From the 2009 report:

" CHRONOLOGY OF THE HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT
The manor of Horsemonden (from the C18 Horsmonden) was once ‘part of the antient possessions of the archbishopric of Canterbury’ but from the C12 was held by a number of eminent families, most notably the Clares, the Earls of Gloucester and Hertford (Hasted). Through marriage the manor passed to Henry, Earl of Northumberland who, in the 1530s, deeded it to Henry VIII who granted it to a Stephen Darrell seven years later. Appended to the manor was the patronage of the Horsmonden church of St Margaret’s and a C15 rectory.
Over the subsequent two hundred years the manor of Horsmonden changed hands a number of times until, in the mid-C18, the c.800ha estate was inherited by James Marriott of Spelmonden who was ‘in holy orders and LL.D’ (Hasted). He moved into the rectory as (probably) the seventh rector following ‘the Rev’d Mr Bates … the fifth here since the dissolution of the monasteries’ (Harris) who was the incumbent in 1719 and William Hassell ‘who added four rooms at very considerable expense’ (1733 Horsmonden Register). A house on the site of the present Rectory Park is named as ‘parsonage’ on a 1671 Spelmonden estate map and on the 1769 Andrews, Dury and Herbert map and is also shown on Hasted’s 1778 map. Marriott ‘rebuilt the Parsonage House in the style of the gentleman’s residence’ (Cronk 1967) adding a stable block, a coach house and walled kitchen gardens (listed building description).
James Marriott remained in residence until his death in 1825 when the estate was inherited by Revd William Marriott Smith (sometimes Marriott Smith Marriott). He made improvements to the estate farms and cottages and damned a stream ‘to pen some ornamental water, landscaped as two deep inter-connected spring-fed ponds for fishing and boating’ (Cronk 1975). These are shown on the 1843 Tithe Map and in 1854 his diary records that he had also made ‘improvements in the park, orchard and meadow’. These included building a new boat house, two new lodges and, on the west side of Spelmonden Road, a tower in honour of Sir Walter Scott (1st OS map). By 1862 the parsonage had been renamed The Rectory (or sometimes Rectory).
The Smith Marriotts continued to occupy The Rectory until the death of Revd Sir Hugh Cavendish Smith Marriott in 1944 when it was offered for sale as Horsmonden Rectory with some 65ha of land, other holdings having been sold
off in the intervening years (Sales Particulars). The estate included c.25ha of pleasure grounds and parkland set in woods of ‘many fine and valuable oak trees and fine plantations of Chestnut underwood, the cutting of which provides a good revenue’. It is not clear whether the estate was sold at that time but from 1952 the property was owned by Judge Glazebrook who renamed it Rectory Park. He carried out a tree replanting programme from 1953-87, continued to manage the woodlands for timber and to develop the gardens until he sold in 1988 to the present owners. The property remains in single, private ownership.
SITE DESCRIPTION
LOCATION, AREA, BOUNDARIES, LANDFORM, SETTING
Rectory Park lies some 90m above sea level in an area of the High Weald described by the historian Edward Hasted as ‘being a surface of continued hill and dale’ and ‘much interspersed with coppice woods of oaks’. It has fine views eastwards over its parkland to the surrounding pasture, orchards and hop fields and northwards towards its lakes (now, 2009, limited by tree growth). The c.20ha site is located about 2km south of Horsmonden, 2km north-west of Goudhurst and 12.5km east of Royal Tunbridge Wells. It is bounded on its north side by farmland, to its east and south-east by Brick Kiln Lane and to its north-west, west and south-west by, respectively, Calves Lodge Shaw, Parsonage Wood and Lordship Wood.
ENTRANCES AND APPROACHES
The approach to Rectory Park is off the north side of Rectory Park Road some 300m east of its junction with Spelmonden Road and as it turns to run southwards to St Margaret’s Church (660m south of the house). A gravelled drive lined on the east side with young beech trees runs c.120m in a north-easterly direction with views eastwards across parkland. The drive is enclosed from the parkland on its east by 1.5m high wooden ranch fencing and on its west by a 2m high beech hedge which screens adjacent C20 agricultural buildings. The drive passes between further beech hedges the runs for a further 50m to arrive at a gravelled forecourt on the south, entrance front of the house. From the forecourt there are also views eastwards across lawns to the park.
The present drive survives from at least the mid-C18 when it served as the route from the rectory to St Margaret’s Church (Hasted) and which, in the early C19, was developed by Revd William Marriott Smith as one of the ‘neat carriage drives and lodge gates at the entrances’ (Cronk). The drive is shown on the Tithe and 1862 OS maps and on the latter it is lined on either side by an avenue of oak trees, one of which survives at its northern end. In the mid C19 the drive entered Rectory Park’s grounds some 600m south-west of the house at Church Lodge (now, 2009, known as The Lodge), a brick and tile lodge standing on Brick Kiln Lane, 300m from its junction with Spelmonden Road. Since the mid-C20 the lodge has been in separate, private ownership.
A second drive, now a track, entered the estate from Spelmonden Road at a lodge (listed grade II) some 400m south-west of the house. The C19, two-storey, red brick lodge has moulded bargeboarded gables and tile hanging and was extended to the rear in the late C19 (listed building description). Now
named Linden, it is in separate, private ownership. From the lodge the drive ran 330m in a north-easterly direction to reach the northern end of the main drive from Rectory Park Road.
PRINCIPAL BUILDING
