This country house is no stranger to fire. It was still unfinished in 1913 when suffragettes set it ablaze. Elms Cross House became the Granby Hotel and was later destroyed by fire for a second time.
Granby House, Wiltshire. For many this is still known as Elms Cross House. Image: Knight Frank.
Situated in idyllic countryside, this substantial family home sits at Westwood, moments from the market town of Bradford-on-Avon, in Wiltshire, within lovely gardens and grounds.
Granby House was originally commissioned by quarry master, builder, and stone merchant, Isaac Jones, built at the turn of the 20th Century and is not listed. It is currently on the market at Knight Frank with a guide price of £2.95 million.
The property was once Elms Cross House, which had been built in 1908, by Isaac Jones at a cost of over £18,000. It was still unfinished when, in June 1913, it was completely gutted by fire. Suspicion at the time rested with the Suffragettes and firemen were unable to save the house due to an absolute lack of water. At the time they depended entirely for their supply on a three-quarter-inch tap in outbuildings.
This photograph appeared in the Wiltshire Times and Trowbridge Advertiser in November 1922. It was taken shortly after the interior was destroyed by fire in 1913. Image: The British Newspaper Archive.
The bare walls of the house became a landmark of the countryside but, in November 1922, Mr Charles William Darbishire, whose firm had business interests in the Far East, and was the newly-elected MP for Westbury, bought the abandoned property. The plans for the house were drawn up by Walter Wadman Snailum of Trowbridge.
Charles William Darbishire (1875 – 1925 . By Walter Stoneman, bromide print, 1922.
Darbishire had the building restored as his permanent residence. A few years later, however, both he and his wife died within a short time of each other. The house continued as a private residence before it became the Harrogate Hotel in 1939. It was named after the Yorkshire town from which the company had relocated after its hotel was requisitioned by the Government. The northern hotel had been called the Granby and after a while the Harrogate Hotel was also renamed as the Granby Hotel.
“As your car comes to rest on the gravelled drive, a butler appears to see to you and your luggage; no matter what the season, the sweet smell of flowers assails you from the forty acres of grounds. The hotel ‘office’ as such is non-existent, but there is a quiet, efficient direction behind the scenes. The chef, whom you may remember from the Granby at Harrogate, is an adept at his job; here at the Bradford-on-Avon version of the Granby, you will find the comfort and calm of country house life, with the additional convenience of a free car to whisk you into Bath if the mood dictates.
” But there is one snag. There are only twelve rooms, as against the two hundred at Harrogate.”
The Granby Hotel. This photograph was taken in 1939. Ashley Courtenay in The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News said; “A fine specimen of Cotswold domestic architecture where, with the exception of the hotel signboard, there is nothing to suggest an hotel.” Image: The British Newspaper Archive.Granby House, Wiltshire. Image: Knight Frank.
However, in August 1947, the building was gutted by fire for a second time. Once again, firemen were baffled by a complete lack of water supply until a relay pump system had been established between the burning hotel and the canal at Bradford-on-Avon, about a mile away. The fire had started in the linen room on an upper floor at the rear of the premises.
In November 1947, Mr William Gerald Holbrow, a timber merchant, purchased the Elms Cross estate, including the remains of the Granby Hotel. The building was restored as a private residence, once again known as Elms Cross House, but was put up for sale in the 1950s. In recent times the house has been used as a luxury bed and breakfast, known as Granby House Hotel, but now closed.
The Granby Hotel caught fire again on a Saturday night in August 1947. Dinner was being served at the hotel when suddenly the cry of ‘fire’ swept through the building, a member of staff having discovered that the linen room on an upper floor was ablaze. Image: The British Newspaper Archive.Granby House, Wiltshire. Image: Knight Frank.Granby House, Wiltshire. Image: Knight Frank.Granby House, Wiltshire. Image: Knight Frank.Granby House, Wiltshire. Image: Knight Frank.Granby House, Wiltshire. Image: Knight Frank.Granby House, Wiltshire. Image: Knight Frank.
There is little more seductive than a grand, yet not overbearing country house. Once known as Vale Lodge, in the reign of George I, this property was the scene of Royal feasting.
Image: Knight Frank.
In 1849, a ‘modern house’ was put up for sale in the village of Winkfield in Berkshire. ‘The residence is approached by a carriage drive sweep with lawn, flower garden, orchard and meadow. It contains eight bedrooms and dressing rooms, drawing room, dining room, breakfast room, two staircases and a stone entrance’.
