Summer Sports - Cricket
Surface soil removed ahead of the 2008 square installation
Laser levelling of the new square
Andy Jesson, Gardens and Park Manager, Sheffield Park
Wales Cricket Association to fund a trophy for an annual tournament of what was then called ‘intercolonial cricket’ in Australia. It grew to become Australia’s principal domestic cricket trophy, contested by all its states, and arguably with more staying power and appeal than our County Championship, the Sheffield Shield. After the Earl’s death in 1909, cricket at Sheffield Park began to decline and, since the First World War, the ground barely used. Sadly, he died virtually penniless, due largely to his extravagancies, and without an heir. The estate passed through several owners before being left to the National Trust in 1954. The pitch was ploughed up during the First World War and, although matches resumed between the wars on a nearby pitch, cricket finally died out when the whole of Sheffield Park grounds were requisitioned during World War Two and used as a base for Canadian troops. What had once been a cricket ground became a conifer plantation dotted with Nissen huts.
In 2009 though it was leased to a Sussex cricket club called the Armadillos and restored to its former glories. Andy tells me how this came about and the early preparation work.
“Back in 2002, the year I came here, the National Trust decided that the infrastructure at Sheffield Park wasn’t able to meet the logistics of events held there,” said Andy. They took the decision to change the then wooded ‐ and frankly unappealing ‐ former cricket ground into an events field.
WG’s big hit. The fenced tree many yards beyond the boundary struck by the legendary cricketer
Right: WG Grace, one of the stars of Victorian cricket to play at the first Sheffield Park ground
44 I PC JUNE/JULY 2018
“We cleared all the trees, and had it power harrowed and roughly leveled by a contractor,” he said. “A seed mix with a wildflower element was sown all over. The site was then fit to be used to host concerts and the like. Approach ways were made with hardcore, then screeded off to make them ‘green’ yet
able to take necessary heavy goods traffic.” Just six years on, the high risk of rain affected events prompted a rethink and the idea of rekindling the cricket heritage born. Andy explained the reasoning:
“It had always been the National Trust’s intention to host country house cricket just as The Earl of Sheffield had more than a century ago. The cricket ground is integral to the whole Sheffield Park landscape.” “We wanted to restore it as the focal point of the journey through the cruciform lakes. The gardens in the Earl’s day were landscaped specifically to make the walk from the house to the ground as colourfully beautiful as possible. The gardens needed to be at their peak when the matches were being held. That is why Sheffield Park is famed for being a late flowering garden and many of the hybrid rhododendrons here were selected to flower well into June.” “A lease agreement with a Sussex cricket club called the Armadillos was made, giving them use of the events area as their home ground. They wanted a really top quality square and set about restoring the ground to something like its former glory.” The Armadillos, formed in 1983 and named, it is said, because the team had a long tail, played a country house type of cricket, but didn’t have a home of its own. They had actually been playing home fixtures in the grounds of Highbrook House at nearby West Hoathly. Peter Wigan, one of the club’s stalwarts and its ground secretary at the time, takes up the story:
“Our initial inclination was to keep down the cost of laying a square, but the decision was taken, in order to produce a first class playing surface, that no expense should be spared,” he said.
“Cricket pitch specialist Steven Pask, based in Lincolnshire, was commissioned to construct an eight pitch square for us, and work began in April ten years ago.” “Its position and orientation were a concern and we even monitored the passage of the sun to get it right, given the surrounding tree line. Much time was spent measuring imaginary boundaries as well, until we established that the pitches should run
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