What is a Ha-Ha?
Ha-ha is mentioned in chapters 9 and 10 of Mansfield Park. It is a ditch, or, rather, a sunken fence by which means the formal garden of a (usually) grand house is separated invisibly from the park where livestock (cattle, deer and sheep) graze. One of its benefits is that from the direction of the house you can barely notice the break in the landscape. The other is to keep cows and deer in the park and not in the formal gardens thereby wreaking havoc eating the plants. Before the introduction of the ha-ha, the only method of keeping livestock in the park separate from the gardens was by visually intrusive means of control , that is , fences and walls. Horace Walpole in his essay On Modern Gardening( 1770) attributed the introduction of such garden features to the English landscape to the famous gardener, Charles Bridgman, partner of the equally famous Henry Wise: But the capital stroke, the leading step to all that followed was (I believe the first though was Bridgman’s) the destructi
A ha-ha is a fence which is concealed in a trench, allowing for the creation of a barrier without the interruption of the view. Ha-has were developed in England in the 1700s, as part of the Landscape Gardening school, which valued long, sweeping views which would appear uninterrupted from most angles. Some examples of extant ha-has dating back to the 1700s can be found in England, and they have been incorporated into landscape design in other regions of the world as well. When a ha-ha is constructed, a deep trench is dug. One side of the trench has a relatively straight side which may be reinforced with stone or wood, creating a fence, while the other side has a gentle slope. For someone walking across a lawn or stretch of land, the ha-ha will appear invisible until the walker reaches the trench. In some cases, a double ha-ha will be built, with a fence in the middle of a trench, acting as a barrier to people or animals approaching from either side. For members of the Landscape Gardeni
