Ferney has a place all of its own in the annals of the Picturesque Movement, the progenitors of which – Richard Payne Knight of Downton Castle and Uvedale Price of Foxley – made the Welsh borders its very cradle. By their way of thinking, the smooth lawns of Capability Brown and tame, safe, classical mansions at their heart became anathema; what they saw as both practical and aesthetically pleasing were mansions designed for ease of use and which drank in views of landscapes appreciated for their own natural merits rather than tampered with by man.

Within their circle, the aspiring landscape gardener, Humphry Repton, became an object of derision for the all-too-safe Red Book of his designs for Ferney Hall that he presented to its then-owner, Samuel Peckham Phipps, in 1789. Phipps had enlisted the services of a landscaper called Woodward, whose work had proved unsatisfactory, hence the summons to Repton. The Red Book – now in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York – provides fascinating reading and is, in many ways, a key document in the aesthetic arguments of the time, seen in the context of the former friendship that Repton had with Knight and the fact that Knight may well have introduced Repton to Phipps. Repton did make further visits to Ferney in 1790, but Phipps’ sudden death that year probably prevented the plans for the grounds being executed. He had, though, prior to his death, given Repton the impression of being ‘highly satisfied’ with his plans.

Phipps had purchased Ferney – or Ferne as it was often spelled then – from Folliott Herbert Walker Cornewall, of the Delbury Hall (q.v.) family in 1787. Cornewall had inherited the estate four years earlier when his elder brother, Frederick Walker Cornewall, MP for Leominster, had died at the young age of thirty-one. He had bought Ferney just seven years earlier from Rebecca (d. 1793), the widow of his cousin, Francis Walker (d. 1776).