BY CHARLES EVANS Stag-hunting from which fox-hunting developed, brought Charles, 2nd Duke of Richmond and Lennox, to Chichester and the South Downs around 1720. His father was one of Charles II’s natural sons by Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth. For him Sir William Chambers built a hunting box and the much more magnificent stable quadrangle. About 1800 James Wyatt began adding to the former … Continue reading Goodwood House
BY CHARLES EVANS Industry throve under the Tudors’ new order, but at the expense of the journeymen artisans and the cottage industries. Thomas Paycocke was one of the new capitalist factory owners, and in the Essex village of Coggeshall, facing the street, in around 1500 he built himself this beautiful house of oak and brick. Almost every beam inside and out is enriched with carving. … Continue reading Paycockes
BY CHARLES EVANS Family feuds long kept alive the custom of local warfare in the West Country. So when Sir Richard Edgecumbe returned with Henry Tudor (1485) to his manor beside the Tamar from which a neighbour had driven him, he rebuilt the house strongly in granite, set around a courtyard and with a formidable gate. Cothele in Cornwall seems as if left unaltered since … Continue reading Cothele
BY CHARLES EVANS This peculiar, circular house, erected by two artistic spinsters and filled out with their curious handicrafts, was built about 1800. The Misses Jane and Mary Parminter, of good Devon middle class stock, travelled abroad for a decade sight-seeing, then decided to continue their association at Exmouth in a house which they designed to incorporate certain features of the Byzantine Church of San … Continue reading A La Ronde
BY CHARLES EVANS Hughenden Manor is best known as the home of former British Prime Minister and author, Benjamin Disraeli. Hughenden stands high among the Chiltern Hills, overlooking a charming park, which also contains the church where Disraeli is buried. The house, with 1780 origins, is really Georgian, of red brick with blue headers,but was ingeniously altered in 1847 by the architect E.B. Lamb to … Continue reading Hughenden
BY CHARLES EVANS Probably the most picturesque of the black-and-white houses of Cheshire and Lancashire, Little Moreton Hall owes its curious appearance to three generations of the Moreton Family. Also known as Old Moreton Hall, Little Moreton is a moated half-timbered manor house four miles southwest of Congleton in Cheshire. It consists of a long and lofty gatehouse range built in the early sixteenth century, … Continue reading Little Moreton Hall
BY CHARLES EVANS In its beautiful setting of lawns and gardens, the rose-red brick mansion of Blickling Hall, many-gabled and turreted, satisfies the most romantic conception of the English Country House. It was built in 1616-28 in Aylsham in Norfolk, on the moated site of a house previously belonging to the Boleyn Family, from the designs by Robert Lyminge, architect of Hatfield House with which … Continue reading Blickling