Vale Lodge had not long been built, supposedly rebuilt using the structure of a hunting lodge on the Windsor Castle estate. 169 years later, the country house, now known as The Vale, no longer stands on Royal land, and is up for sale for the first time in 22 years.
Image: Knight Frank.
The house appears to have fallen into the hands of Isaiah Linwood Verity, a Major in the 92nd Highlanders, whose desperate suicide at Brompton in 1849, may have prompted the house sale the same year. The house probably didn’t sell because his son, Charles Felix Verity, soon to become a Major in 2nd (South) Middlesex Corps, later lived here.
And so, Vale Lodge, in Berkshire hunting country and close to Ascot Racecourse, proved to be a popular house. Often tenanted, its notable residents including Warine B. M. Lysley, a director of the County and General Gas Company and Bombay Gas Company, and The Hon. Arthur Henry John Walsh, Politician and Lord-Lieutenant, and later 3rd Baron Ormathwaite.
Image: Knight Frank.
Vale Lodge, with its painted stucco, was extended in the late 19th century, probably with the addition of its portico flanked by Corinthian pillars, but appears remarkably unchanged, except for the addition of an outdoor swimming pool.
Grade II listed, The Vale is on sale at Knight Frank with a guide price of £3.5 million.
Built on an ‘improbably grand scale’. Two centuries of downsizing has left this country house a pale comparison of its magnificent past.
Image: Knight Frank.
If archaeologists were to dig around Haymes, at Cleeve Hill, there is no knowing what unexpected treasures might be found. It was once the site of a Roman settlement; its excellent location no doubt attracting the Hayme family, medieval owners of the land between the 13th and 15th centuries. Later still, it was also the site of Haymes Place, a 16th century mansion built, according to historian Nicholas Kingsley, on an ‘improbably grand scale’.
What we see today are the remnants of the house, virtually unrecognisable from Thomas Robins’ view of 1760. Haymes Place, allegedly modelled on Isaac Ware’s Chesterfield House in London, had a centre of seven bays and two-and-a-half storeys, linked by curved quadrant wings to five by four pavilions.
A drawing by Thomas Robins, 1760, showing the house built for Sir William Strachan that was perhaps never fully fitted out internally. Image: Nicholas Kingsley.
Sir William Strachan had inherited a small sixteenth century house, but after acquiring the Manor of Bishops Cleeve in 1735, he rebuilt it at the centre of his 100-acre estate. Kingsley believes the house was never completed, because by the 1770s Sir William was living in a rented cottage at Hucclecote.
Sir William sold Haymes Place in 1773 to Messrs Thorniloe and Lilley of Worcester. Five years later, the main block had been demolished, along with the quadrants, although the pavilions still survived. (According to auction details from 1921, there was the suggestion that ‘a considerable portion had been destroyed by fire’ about this time). More importantly, it seems that it was now called Haymes Farm, a name that stuck until well into the twentieth century. In 1792, Bigland recorded that ‘Sir William’s elegant mansion house… in a few years was levelled to the ground, and the materials sold’.
Image: Knight Frank.
Haymes Farm and the Bishop Cleeve estates descended by marriage from John Thorniloe, first to the Russell family and then to Sir John Somerset Pakington, 1st Baron Hampton. It is doubtful that he lived here, most likely renting the property to tenants. He sold the estates in 1871 to Joseph Lovegrove, the County Coroner. By the turn of the twentieth century, Haymes Farm was in the hands of William Holliday who might have been responsible for demolishing one of the two surviving pavilions. At some stage, the house was given a large rear extension, including the integration of a re-sited mid-18th century lodge. In 1921, the house was sold to Alfred Newey, a horse-trainer of Cleeve Hill, but most famous for winning the Grand National on Eremon in 1907.
Newey remained until 1933, and by the 1960s it belonged to Peter R.B. Deakin, who ran a mushroom-growing business until 2005. The business was sold and survives today at the nearby Chelbury Mushrooms Farm.
Image: Knight Frank.
Haymes is Grade II listed and currently on the market at Knight Frank with a guide price of £5 million. According to the sales catalogue, it is ‘a beautiful, well-proportioned Georgian family home which has been the subject of a complete renovation’. Maybe so, but having seen comments elsewhere, there is little enthusiasm for the changes by country house followers.
