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Category: Worcestershire

On the road to ruin.

On the road to ruin.

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Travelling around the country, as we do, we expect to see both the usual and the unusual – but not together on the same site. This place is only an hours drive from home.

The earliest building on this site was a Jacobean brick built house. After the civil war it was sold and the new owner erected two towers on the north side of the house and his grandson added the wings which enclose the entrance courtyard. Later a new private chapel was added to the west of this courtyard.

Around 1805 the owners employed John Nash, a well known English architect, to carry out a major reconstruction of the house which included the addition of huge ionic porticoes to the north and south fronts.

In 1837 serious debt forced the sale of the estate to the 11th Baron Ward, later 1st Earl of Dudley, who had inherited a great fortune from the coal and iron industries in the Black Country.

In the 1850s, Baron Ward engaged the architect Samuel Daukes, who had already altered his London house to remodel the house in Italianate style using ashlar stone cladding over the existing red brickwork and this is the result – Witley Court near the village of Great Witley in Worcestershire..

What a very grand house it is with the very impressive fountain behind it.

However you may not have noticed something odd about the house in the first photograph. There is no glass in any of the windows and the sky is visible through some of the windows as seen in the picture below.

In 1920 Witley Court was sold to Sir Herbert Smith who maintained only a skeleton staff to manage the house whilst he and his family were away, and many areas were left unused. A major accidental fire broke out in September 1937 whilst Sir Herbert was at another of his houses and although it did not destroy the whole house the estate was sold as separate lots with the house being bought by scrap dealers who stripped what they could from the house leaving it an empty shell. So we have what appears to be the usual stately home but is, unusually, just a shell. A rather sad ending for such a grand house.

The ruin is currently managed by English Heritage.

The picture below is the main reception hall with the main staircase through the arch in the far wall.

The picture below is in the main stairwell and the angled plaster follows the line of the original staircase.

There are numerous decorative carvings around the building of which this doorway is an example.

This picture shows the main entrance to what was the Conservatory and the picture below it is the Conservatory interior.

The church is still attached to the main house but is not maintained by English Heritage as it is now the parish church.

But what a parish church. It was built in the mid 18th century and, at that time, the interior was rather plain. Just 10 years later stained glass windows and the oil on canvas paintings on a new curved ceiling were added together with  moulds for the wall and ceiling decorations and the organ.

What an astonishing result! If you are ever in this area don’t miss seeing the church interior.

Stone, stone and more stone.

Stone, stone and more stone.

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Well we’re back from the Cotswolds. We had mixed weather with Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday being sunny and warm and Thursday and Friday overcast with some showers.

We drove from home to Chipping Campden, where we were staying for two nights, but stopped off at the Rollright Stones, just over the Gloucestershire border into Oxfordshire, on the way. These 77 stones form a perfect circle 104 feet across and stand on a prehistoric trackway at the edge of a ridge.

We continued on to Chipping Campden arriving at around lunchtime. It is a proper working town, not having to survive on tourism alone, but has a lot to offer the tourist. There were many typical cotswold golden stone buildings including the Market Hall.

The following day we walked up Dover’s Hill on the edge of the town which gave some stupendous views over the surrounding countryside.

There were plenty of sheep and lambs about and this lamb seemed pretty ingrigued by us.

A little way north of Chipping Campden is Hidote Manor Gardens – one of the National Trust’s properties. We spent a half day here and what an amazing place it is.

We also had a trip to Broadway as it’s one of those well known picturesque Cotswolds places. Neither of us liked it very much. It is attractive in that it has the typical Cotswold buildings of golden stone but that was it really. It seemed that most of the people there were tourists and most of the businesses lining the main street were aimed at relieving tourists of their money – not a proper working village at all.

Broadway Tower was a bit different. Set out in the middle of nowhere on the top of a hill it’s an interesting feature. We didn’t go up the tower but the views from the top of the hill were amazing.

Thursday turned out to be a cloudy day with showers so we thought that ‘indoors’ would be good and so Snowshill Manor it was. I don’t know quite what to think of it. It’s certainly an extraordinary place with every room crammed with a whole range of artifacts from furniture to bicycles. Apparently the chap who owned it lived in a separate cottage next to the manor and used the manor to store his collection. You’d have to see it to believe it and, no, I didn’t take any photographs because it’s not permitted.

This trip was a good one and more details will appear on the web site pages in due course.