Lulah Ellender visits Kipling’s Bateman’s

My first encounter with Bateman’s, the former home of poet and author Rudyard Kipling’s, was, fittingly, through a story. It goes like this. At the age of six, Kipling was sent from his home in India to school in England. This uprooting was traumatic enough, but he also experienced cruel treatment from the foster family charged with his care. His uncle’s house in Fulham became a refuge – every time he rang the bell-pull there he felt relief, welcome, at home. When this house was demolished years later, Kipling rescued the bell-pull and installed it at Bateman’s, wanting any child visiting to feel the same sense of safety and fun.

Kipling’s life was, of course, defined by story – not just his own but those he created. And Bateman’s was an important backdrop to his work, providing both a safe family home and creative inspiration. He bought the house in 1902, looking for a retreat from the crowds of onlookers peering curiously at his Rottingdean home. It sits on the edge of Burwash village, surrounded by fields, in Kipling’s time fairly inaccessible (unless, like him, you were an early-adopter of the motor car). I came across it on a circular walk around Burwash on a mizzly autumn day, floundering through flooded fields and getting the kind of lost that starts as funny and then becomes unnervingly uncanny. The handsome pale stone house dates back to 1634 and was a farmhouse until the late 1890s. Kipling and his wife, Caroline, completed the renovations begun by the previous owner, restoring the house and garden. After Kipling’s death in 1936 Caroline left Bateman’s to the National Trust, who still own it today.

Kipling was a keen gardener, favouring loose formality and simplicity. He wanted the garden to be a space for friends and family to relax, and it retains this sense of welcome today, with children playing on the grass and visitors eating cake from the café. He sketched designs for the space, ordering plants from North America and Japan, planting a traditional rose garden and extending an existing pond into a linear lily pond that he’s said to have funded with his Nobel Prize winnings.

Neatly-clipped low box hedge borders divide a terraced garden that flows into more relaxed spaces as you move away from the house. A walled kitchen garden reflects Kipling’s belief in self-sufficiency, with vegetables and espaliered fruit trees. Beyond the formal gardens is the secluded Woodland Garden where Kipling planted bluebells, wood anemones, early purple orchids, wild garlic and celandines, evoking the natural beauty of English woodlands. There’s a charming orchard with apples, plums, medlars, damsons, crabapples, black mulberries, and a row of trained pear trees known as Pear Alley. Brick pathways lead you through lawned areas and ornamental borders, past a row of pleached lime trees and into a wildflower meadow edged by the River Dudwell. It’s a calm, still place where it’s easy to imagine Kipling sitting by the millpond, writing. There’s also an 18th Century working mill that still houses the original grinding stones, wheel, and gears that Kipling carefully restored.

This eagerness to return the house and garden to the past is rooted in Kipling’s belief in craftsmanship and reverence for heritage. He was fascinated by the history of the Wealden landscape and the lives of the people who lived and worked there. A hedger named William Isted and his wife introduced Kipling to local folklore, recounting tales of a wise woman who would use a sacrificed black cockerel to divine the future.

Bateman’s became a focal point where Kipling’s fascination with the past, literature, and the natural world intersected. The Sussex countryside inspired his fantasy stories of Puck, a time travelling magical being who brings historical figures into the present to recount their stories to children. In The Land Kipling tells the story of a field through generations of a local family who ‘Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the law calls mine’.

This nostalgia tips into the more troubling aspects of Kipling’s story. His defence of empire, paternalistic view of the English rural working class and exoticisation of India have made him a controversial literary figure. His stereotypical portrayal of people of colour and assertion of British colonial superiority have complicated his legacy. Kipling likened England to a garden, writing ‘And the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away’. Viewed through this lens, the gardens at Bateman’s can be seen as a manifestation of an idealised pastoral nationalism. It’s a beautiful place, carefully tended and much loved by visitors, but the sense of order and gentleness belies a complex tangle of narratives.

For information about visiting Bateman’s go to nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/sussex/batemans

Hastings artist Clare Fletcher is exhibiting original watercolour illustrations inspired by Kipling’s The Jungle Book at Bateman’s until January 5, in celebration of the book’s 130th anniversary.