IN 1724 the architect John James (c.1672–1746) of Greenwich built himself a country house – Warbrooks House at Eversley in Hampshire. In front of the house he placed a long, formal, piece of water that he would have described as a ‘canal’. James was a keen gardener, a member of the Society of Gardeners, and the translator of an influential treatise on gardening. Published in 1712, James's The Theory and Practice of Gardening was a translation of a work by Antoine-Joseph Dezallier D’Argenville that had first appeared in Paris in 1709. In the book he comments on the various water features to be found in gardens:

These canals were not the waterways used by commercial barges, but were long and thin ponds that were decorative features in formal gardens – to make the distinction clearer I have called them ‘garden canals’. Their popularity in the early eighteenth century can be gauged from the high percentage of gardens with canals that are illustrated in Johannes Kip and Leonard Knyff's Britannia Illustrata of 1707. However, when formal gardens went out of fashion later in the eighteenth century, many canals were infilled. The loss was so high that when the National Trust restored the canal atWestbury Court in Gloucestershire, they were able to claim it as ‘one of the rarest types of garden to have survived in this country’. The work at Westbury has led to renewed interest in some of the other surviving canals, of which those at Hampton Court Palace, Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, and Shotover Park in Oxfordshire are notable examples.

P.F. Springett first brought the existence of the canals at Campsey Ash in Suffolk to the attention of garden historians in an article published in 1974, in which he compared them to those at Westbury Court. Yet they remained isolated curiosities for a decade and a half. In October 1990 I was invited to investigate a possible fragment of a moat that was being desilted at Boundary Farm, Framsden. The visit rapidly disclosed that this was not a moat, but a long, straight, pond, with a terrace on one side.