The Ha-Ha

From the terrace of an English country house of the right period — call it the 1740s — the lawn runs out to meet the fields without a seam. Cattle or sheep graze in the middle distance; beyond them the ground lifts into planted woods. There is no fence anywhere in the prospect. The grass of the garden and the grass of the pasture read as one continuous surface, and the animals stand in it like figures placed there to finish the composition, which in a manner of speaking they were. What the view keeps back is that the cattle cannot come a step nearer. Between the mown lawn and the grazed field the ground falls away into a ditch, and on the garden side of that ditch stands a low wall the animals can neither climb nor jump. You cannot see it from the house, because it lies below the level of your eye. The whole arrangement is called a ha-ha.

The trick is in the geometry, and the geometry is exact. Stand on the lawn and look out. At your feet the turf ends in a sudden vertical drop — a retaining wall of dry stone or faced brick, on your side of the ditch. The floor of the ditch lies some feet down. From there the far bank rises again, but gently: a turfed slope graded back up to the level of the field. An animal grazing in the pasture ambles down that easy slope into the bottom of the trench and finds itself under a wall it has no way over. It never reaches the garden. What makes the wall vanish is not any softening of the wall; it is the ditch, which drops the whole barrier below the sightline of a person standing back on the lawn. The eye passes clean over it, and lawn and field and wood compose into a single unbroken green. Nothing has been hidden from the cattle, who meet the wall at close range. Something has been hidden from you, and only because of where you happen to stand.

The device belongs to the English landscape garden of the 1720s and 30s, though its first appearance in print is French — Dézallier d'Argenville's treatise of 1709, put into English by John James in 1712, where the sunk opening is already said to "surprise the eye upon coming near it, and make one cry, Ah! Ah! from whence it takes its name." Charles Bridgeman had one dug at Stowe in that first decade; nobody can honestly be called its inventor, and the deer-parks of the Middle Ages had used one-sided ditches for centuries to hold their herds. What was new was not the trench but what the gardeners saw they could do with it. Half a century on, Horace Walpole looked back and called it "the capital stroke, the leading step to all that has followed" — the moment the garden stopped walling itself in. The old formal garden had declared its edges: clipped hedges, terraces, a boundary wall you were meant to read as the end of the made world and the start of the wild one. The ha-ha removed the declaration. "He leaped the fence," Walpole wrote of William Kent, "and saw that all nature was a garden."

Notice what the sentence quietly concedes. The fence did not come down. Kent did not throw the estate open to the commons and the deer; the fence went into the ground, kept every ounce of its function, and gave up only its visibility — and giving up its visibility, from the one place that mattered, was enough to annex the whole horizon to the view. Sir John Perceval, walking Stowe in 1724, caught the effect exactly: the sunk fence, he wrote, "leaves you the sight of the beautiful woody country, and makes you ignorant how far the high planted walks extend." Ignorant of the edge. That is the product. The boundless prospect, the sense that the designed ground simply keeps going until it becomes the world, is not the absence of a boundary. It is a boundary subtracted from a single point of view.

This is what the ha-ha demonstrates, and I do not think it is obvious. A visible fence does two jobs at once: it stops the animal, and it announces, to everyone and all along its length, that the animal is stopped. We feel these as one thing, so that a boundary which makes no announcement can seem like no boundary at all. The ha-ha pulls them apart — not by weakening the enforcement, which stays total, but by making the announcement depend on where you stand. At the lip it declares itself violently. From the house it says nothing. What the device removes is not the boundary, and not even, quite, the sign of the boundary; it is the sign's reach. It strips the announcement from one privileged seat and leaves it intact everywhere else. And the seat it clears does not stay empty. Into it floods a positive thing — a feeling of open, unbounded country running off to the trees — produced for that seat, and only that seat, by the barrier it can no longer see.

It is tempting, and not altogether wrong, to hear a politics in that privileged seat. The century that sank its fences was also the century of parliamentary enclosure, when the open fields and commons of England were fenced, hedged, and redistributed into private hands, displacing the people who had worked them for generations. There is a body of scholarship — Raymond Williams, Ann Bermingham, others — that reads the smooth estate prospect as an aesthetic which naturalizes property, turning the hard question of who may stand where into a soft green distance. A machine that makes an owned and bounded field read, from the owner's window, as free and open nature is not on that account innocent. The counterweight is that the men who dug these ditches wrote about them as a way to keep the deer off the roses and to enlarge a view; they left no confession of ideology, because in their own terms there was nothing to confess. The politics is a lens later readers bring. It is not a secret the object was built to hide. What the object was built to hide was a wall.

Which returns me to the name, the strangest part of the business and the most honest. Every other feature of the great gardens is named for what it achieves — the cascade, the temple, the prospect. The ha-ha is named for the one moment it fails. The word is the reported cry of the walker who, strolling toward what looks like open lawn, arrives without warning at the lip of the drop and pulls up short: ha! ha! — or, in the French of the treatise that first described it, ah! ah! — surprise, and a small lurch of the stomach, at the boundary that was doing its work the whole time and has just, at close range, come roaring back. The etymology is only "supposed," the dictionaries are careful to say, and one prefers a plainer descent from an old word for a hedge; but the surprise story is the one the earliest text tells about itself, and it is true to the device even if it is wrong about the syllable. The whole apparatus is engineered toward invisibility from a single seat. It is named for the instant a person leaves that seat, meets the edge, and knows in the body that the line was there all along. Jane Austen set a character at exactly that lip in Mansfield Park and had her heroine call the warning across to her — "you will be in danger of slipping into the ha-ha." A thing built to keep you from seeing the line is named for the sound you make when you finally do.