My thanks to historian Nicholas Kingsley for providing the history of the house, much of which is included here, making it much easier to research some of Haymes’ later occupants.
“Where the house at Findon Place, or the Manor House as it used to be called, now stands, there had doubtless been a house for many hundred years, and it is probable that Edward I spent many a night here.”
Image: Knight Frank.
Findon Place is a stunning example of classical Georgian architecture. It has an extensive and rich history and is listed Grade II* due to its architectural and historical merit. The present house was largely built in the mid-18th century by John Cheale, Norroy King at Arms. It occupies the site of the original Manor House, and some parts of the present building date back to the reign of Henry VII, if not earlier. It is now on the market at Knight Frank with a guide price of £6 million.
At the time of Edward the Confessor, the lands at Findon were in the possession of Harold, the last of the Saxon Kings, who was succeeded in the ownership of Findon (then called Fine-dune) by William de Braose, who as a kinsman of the Duke of Normandy is said to have received no fewer than forty gifts of property from William the Conqueror. At the time the estate equated to a 15,000-acre deer park.
Findon Place stayed in the hands of the Braose family until 1317 when William VIII gave the house to his daughter Aline and her husband John de Mowbray.
Image: Knight Frank.
The new family ownership of John de Mowbray was cut short as he was beheaded in York in 1322 after being part of the revolt against the Crown. The King granted a licence in 1324 to allow Aline, the ability to grant the manor to Hugh de Spenser.
Findon Place was then in the hands of the Crown from 1525 until 1538, when Richard Rich obtained a licence and passed on the tenure to Thomas Cromwell. During Cromwell’s ownership, a larger house was constructed over the medieval foundations. There is still evidence of one of the grand chimneys between the present kitchen and the sitting room, which is now blocked off.
Edward Shelley was passed the house in 1541 from Cromwell, and it remained in the Shelley family until 1604.
Image: Knight Frank.
Coming to later times we find Findon Place held by John Cheale, Norroy King of Arms in the reign of George IV, who rebuilt most of the house before passing it to his nephew, William Green, a friend of the Sovereign who, when Prince of Wales, often visited Findon from Brighton, for the excellent shooting on the estate. Green’s devisees in trust reserved twenty acres and the sepulchral Chapel, in the Church, and sold the remainder to William Richardson.
William Richardson bought the house in the 18th Century and was married to Mary Margesson, the eldest daughter of John Margesson of Offington, who died without issue and the property was bequeathed to a cousin, William Westbrook Richardson, himself the son of Frances, second daughter of John Margesson.
It was soon after his arrival in 1787 that the house was restored, and the reception rooms rebuilt. After his death in 1801, his widow built the big room to the west end of the house.
Image: Knight Frank.
Findon Place was later sold to Lieutenant-Colonel William George Margesson in 1872, who added a storey to the east wing, which improved the servant accommodation. He also built a reservoir holding 15,000 gallons on the hillside. However, Margesson died in 1911 and his two sons died in the First World War, leaving no heirs.
During the early years of the 20th century the house was let and one of the occupiers, Mr E.J. Spencer, carried out several extensive internal improvements, embracing among other things an electric lighting plant, heating, drainage and septic tank, additional bathrooms, panelling to several reception rooms, a new reservoir holding 45,000 gallons, new croquet lawn and two tennis lawns.
Image: Knight Frank.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Findon Place was let to the Savills and then to the Hartridges, who eventually bought it. John Hartridge sold it to Keith Middlemas, who in 1972, sold it to John Young.
The oldest part of the present house are the cellars, which were originally the base of the medieval house. The hard stone foundations, laid about 1200-1300, can be seen and a cut chalk and red mortar wall from before 1300.
The property is beautifully set back from the lane, with a stone gravel drive. The accommodation is well proportioned and arranged over four floors. Of note are the three principle reception rooms, which have extraordinary high ceilings.
Image: Knight Frank.
The house has been adapted for modern day living with a great balance between formal and informal areas and maintains the ability to entertain on a grand scale. The bedrooms are arranged over two upper floors and as expected are well proportioned. On the first floor there are six principal bedrooms served by four bathrooms, including a generous master suite with bedroom, bathroom and dressing room. The second floor is served by a separate staircase and provides more flexible accommodation with a kitchenette, five bedrooms and two bathrooms giving the ability to create a separate apartment for staff or guests.
