File:Arundel Castle 21-09-2012 - 8027481852.jpg

English: There are nearly 1,000 years of history at this great castle, situated in magnificent grounds overlooking the River Arun in West Sussex and built at the end of the 11th century by Roger de Montgomery, Earl of Arundel.

The seat of The Dukes of Norfolk and set in 40 acres of sweeping grounds and gardens, Arundel Castle has been open to visitors seasonally for nearly 200 years. It is one of the great treasure houses of England, each having its own unique place in history and is home to priceless works of art. Come and see paintings and furniture, tapestries and stained glass, china and clocks, sculpture and carving, heraldry and armour in stunning room settings.

The Collector Earl's Garden Opened by HRH The Prince of Wales on 14th May 2008 The new formal garden at Arundel has been conceived as a light-hearted tribute to Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel (1585-1646), known as ‘The Collector’. The new garden occupies about a third of the area of the Georgian and Victorian walled kitchen garden, which for the last forty years had been an ugly tarmac and concrete car park. All the walled garden originally supplied flowers and vegetables to the castle and to Norfolk House but was gradually given up after the Second World War and was largely derelict by the 1970s, as happened in those straitened times at many English country houses. The present Duke and Duchess have already re-created the rest of this area as an organic kitchen garden; part of a general programme of restoration and enhancement of the whole castle and grounds undertaken over the last twenty years or so. It has been conceived as a Jacobean formal garden. It is in fact an imaginative re-creation of what the Collector Earl’s formal garden may have been like at Arundel House. The domed pergola and fountains are based on those seen in the garden vista in the background of the famous Mytens portrait of the Countess of Arundel, while the various gateways and pavilions are based on Inigo Jones’s designs for Arundel House. They have been executed in green oak and have a rustic charm and robust character appropriate to the garden.

The grand centrepiece is the rockwork ‘mountain’ planted with palms and rare ferns to represent another world, supporting a green oak version of ‘Oberon’s Palace’, a fantastic spectacle designed by Inigo Jones for Prince Henry’s Masque on New Year’s Day 1611, flanked by two green oak obelisks. This contains a shell-lined interior with a stalagmite fountain and gilded coronet ‘dancing’ on top of the jet.