Qualla: Ampthill Park

Ampthill Park: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0. On an August night in 1979, an artist named Kit Williams walked across Ampthill Park in Bedfordshire carrying a small ceramic casket containing a golden hare studded with gemstones, found a spot near a stone cross, and buried his treasure. Williams had just finished writing and illustrating a children's book called Masquerade, in which fifteen elaborately painted pictures concealed clues to the exact location of this hare. He had told no one where he was burying it. The book was published in August 1979, sold over a million copies in three years, and triggered a national obsession - amateur cryptographers, professional treasure hunters and ordinary readers all trying to decode the paintings and find the hare. For Williams, the choice of Ampthill Park was deliberate: it was the place where Katherine of Aragon had been held in 1533 while Henry VIII pursued his annulment, and the stone cross near which the hare was buried had been erected in her memory in 1773 with verses by Horace Walpole. The treasure hunt was, among other things, a love letter to a queen who had been written out of her own history. The hare was dug up in 1982, in circumstances that turned out to be more sordid than romantic. The park is still here.

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Image: Paul Dixon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ampthill Park: Royal Lodge to Tudor Prison

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Roberts, CC BY-SA 2.0. Ampthill was a royal hunting park from at least the 14th century - dense woodland on a low ridge in the middle of Bedfordshire, well placed for the kings of England to ride out from London for the chase. Sir John Cornwall, who had married Elizabeth of Lancaster - sister of Henry ...

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Image: Peter Roberts | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ampthill Park: The House Capability Brown Knew

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Ampthill Park House that stands today was built between 1687 and 1689 by the Cambridge architect Robert Grumbold, for the Ossory family. A century later, the house was remodelled by Sir William Chambers - the same architect responsible for Somerset House and the Pagoda in Kew...

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Image: Paul Dixon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ampthill Park: Sugarbeet Volunteers and Cheshire Homes

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dennis simpson, CC BY-SA 2.0. During the Second World War, the army occupied Ampthill Park. A farming camp set up nearby housed volunteers who came to help with the sugarbeet harvest, sleeping in tents pitched in the grounds of the great house. After the war, the estate was sold to Bovril Limited - the meat e...

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Image: Dennis simpson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ampthill Park: The Masquerade Treasure Hunt

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Nyborg, CC BY-SA 3.0. Kit Williams's hare turned out to be a cautionary tale about treasure hunts. The first man to claim it, in February 1982, was a Mancunian named Ken Thomas, who showed up with a metal detector and produced a sequence of clues that did not quite match the ones the book contained. W...

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Image: Chris Nyborg | CC BY-SA 3.0