The gardens provide the most glorious setting and have been laid out to create a high degree of privacy and protection. They include a mixture of high flint walls, herbaceous borders, mature trees and areas of level lawns. There is a range of additional outbuildings including stables, garden stores and a hexagonal room. They also include a heated outdoor swimming pool and tennis court. The grounds extend to approximately 52 acres and is a mixture of pasture and woodland.
For the first time in 65 years this house might be going back into private ownership, but it will require deep pockets to do so
Image: Knight Frank.
In 1936, there was excitement and relief when Lord Brocket, who as Mr Ronald Nall-Cain had represented Wavertree as its MP until 1934, bought Bramshill Park. This country house had been the residence of the Cope family for 200 years, but there was a danger of it passing out of private ownership as had happened to so many other mansions at the time.
It was bought as a second home for his family in more rural surroundings and further from London than Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire.
As it turned out, Lord Brocket, a man of considerable wealth, was its last private owner. He held on to the property until 1953 before selling it to the Government. However, sixty-five years later there is a chance that Bramshill Park might become a family residence once again.
This is a big country house. Bramshill Park is a magnificent Grade I listed mainly Georgian mansion, set within Grade I listed parkland, woodland and lake. It stands just over three miles away from Hartley Wintney, a charming country village in Hampshire. It is now being marketed at Knight Frank as a conversion opportunity, price on application, but expect to pay in excess of £20 million for the privilege, and then there will be conversion costs on top.
Bramshill dates to the Doomsday Book of 1086 when the estate was held by Hugh de Port. In 1347 Sir Thomas Foxley, Constable of Windsor Castle, was granted permission to enclose 2,500 acres of land as a deer park at Bramshill and Hazeley. Sir Thomas was responsible for the construction of the noble mansion at Bramshill which has drawn comparisons with Windsor Castle. The mansion then passed to the 11th Lord Zouche of Harringworth. Zouche needed a large country mansion to consolidate his position at Court and to make a statement that he was a force to be reckoned with. He reconstructed the house between 1605 and 1615.
Bramshill Park photographed in 1909. When this was taken Sir Anthony Cope’s house had just escaped destruction in a forest fire. For three days, 400 mounted troops from Aldershot had assisted local authorities in beating out extensive fires in the neighbourhood of Eversley, Hampshire, the work, it was believed of incendiaries. The fires were put out but not before some 2000 acres had been devastated. Image: The British Newspaper Archive.Image: Knight Frank.
Lord Zouche was a well-travelled and cultivated gentleman and it is to him that the creation of Bramshill House, largely as it appears today, is credited together with its walled gardens, maze and lake. The Henley family bought the estate in 1640 and remained at Bramshill until 1699 when it was sold to Sir John Cope whose descendants remained at Bramshill for 236 years. The Cope’s had a significant influence on both the fabric of the building, and its landscape. Much of what we know of the changes to the house and grounds over this period are described in a book published in 1883 by Sir William Cope, the main phases of internal change appear to be as follows:
1720. Introduction of the mezzanine floor and Queen Anne Stairs.
1812. Construction of the “Dark” corridor in the courtyard to allow independent access to the first-floor rooms and improve internal circulation.
1850-90. Incremental changes, mainly replacement of failing external fabric and re-organisation of the ground floor of the north wing. Introduction of bathrooms.
1920. Removal of partitions and walls from the former billiard room and “Red” dining room to create the Morning room.
Image: Knight Frank.
In 1936, Bramshill was bought from the Cope family by Ronald Nall-Cain, 2nd Baron Brocket. During the Second World War, the house was used by the Red Cross as a maternity home for evacuee mothers from Portsmouth, and afterwards as a home for the exiled King Michael and Queen Anne of Romania and their family.
A Jacobean gem: The exterior of Bramshill which was built between 1605 and 1612 by Lord Zouche, a friend of Ben Jonson and one of the Peers who tried Mary Queen of Scots. When this photograph was taken in 1936 no structural alterations had taken place since 1705, and Lord Brocket, as the new owner, intended to make very little change. Image: The British Newspaper Archive.‘A famous mansion saved’ said The Sphere in July 1936, The 127-ft Long Gallery at Bramshill Park, the early 17th century residence near Stratfieldsaye, Hampshire, a magnificent architectural example of its period, which had just been bought by Lord Brocket who intended to preserve it in the interests of the nation. Image: The British Newspaper Archive.The State Drawing Room in 1936: A spacious apartment with furniture and tapestries that ranked as museum pieces. Image: The British Newspaper Archive.Image: Knight Frank.