Rectory Park (listed grade II*) was built in the C15, extended in the C16 and altered in the mid-C18 and mid-C19 (listed building description). It is a three-storey, timber-framed house and is ‘rendered, part tile hung, and clad and extended in red brick’. According to the listed building description its ‘moulded arch braced trussed roof … is of a type rare in Kent’, an opinion that supports Harris’s comment when he visited the house in 1719: ‘This gentleman showed me the roof of the Parsonage House which is so uncommon that I never saw the like before. ‘Tis framed of huge strong compassing or circular timbers, just like the ribs of a ship; and really it looks very much like the hold of a ship inverted.’
The two C19 wings on the south front of the house have moulded bargeboards with pendants and finials. Pevsner described this façade as ‘Unbeautiful, almost symmetrical … contrived in the early C19 by stretching a battlemented white brick centre between the pre-existing red-brick gables to left and right …The gables got droopy bargeboards at the same time’.
Forty metres south-west of the house is a mid-C18 stable block (listed grade II) with a mid-C19 clock turret and weather vane dated ‘WMSM 1856’. It has a two-storey central block and single-storey flanking wings and is constructed of red and blue brick. Ten metres south-east of the stable block is an C18 coach house (listed grade II). It comprises two single-storey hipped blocks which are timber-framed and weather boarded with a plain tiled roof (listed building description).
GARDENS AND PLEASURE GROUNDS
The gardens on the north, east and south sides of the house are laid to lawn with shrubberies and mature trees and are enclosed variously by hedges, ranch-style, wooden fencing and post-and wire fencing. The layout of these gardens survives from the mid-C19 (1860 photograph; 1st edn OS map) apart from the late C19 alterarions which extended the lawns, walks and shrubberies to include an orchard immediately south of the kitchen gardens (1897 OS map). In 1944 the house was ‘surrounded by lawns, divided from the adjacent parkland by iron fencing, and providing many picturesque walks … with pleasing prospects of the woods and lakes’ (Sales Particulars).
The main ornamental gardens lie on the west side of the house within and around the former walled kitchen garden. The 2.5m high, brick-walled garden (listed grade II) lies 40m west of the house and comprises two sections separated by a brick wall. The western section is a rectangular area (50m x 40m) divided into quarters and partly laid to lawn with ornamental planting and partly cultivated for productive use. The eastern section is of an irregular shape (c. 30m x 15m) with the northern end of the stable block occupying its south-east corner. It is now laid to grass. A few metres further east again is a late C20 wire-enclosed tennis court.
In 1862 the western rectangular section of the kitchen garden is shown divided into quarters with perimeter walks and a fountain at its centre (1st edn OS map). A greenhouse, possibly the vine house mentioned in the 1944 Sales Particulars, occupied the exterior of a section of its southern wall, standing within a slip garden or frame yard. Additional lean-to and free- standing greenhouses were erected during the late C19 (2nd edn OS map) and are now gone. Earlier, in about 1840 according to Cronk, Revd William Marriot Smith’s diary records a ‘moment of ephemeral fame among horticulturalists’ when Mr Gulliver, his gardener, raised the first fuchsia with white sepals which he named ‘Venus Victrix’. The 1944 Sales Particulars described ‘a fine kitchen garden about a quarter of an acre, with peach, fig, cherries, and other walled fruit, besides cordon apples … a vine house on the south side; potting and tool sheds and smaller lean-to glasshouse’.
Nineteenth-century maps provide few indications of the function of the irregular-shaped eastern section of the walled garden although it featured a sundial and a glass house was built on the exterior of its north wall (1862 OS map). By 1944, however, it had been laid out as ‘an attractive Dutch garden’ (Sales Particulars).
PARKLAND
Parkland to the north, east and south-west of the house is managed as pasture, with many mature oak trees and a few C19 Wellingtonia surviving. The slopes of the western park rise steeply from south to north and then drop towards the lakes, the early C19 ‘spring-fed ponds’ which lie c.150m north of the house and which Revd William Marriott Smith created by damming a stream in the park. A bridge with wooden slats and iron railings (a C20 replacement for the bridge recorded on C19 maps) crosses the water at the point where the stream enters the lake, the edges of which are overgrown with self-sown trees which obscure views to and from the house.
The present extent and layout of the parkland survives intact from the mid-C19 (Tithe Map) when the house was described as being set within ‘a spacious park’ (Bagshaw). Nineteenth-century and early C20 OS maps depict the well-treed parkland and local directories document ‘a fine and well-wooded park’ (Kelly 1899, 1934). The 1944 Sales Particulars describe a ‘beautifully timbered parkland’ that ‘culminates to the north in two charming lakes, the most northerly used for bathing, and the other affording excellent fishing’.
A footpath shown on the 1862 OS map runs from Rectory Park Road across the western parkland and crosses the bridge over the lake to continue to Lewes Heath some 500m further north."(1)

In 2019 a Parkland Management Plan was prepared for Rectory Park on the advice and guidance of the estate's Woodland management, which details the landscape history of the parkland and the areas of ancient woodland, ancient routeways and hollow ways, two areas of 18th to 19th century narrow ridge and furrow, lynchets and assarts within the parkland, as well as post-medieval parkland features such as the bathing and boating lakes. The report describes the parkland as being of 'local' archaeological significance, with the exeption of potentially undisturbed medieval field bouldaries and lynchets. (2)

<1> Barbara Simms, 2009, The Kent Compendium of Historic Parks and Gardens for Tunbridge Wells Borough: Rectory Park (Unpublished document). SKE16335.

<2> Dr Nicola R. Bannister Aclfa, 2019, Rectory Park, Horsmonden, Kent, Parkland Management Plan (Unpublished document). SKE53539.