In 1329 Bishop Burghesh acquired land alongside the Palace to build a garden. Although the plans have been lost it's assumed that vegetables, fruit and flowers would have been grown here like numerous ecclesiastical gardens of the medieval period.

Writings about the garden surface over the next few hundred years with tantalising details of how it once might have looked. In 1647, despite the Palace having been severely damaged in the English Civil War, there were still high mounted longe walks on one side, set with fruit trees, and....a green court, bowling Greene, orchard, a garden.'

In the 19th century, illustrations show there was a kitchen garden but again records were lost so it's hard to know in any detail what would have been grown here. By the end of the 20th century, the site was looking rather sorry with a derelict pre-fabricated bungalow, once the home of the Palace custodian, obscuring the view.

In 2000 plans were drawn up to create a garden here once again, a small contemplative green space overlooking the rolling plain of Lincolnshire where the winds come straight from Siberia.

Landscape architect, Mark Anthony Walker has carefully linked the lands use as a garden through the centuries to the Cathedral nearby to create a contemporary yet peaceful space.

You arrive in the garden through the labyrinth of the ruined Bishops' Palace, emerging from the darkness of a cold stone room with a vaulted ceiling, down a flight of ancient steps, and then through a gap in the thick Medieval wall into the light. Because it's on a south-facing slope you first see the garden from above.

At the back of the terrace is a buttressed Roman wall which, in summer, is self-seeded with red Valerian ( Centranthus ruber) - highly appropriate as this tough, opportunistic plant gets its name from an ancient Roman family, the Valerii.

From the viewing platform your eye immediately picks out nine tightly clipped hornbeam ( Carpinus betulus) piercing the air like the spires of the Cathedral. Narrow weathered brick paths at precise geometric angles running between the trees echo the intricacy of the ribs supporting the Cathedral's ceiling. Each tree is sunk into a circlet of polished stainless steel, like the architectural bosses where the ribs intersect.

If this sounds overly complicated its not. You're reminded of the elegant workmanship of medieval craftsmen, such as the silversmiths who made the chalices and communion plates and the stonemasons who sent ambitiously tall towers into the air.