Richard Wheeler, National Gardens Specialist at the National Trust, leads us on this visit to the superlative designed landscape at Rousham, a place of pilgrimage for William Kent aficionados. Rousham represents the first phase of English landscape design and remains almost as Kent left it, one of the few gardens of this date to have escaped alteration, with many features which delighted eighteenth century visitors to Rousham still in situ, such as the ponds and cascades in Venus’s Vale, the Cold Bath, the seven-arched Praeneste, Townsend’s Building, the Temple of the Mill, and, on the skyline, a sham ruin known as the Eyecatcher. Shotover, where Sir Beville Stanier hosts us, also occupies a important place in the landscape canon. Begun in 1718 and completed in 1730, it is a rare survival of an early Georgian formal garden, laid out along an east-west axis 1,200 yards long, at its centrepiece a straight canal terminating in a Gothic Revival folly. Kent is present here too, having designed an octagonal temple to stop the view down a similarly long vista west of the house.