Following its sale in the 1953 to the British Government it became the Police Staff College in 1960, and was later home to the European Police College, the house and its outbuildings operating as a conference and training centre. Owing to escalating maintenance costs the property was put on the market for £25 million in 2013 and later sold to City & Country for £20 million in August 2014.
The property is now being offered for sale as a private mansion, along with a former coach house and assembly dining hall. It has the benefit of consents pending to restore it back to a single-family residence.
Police officers undergoing the Senior Command Course at the Police College, Bramshill, in 1970. Image: The British Newspaper Archive.Image: Knight Frank.Image: Knight Frank.Image: Knight Frank.Image: Knight Frank.Image: Knight Frank.Image: Knight Frank.Image: Knight Frank.Image: Knight Frank.Image: Knight Frank.Image: Knight Frank.
“It is the kind of house that takes a lot of living up to,” Evelyn Waugh wrote in his diary, as if rehearsing his favourite role as country squire
Image: Knight Frank.
The selling point for Piers Court, on the market at Knight Frank with a £3 million guide price, is its connection with Evelyn Waugh, the author of Brideshead Revisited, who lived here between 1937 and 1956.
Notwithstanding, Piers Court at Stinchcombe, near Dursley, has a history going back much farther. The Grade II* listed house stands on the site of a medieval manor of that name burned down by Parliamentary troops searching for Prince Rupert on his march from Cirencester to Berkeley Castle (about six miles away) in 1645. Piers Court, a safe house for Royalists, was owned by the wealthy land and mill owning Pynffold family who remained for 150 years.
According to Historic England, the remains of the earlier building were incorporated into an 18th century property which is the house we see today.
Image: Knight Frank.
Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903, the second son of Arthur Waugh, who was a contributor to The Yellow Book, an essayist and a publisher. He was educated at Lancing and Hertford College, Oxford, and, like many other writers, he taught in a private school for a time. His first novel, Decline and Fall, was published in 1928 and he followed it with nine years of travel which included the Arctic, tropical America and Abyssinia. He became a Roman Catholic in 1939 and had a varied war service, including membership of the British Military Mission to Yugoslavia in 1944. He married Laura, a daughter of Colonel Aubrey Herbert, an MP for Yeovil, in 1937 and settled at Piers Court, where he collected books. His novels included Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934), Scoop (1938), Put Out More Flags (1942), Brideshead Revisited (1945), The Loved One (1948), Helena (1950) and Men at Arms (1952).
Evelyn Waugh poses by one of the many fine pieces of ornamental statuary which enhanced the beauty of the garden at Piers Court. Image: The British Newspaper Archive.
Evelyn Waugh bought Piers Court for £3,600 in 1937, having been given the money by his future parents-in-law, in readiness for his marriage to Laura Herbert, his second wife. (His first marriage to Evelyn Gardner had been annulled in 1926).
The outbreak of war meant their stay at Piers Court was cut short. The Waugh’s let the house to a convent school for £600 a year in October 1939, Laura moved to Pixton Park in Somerset, and Evelyn served with the Army in Crete and Yugoslavia. It wasn’t until September 1945 that they returned.
There are contradictory stories about Evelyn Waugh’s feelings towards Piers Court. He was initially said to have ‘fallen in love’ with the house; his son, Auberon Waugh, later recalled in his book Will This Do? how he and his siblings knew “the front of the house belonged strictly to my father . . . one detected his presence as soon as we walked into the pretty hall, with its white and black stone floor and glass chandelier”. The enforced absence might have been responsible for his later abating attitude regarding Piers Court.
Image: Evelyn Waugh Society.
Frances Donaldson, in Evelyn Waugh – Portrait of a Country Neighbour, wrote in 1968:
“I always loved the drawing-room at Piers Court. The rest of the house was a question of taste – Evelyn’s taste. Personally, I became very fond of that too, but I could understand why other people disliked it. Evelyn liked dark surfaces and pattern, heavy furniture, silver and glass. There was much that was Victorian in the house, but his taste was masculine and, although the house was enlivened with personal eccentricities, it was genuinely of the period.
“In his library the carved shelves were built out in bays as they are in a public library and painted dark green, but it was a big room and the effect was rather beautiful while this arrangement provided room for his collection of books. The dining-room was sombre but the hall, staircase and landing above were light and elegant. The whole house right down to the Abyssinian paintings in the gentlemen’s lavatory was uniquely different from any other house I have ever been in.
