The House

Four hundred years of people not quite finishing it.

Nothing here was built all at once and nothing was ever properly completed. Five rooms are open; the rest is lived in, worked in, or held up with scaffolding.

The Stone Hall

1583

The oldest room standing, and the only one that has never been re-floored. The screen at the north end came out of a ship; nobody has ever established which.

The Long Gallery

1601

Forty-two metres, built for walking in bad weather. The plaster ceiling took a team of six eleven years and they signed it, in a corner, where they thought nobody would look.

The Library

1748

Nine thousand volumes, of which about four hundred are worth anything and the rest are worth keeping. Open to researchers by arrangement.

The Garden Room

1812

Added when the family decided the house should face the park rather than the road. It was the right decision and it cost them the drive.

The Kitchen Court

1866

Still a working kitchen. The range was converted in 1978 and the copper is used, not polished.

The collection

Mostly ordinary, entirely local.

There is no masterpiece here and we have stopped apologising for it. What there is instead is four centuries of one family buying from within about thirty miles.

Nine hundred objects are catalogued and the catalogue is public. The furniture is largely Oxfordshire, the portraits are largely bad, and the two things worth travelling for are a 1602 estate map and a set of dairy ledgers that runs unbroken from 1740 to 1961.

The 1602 estate map — the earliest surviving survey of the valley, on vellum
The dairy ledgers — 221 unbroken years, digitised in 2019
The Long Gallery ceiling — signed by its plasterers, found 1961
The library — 9,000 volumes, open to researchers by arrangement

Keeping it up

The roof is the whole argument.

Everything else on this estate is negotiable. The roof is what the endowment exists for.

Stone

From the same quarry as the original build, two miles south, reopened by the trust in 2013 purely to supply repairs. It is cheaper than matching it on the open market and the colour is right.

Lead

Recast on site every time a section comes off. The 1583 lead is still up there in places, on its fourth casting.

Lime

Hot-mixed on the yard. Cement was used on the south front in 1958 and we have spent thirty years taking it back off.

Oak

From the estate, seasoned four years in the timber yard. The 1782 planting was made for exactly this and is only now coming to it.