve”. After his death in 1865 was inherited by his son and heir Edmund. Edmund Waterton was a significant antiquarian who accompanied us on the recent Marian Pilgrimage. Unfortunately his commitment to such studies led to his financial difficulties which resulted in bankruptcy and the sale of the hall and estate in 1876. Wikipedia has a history of the property at Walton Hall, West Yorkshire  and has biographies of father and son at Charles Waterton and at Edmund Waterton. That biographical account of Charles and his innovative ideas, as well as his idiosyncrasies, shows the range of his interests and something of his legacy.

The Watertons were a recusant family and descended from Robert Waterton, who died in 1425, and was not only a leading figure in the administration of the Duchy of Lancaster, but, by his second marriage, brother-in-law to a certain Bishop Richard Fleming of Lincoln, “my bishop” , and the original Clever Boy.

Charles Waterton is now, quite rightly, no longer just seen as the eccentric Squire of Walton Hall but as a pioneer and indeed as a visionary in natural history and environmental matters and as an explorer whose books influenced later generations, including Darwin and Wallace. True, there was an eccentric side to him, but it is often engaging, such as in sleeping with his foot outside his tent in South America in the hope that a vampire bat would bite him, a hope in which he was to be disappointed, or as when he built new pig sties at Walton and included window openings so his pigs could enjoy the view…

Charles Waterton in 1824

National Portrait Gallery

Image: Wikipedia 

Quite apart from his significant scientific contribution to learning and popular understanding of the natural world when I skimmed Brian Edginton’s biography of Charles Waterton I recall being impressed by its account of the recusant culture of Walton. Charles was born in 1782, in the lifetime of the Young Pretender, and when the hint of Catholic Emancipation was a glimmer of an idea that could trigger the Gordon Riots in 1780. One reason that may have sent Charles to manage family estates in British Guiana was that as a Catholic there was no public role for him in Britain. He had returned to Walton by the time of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, and was to see the restoration of the hierarchy in 1850. For last fifteen years of his life there was Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. He and his son were products of that hidden scholarly world of the old Catholic gentry which remained discreet in its life long after 1829.

The preservation of Walton is important not just to the local environment of Wakefield but to the wider, much wider, environment that fascinated Charles Waterton.