The artist (Ellen-Ann Hopkins) standing in front
of the frescoes in the tea room at Buscot

Complementing the frescoes of the swimming-pool pavilion are the vigorous and colourful murals that decorate the Buscot tea room, which was converted from part of the eighteenth-century stable block in 1991. The murals, painted a secco (on dry plaster), between 1991 and 1994, are the work of Ellen-Ann Hopkins, and they evoke the Renaissance style of Veronese, who covered the walls of the Villa Barbaro with amusing portraits of the owner and his family. Here, the artist has included many symbolic objects whose full meaning is understood only by the family and friends of Lord Faringdon, though everyone will recognise the family lurchers, the black swans from the Buscot Park lakes, and various flowers from the Four Seasons garden. Rather than include her own self-portrait, the artist has allowed her faithful black Scottie, Macbeth, to stand in for her. Quixotic and enigmatic, the frescoes are also full of energy and colour and form a part of the continuing artistic tradition at Buscot Park.


In a bird survey conducted by the British Trust for Ornithology in 2002, a one-kilometre square sample area on the Buscot Park estate was found to have the second highest count of breeding birds in the UK. Sixty breeding species were counted here, exactly the same number as the top spot, a one-kilometre square site in the Kennet Valley in Berkshire. However, one of the Buscot nesting species – the black swan – was discounted from the survey because it is not strictly regarded as a native species. The other 2,000 squares in the UK survey had an average count of thirty-five different species. Altogether the total number of different species counted at Buscot is in excess of one hundred. They include such rarities as Golden Plover, Woodlark Snow, Reed and Corn Bunting, Barn Owl, Great Spotted Woodpecker, Reed Warbler, Sedge Warbler and Kingfisher.