Three hunting parks once surrounded Alnwick Castle, providing wood and venison to the Percy family who became Dukes of Northumberland. Only one survives: Hulne Park, a walled wilderness of woods, moors, and grassland concealing a thirteenth-century friary, an eighteenth-century Gothic tower, and a cave guarded by a statue of a White Friar in iron boots. The whole was redesigned by Capability Brown, the most influential landscape designer in English history, who turned medieval hunting ground into picturesque parkland.
Lancelot "Capability" Brown earned his nickname from his habit of telling clients their estates had "capability" for improvement. By the time he reshaped Hulne Park for the 1st Duke of Northumberland in the 1760s and 1770s, he had already remade Blenheim, Stowe, and Chatsworth. His Northumberland project was unusual in scale - several thousand acres of walled park, much of it pre-existing medieval landscape that Brown smoothed and sculpted rather than erased. The park retains its boundaries, its mature woodlands, its open grassland, and the long views Brown engineered between landmarks. It is one of the largest surviving Brown landscapes still managed as a single private estate, in continuous Percy ownership for more than seven hundred years.
Tucked into the park sits Hulne Priory, founded in 1240 by Carmelite friars - the "Whitefriars" - and chosen, the tradition runs, because the site reminded them of Mount Carmel in Palestine where their order began. Substantial ruins survive: arches, walls, a fifteenth-century pele tower added when border raids made even monks fortify themselves. Eighteenth-century stone figures of friars stand watch over the ruins, carved by order of the Percys to populate the romantic scene. Hollywood found the priory more than once: it doubled as Kirklees Abbey in HTV's Robin of Sherwood and stood in as Maid Marian's home in the 1991 Kevin Costner film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
On a high point in the park rises Brizlee Tower, a Gothic Revival viewing tower built in the 1780s to the design of Robert Adam - the architect whose neoclassical style defined Georgian elegance. From its top, the duke could survey his Northumberland holdings stretching to the sea. Elsewhere in the park, a cave called the Nine Year Aud Hole opens into the rock, its entrance guarded by a Grade II-listed eighteenth-century statue of a White Friar carved in stone. The name's origin is murky local dialect - possibly "nine year old hole," possibly something stranger - and the statue stares out from the rock face as if still keeping watch for raiders the friars never quite stopped expecting.
The park opens to walkers most days between 11 a.m. and sunset. No dogs are permitted. There are no visitor facilities, no signage, no gift shop - this is a working estate, not a tourist attraction, and the visitor is expected to behave accordingly. The result is a rare thing in modern Britain: a vast, walled, mostly silent landscape where you can walk for hours and meet only the occasional shooter, forester, or the home farm tractor going about its business. Hulne Park feels less like a public space than a privilege quietly extended, a corner of the eighteenth century preserved by the simple expedient of never letting it become anything else.
Hulne Park lies immediately west of Alnwick at 55.43N, 1.75W, with the town and Alnwick Castle on its eastern edge. From the air the park reads as a large rectangular block of woodland and open ground enclosed by a wall, with the dramatic outline of Alnwick Castle visible just to the east and the smaller Brizlee Tower sometimes catching the light on rising ground within. Best viewed at 1,500-3,000 ft AGL. Nearest ICAO: EGNT (Newcastle, 28nm south), EGPH (Edinburgh, 78nm northwest). The North Sea coast lies 5nm east; inland weather can differ markedly from the coast.