“The drawing-room into which we were shown on that first night spoke as much of Laura as of Evelyn. They both loved and had considered knowledge of fine furniture and they bought eighteenth-century pieces when they could afford to. On the walls hung pictures from Evelyn’s collection of Victorian painters including the Augustus Egg of two girls in a boat, and I remember with vivid affection the faded green velvet curtains banded with chintz which hung in the circular bay window and the cushions which they had bought in a country house sale. On this night a fire burned in the grate and the chintz-covered chairs and sofa were reassuring.”
Evelyn Waugh photographed with his family in the grounds of Piers Court, at Stinchcombe: Evelyn Waugh, Harriet, Septimus, James, Laura Waugh, Maria, Margaret and Auberon Alexander. Image: The British Newspaper Archive.
According to Knight Frank, much can be learnt about Evelyn Waugh and his time spent at Piers Court from his diary entries and the letters he wrote to his friends, many of whom were noted intellectuals in the twentieth century.
Ironically, it was also Knight, Frank and Rutley who handled the sale of Piers Court when the Waughs tired of the house. The official line was that Evelyn had, in June 1955, received an unsolicited visit from Nancy Spain, a reporter from the Daily Express, demanding an interview. He showed her the door, but the damage had been done. Spain wrote up the episode and, within weeks, Waugh put Piers Court on the market. “I felt as if the house had been polluted,” he wrote to the estate agent, furious at the invasion of his privacy. “If you happen to meet a lunatic who wants to live in this ghastly area, please tell him.”
Evelyn Waugh in his beloved library. Image: Harry Ransom Center/University of Texas at Austin.The library benefits from a large bay window and overlooks the parkland. Image: Knight Frank.
The truth about their departure was probably best summed up by Frances Donaldson:
“Whether or not I am right in my view, the happy days came to an end in 1956. Evelyn began to be restless, ostensibly because he believed the town of Dursley was creeping up to his gates, but really I think because he wished for change, to break the rut of boredom in which he was sunk.”
Various buyers came to light, among them a Colonel and a Sir Anthony Lindsay-Hogg, but it wasn’t until June 1956 that a Mrs Gadsden made an offer of £9,500 for Piers Court, which was accepted. The Waughs moved to a manor house at Combe Florey in Somerset where Evelyn died in 1966.
Leading up the stone steps and behind a heavy panelled door one finds a classical Georgian hall with a flagstone floor and cantilever staircase with a mahogany polished hand rail and wrought iron balustrading. Image: Knight Frank.The drawing room looks to the front of the house and down the alternating copper and green beech avenue. Image: Knight Frank.Off the inner hall is the beautiful dining room with its Adam fireplace, polished oak flooring and large sash windows with a westerly aspect. Image: Knight Frank.
Piers Court is approached up a long drive, lined with high beech hedges.
According to Knight Frank, the house is extremely well presented and benefits from both an imposing, formal layout ideal for entertaining, yet to the rear of the property lies a homelier arrangement of rooms ideal for family living. Off the main entrance hall are the formal drawing room and library, both of which provide the grandeur that would be expected of a Georgian manor house.
Described by Country Life as a genial, pleasantly rambling family house with some 8,400sq ft of accommodation, including five reception rooms. There is also a kitchen/breakfast room with a beautiful beamed ceiling, tiled floor and lovely rustic feel. Upstairs there are eight bedrooms and six bathrooms … plus extensive attics and a one-bedroom staff wing.
The front garden is lawned with a circular clipped yew hedge encompassing an ornamental fountain. The secret garden is of particular note, with high clipped yew hedges and bordered by a stone wall. Gravel walkways lead to the Gothic edifice which was built by Evelyn Waugh when he was creating the gardens. The croquet lawn and tennis court are well screened by a high beech hedge which creates a corridor of alternating green and copper beech.
Piers Court has an array of deep beds which fill with colour in the spring and summer months. There are many garden components. The Coach House looks over the oval walled garden with ornamental ponds framed by careful planting. The park is arranged as pasture with parkland trees including horse chestnut, lime, oak and copper beech. Lying to the south of the parkland is further grassland divided by a hedgerow. A footpath crosses part of the land to the west of the house.
Of course, there have been a few owners since, and probably most traces of Evelyn Waugh’s existence have long-since disappeared. Back in 2004, the then-custodian revealed that his beloved library was long gone. “Under a previous owner, the library where Waugh wrote was shipped, piece by piece, to Texas, where it was supposed to be reconstructed as a museum but is still in packing cases.”
