Ustigate designed and built a variety of water features to enlighten and enhance the visitor experience at Kirkleatham Walled Garden in Yorkshire. A 256m trench was required to fuel the network of picturesque water features within Kirkleatham Walled Garden.

Water flows throughout the Kirkleatham Walled Garden, serving as a stimulating and uplifting pulse from top to toe. There are nine elements altogether; an indoor rill that leads to the outdoor courtyard pool and rill east and rill west that lead to source pool A, B and C and a lily pond in the cottage garden. A water play area is stationed nearest to the maze, restaurant and shop.

The rill water journey begins indoors and leads outside to run the entire length of the walled garden. It is an impressive, eye-catching feature that engages visitors to look beyond and appreciate the magnitude of what is around them. All five of the pools are beautiful and sitting proud with their brick paver body, and sandstone edge. Movement and acoustics are delivered to the garden via the rill, cascading water between the pools, and bubbling jets of varying heights. The 1.5m-tall fountain in the lily pond is controlled by an anemometer in windy conditions.

LED lighting illuminates the features at night.

The water play area is a meandering walkway and a splashpad concept comprising of 18 multi-directional water jets in a zero standing water environment. The playful “popping” water jets are programmed to run on a sequence to conserve water and have an activation bollard to increase the interactive fun. The splashpad watercourse offers a playscape that is accessible to all, and it is environmentally-friendly; supplied with a Ustigate water management system that enables mains-fed water to be captured after play and repurposed for irrigation.

A superb choice of materials is evident and fluent throughout the Kirkleatham Walled Garden. Yorkstone has been used to create footbridges across Kirkleatham’s rill feature and in and around the splashpad are circular shapes of brown timber decking, a natural rill formed from cobbled granite stone, a breedon gravel path, and rapeseed coloured EPDM wetpour. The complementary hard and soft landscaping has turned what was once a barren landscape into a natural and warm atmosphere enriched with water features, trees, hedges, lawns and shrubs.