Beckley Park provides an appropriate setting for the headquarters of a foundation promoting the exploration of consciousness. For a start, it feels extraordinarily remote given its proximity to Oxford. Up a long, bumpy track, perched on the last solid ground before Otmoor, the house provides a striking landmark in an otherwise rural setting. The mystic air of the place is enhanced by the three moats that encircle the house, the burgeoning orchard, and the enchanting topiary gardens, laid out in their present form by Amanda's grandfather, Percy Feilding, and shaped by Amanda's father, Basil Feilding, together with Bertie Moore, a buddhist monk friend of his.

The history of Beckley Park dates back at least to Saxon times, with King Alfred bequeathing 'Beccaule' to his kinsman Osferth in his last will and testament. This set the tradition of granting Beckley Park to a valued companion, rather than from father to son in the usual manner. It has since been the gifted treasure of noblemen and royalty alike, up until the modern era, when it was bought by Amanda's ancestor in the early twentieth century.

The house as it stands today was built in 1520. The south entrance is reached over a solid, stone-arched bridge across a moat as green as a lawn with waterweed. Valerian pours out of the crumbling grey lias of the moat walls whilst clouds of pink roses billow out from the narrow garden strip between the moat and the plum-coloured brick house walls.

The Foundation itself works from a barn to the side of the house, festooned in white roses, ornamented with richly carved Indian panels and liberally decorated with Buddhist and Tibetan images and drawings. From the barn, paths lead past miniature garden enclosures, again Eastern in their ornaments, to turn a corner of the house, and there, beyond a deep pit of water with gunnera, foxgloves and rampageous flowers, is the remarkable north garden with its triple moats, which hang below the house like three strands of a necklace. Between the stone terrace of the house and these moats are two lozenge-shaped garden rooms, one with a tall tulip tree, and round these lozenges topiary passages spread out in a delicious but bewildering green maze, curiously dry above so much still, green water. What crowns these mazes of box and visually overwhelms everything else, floral or green, are the box pyramids, not two or three of them, but an uncountable multitude of 20-30 green spires all kept neat and geometric.

The impact of this configuration is impressive to say the least. The north wall of the house, with its three projecting towers, rises up sheer from the narrow terrace, and at every few yards off the terrace there are entry points into the moat and topiary maze. Amanda has created routes into the confusion by bridging the moats with clustered telegraph poles; but because the water is greener even than the lawns there is a perilous uncertainty as to where a foot can be placed. Yellow irises flourish in the green water; wild strawberries grow temptingly brilliant upon surprisingly dry banks. Lilies and roses, these last pale pink and wine dark, almost purple, enliven, together with red hot pokers, every small patch of open ground except for the lawns in those two intimate twin garden rooms.