Marling Hall stands on a little eminence among what would in more golden days have been called well-wooded parkland. Owing to death duties and other ameliorative influences a number of its fine oaks and elms have been at various times cut down and sold. Those that remain are dying from the head downwards in a disconcerting way for want of woodmen, though even Dean Swift did not have large gaunt leafless branches sticking out of the top of his head like a nightmare of Actaeon. Behind the house meanders the little stream of Rising which after it has flowed through the Risings (High and Low), joins the river near Barchester