The sitting room overlooks the English country garden and terrace, benefiting from an open fire with a painted stone surround. Image: Knight Frank.The Elizabethan rear of the house, with its slightly less formal rooms, lends itself to be the nucleus of family living. The kitchen has a range of traditional wooden cabinets, granite work surfaces and a terracotta tiled floor. Image: Knight Frank.The first floor offers the primary accommodation with a beautiful en-suite master bedroom with stunning south westerly views of the parkland. There are four further bedrooms on this floor, all of which are en-suite. Image: Knight Frank.Image: Knight Frank.
Slavery, evacuees, refugees and a donkey called Petronella
‘Easterlands stands in a lawn, tastefully laid out with a fish pond at its base, and commands a beautiful view of its park-like grounds well studded with ornamental trees and the surrounding country.’ From a sales brief in 1862. Image: SWNS.
Back in 2014, this country house hit the market with a guide price of £3.1 million. Unsold, apparently unwanted, it remains for sale with a vastly reduced guide price of £2.25 million. Easterlands at Sampford Arundel, near Wellington, is an impressive residence surrounded by its own parkland with secondary accommodation, traditional outbuildings and mature grounds and gardens.
Knight Frank, who are marketing the property, believe the house dates to the late 19th century. However, it is probably earlier than that, possibly early 1830s because its architectural style is typically Georgian.
The sale of Easterlands provides the opportunity to acquire a significant seven bedroom country house in need of some refurbishment, set in an outstanding ringfenced park in a truly convenient location for many schools and businesses in the West Country. Image: Knight Frank.
Easterlands House was most likely built for William Bellet who bought the land in 1816 from Richard Yendle of Uplowman, yeoman, and Jeremiah Woodbury of Exeter, innkeeper. His daughter Elizabeth married John Shattock (1792-1860), an English landed proprietor and merchant, who made his fortune at Kingston, in Jamaica, and returned to England between 1831 and 1833. Shattock was connected to Jamaica’s slave trade and duly awarded compensation by the British Government when the Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833. There were two small awards, for a group of about ten enslaved people in Good Air, St. Andrew, and for the enslaved people on St. Mary, Jamaica.
A man of immense wealth, the couple settled at Easterlands and when John Bellett Shattock died in 1860 it passed to his eldest son, the Rev. John Bellett Shattock of Stalbridge, Dorset, who put the estate up for sale in 1862.
Easterlands was put for sale by the Rev. John Bellett Shattock in 1862. This notice is from the Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser. Image: The British Newspaper Archive.From the top of the land there are views over the surrounding Taunton Vale, Blackdown Hills and Wellington Monument and down to the village with the tower of the village Church forming an attractive focal point. Image: SWNS.
Easterlands was sold to Charles Moore in 1864. He was a Liverpool merchant and appears to have let the fully furnished property. Occupants included Charles Hutton Potts (1823-1886) and Major-General Cookson, who was a yearly tenant when the estate was put up for sale again in 1876. Failing to find a buyer, it went back on the market in 1878 under the instruction of Mary Louisa Moore of Clontarf, Dublin.
Getting ready for a new owner. This sales notice from the Dorset County Chronicle indicated that Easterlands was being cleared for the arrival of Charles Moore. Image: The British Newspaper Archive.
The estate was sold to Robert Arundel Were (1822-1892), a solicitor and gentleman of Wellington, who held many appointments with local authorities including Superintendent Registrar Clerk to the Wellington Bench, the Board of Guardians, the Rural Sanitary Unit and Milverton Highway Board. When he died in May 1892 the estate was put up for sale just weeks later.
It remained unsold and was let to Arthur Tristram E. Jervoise before the house and estate of 140 acres were bought for nearly £9,000 by Frederick George Slessor in 1897. Slessor, chartered civil engineer, was the son of Major-General Slessor of Sidmouth, Devon, and remained until his death in 1905.
The house is approached through a wide gated entrance, guarded by a three bedroom lodge cottage, down a long tree lined avenue affording tantalising glimpses of the house amongst the mature trees in the garden and park. Image: Knight Frank.
After going to auction in 1906 it was bought by Colonel Joseph Henry Moore, a retired officer in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He’d spent 30 years in the Army, serving in the Ashanti War, the defence of the hospital at Foomana and in the Afghan War the occupation of Kandahar and the Battle of Khelal-i-Ghilzai. He later held several appointments in India and was principal medical officer both at Quetta and Bombay.
