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Please check with garden owners or their website to confirm current dates open Every day (except Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's Day); 9am - 5pm. 4.30pm in winter months
Welcomed.
Groups Yes if tour with Gardeners required contact Group Tour co-ordinator, Lesley Senior
All year. Guided Tours only (approx.max.75mins) first 11am - last 3pm. Open April - end Oct daily. Mar & Nov, - Tues, Thurs, Sat & Sun. Jan, Feb & Dec; Weekends only. (Please visit website as Tours times vary seasonally)
All year
Spring Flowers, Hyacinths, herbaceous borders.
Castle & Gardens, Adult £9.00; Child (5-16) £5.50; Over 60s £8. Children in groups £5. Children under 5 free. Groups (20+) £8.00 Gardens only, Adult £6; Child £4; Over 60s £5.50. Children in groups £3.50. Children under 5 free. Groups (20+) £5 Annual Pass available, check own website
Guide dogs are permitted
Winner of Best Small Visitor Attraction of the Year - Welcome to Yorkshire White Rose Awards
NEW for 2013 themed speciality tours - Love and Heroines looks at the love lives, losses and courage of some of the Ingilby Ladies. The Skeletons in the Closet tour reveals some of the intrigue and more colourful aspects of the Ingilby through 700 years of history. Blood and Treason is a truly horrible tour telling of Civil War, Kings and Conspirators all within one Yorkshire family. Family Life is a speciality tour exploring 700 years of one family focusing on day to day life in a Castle throughout the centuries.
Hyacinths
The Boar's Head Hotel, Ripley
The Boar's Head, Ripley
The Boar's Head, Ripley Malt Shovel, Brearton
Harrogate RHS Harlow Carr Gardens Fountains Abbey Yorkshire Dales Newby Hall Castle Howard Harewood House
Ripley Castle gardens are intended to be a delight at any time of the year, but are particularly impressive in the Spring when the wonderful collection of Hyacinths is in bloom in the Walled Garden. There are some 60 varieties of Hyacinth grown here, some traditional, some modern. The remainder of the Walled Garden is filled with lawns, beds and borders and some rare fruit trees. Vegetables, herbs and spices are grown here for the Castle's table. The herbaceous borders are some of the longest in Britain.
The extraordinary range of hot houses, renovated in 1991, are some 60 yards long, and contain a huge variety of cacti, ferns and tropical plants including citrus, begonias and bananas. In the centre of the hot houses is the Orangery-cum-Palm House crowned over its whole area by a roof of curved glass, like that of a Dutch barn.
In the Pleasure Grounds, a walk around the lake allows glimpses of the herds of Fallow and Red deer which graze under the ancient oak trees.
The gardens at Ripley were originally intended purely to supply the Castle with fruit and vegetables to complement the home farm's supply of meat and dairy produce. When Sir John Ingilby's over-ambitious plans for rebuilding the castle forced him and his wife into exile in the 1780s, gardening remained one of his consolations and he even requested his agent to bring him over a variety of seeds from Ripley, as they were much better than the ones he could obtain in France.
His son, Sir William, started on a massive scheme to improve the estate, and especially the gardens, in the 1820s, with a Walled Garden of 4 acres separated into formal, flower and vegetable gardens by brick and stone walls. He also laid out the Pleasure Grounds of eight acres and the extraordinary set of hot houses on the other side of the wall of the formal garden.