A picturesque view of Easterlands. This photograph is thought to date from the 1920s or 1930s. Image: sampfordarundel.org.
Colonel Moore enjoyed Easterlands only briefly. He died there in 1908 but his family remained until 1924 when it was offered for sale by private treaty.
Up until this point, Easterlands had slipped between families and it wasn’t until Alderman Gerald Fox bought the property in 1925 that the house enjoyed any stability. He moved here with his wife, Beatrice Cornish-Bowden, youngest daughter of Admiral Cornish-Bowden, of Newton Abbot, and was affectionately known as ‘Bee’.
Gerald Fox (1865-1947), was the second son of Joseph Hoyland Fox, for many years the chairman of Fox Bros, an old family woollen business at Wellington. He was educated at Marlborough College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A.. He joined Lloyds Bank prior to becoming a partner in Fox, Fowler and Co, a Westcountry private banking firm, afterwards absorbed into Lloyds Bank itself. He was also a director of Devon & Courtenay Clay Company, the Commercial Union Assurance Company and of Candy & Company, a pottery firm at Heathfield. Aside his business interests, he also managed to be secretary of Somerset County Rugby Club and Somerset County Cricket Club. (Fox Brothers still survives and is run by ‘Dragons’ Den’ star Deborah Meaden who purchased a majority stake in 2009).
As the current sale particulars point out, Gerald Fox will be best-remembered for taking in several evacuees and refugees during World War Two, when several rooms in the house were converted to accommodate them. Easterlands also became the headquarters for the local Home Guard and had a near miss in 1940 when a German bomber dropped a 100lb incendiary bomb. It cleared the house and fell into the lake causing no damage except to a tree.
Image: Knight Frank.
After his Gerald Fox’s death in 1947, his widow remained until the early 1950s before selling up and moving to the Quantocks.
Easterlands appears to have then been occupied by Mr Hans K.E. Richter and then Lieutenant-Colonel R.S. Rogers, both of whom little is known. However, in 1963, the estate was bought with great fanfare by Mr Edward Du Cann, the Conservative MP for Taunton and Economic Secretary to the Treasury. In later years he would become chairman of the 1922 Committee, the Conservative party’s parliamentary group.
Later Sir Edward Du Cann, a controversial Conservative MP and businessman who was once a contender for the party leadership.
Edward Du Cann (1924-2017) and his wife had been living in temporary accommodation while they waited for the sale to be finalised. When it was concluded they lived a very public life at Easterlands along with a donkey called Petronella.
He became a well-known businessman with his Unicorn Group, was a director of Keyser Ullman, a banking firm that collapsed in 1974, and later served as a director and chairman of Lonhro (later collapsing owing £10 million to creditors).
After Easterlands he owned nearby Cothay Manor which he was forced to sell after several legal disputes over debts and was made bankrupt in 1993.
This fine country house has now been in the same ownership for about 35 years and whilst well-cared for and maintained, gives an incoming purchaser the opportunity to refurbish the house and develop the barns and outbuildings to suit their needs, subject to obtaining the necessary planning consents.Image: Knight Frank.Image: Knight Frank.
The current owners arrived at unlisted Easterlands during the 1980s.
According to Knight Frank, the main reception rooms are well-proportioned with high ceilings and have elegant detailing including substantial fireplaces and panelling. As might be expected Easterlands provides the traditional room configuration – entrance hall, study/drawing room, dining room, garden room, billiard room, kitchen/breakfast room, pantry, larder, utility room, estate office, three cloakrooms, boot room and extensive cellars. Its master bedroom has two en-suite dressing rooms and bathrooms, in addition to a further six bedrooms and bathrooms.
The house also comes with extensive outbuildings including a two-bedroom cottage, a three-bedroom lodge, a coach house with stabling and stores, as well as barns.
Within its 44.4 -acres are a walled garden, hard tennis court, covered swimming pool, a former vineyard, mature gardens, woodland and a lake.
Image: Knight Frank.Image: Knight Frank.Image: Knight Frank.Image: Knight Frank.At the centre of the rambling grounds and gardens is the elegant water feature with its Japanese bridge, which could be right out of a garden in the French village Giverny, Claude Monet’s famous home. Image: Knight Frank.
HOUSE AND HERITAGE 