History set in stone

Four extraordinary country houses new to the market include an original 'West Country Ziggurat' and a manor once part of the Highgrove estate

- Penny Churchill

THE houses and estates that are the real stars of COUNTRY LIFE provide a compelling and enigmatic insight into the lives of those who built, owned, lived in and often fought over them. In this week’s Platinum Jubilee issue, the enduring fascination of England’s historic houses is reflected in the launch onto the market of four timeless, but quite different country houses that have featured within its pages.

Sam Trounson of Strutt & Parker in Cirencester (01285 653101) quotes a guide price of £3.75 million for Grade I-listed, Elizabethan Doughton Manor, near Tetbury, Gloucestershire, a wonderfully symmetrical, but little-altered Cotswold-stone manor house, which stands opposite The Prince of Wales’s Highgrove estate, of which it was once a part. Doughton Manor, with its traditional coach house, Grade II-listed stone barn and nearly five acres of walled gardens and paddocks, stands at the heart of the Cotswold AONB, a mile west of Tetbury, 11 miles from Ciren- cester and nine miles from Kemble station.

Although its Historic England listing maintains that Doughton Manor was built for Richard Talboys between 1628 and 1641, research conducted by the present owners, backed up by documents held in Tetbury church, suggests that the house was, in fact, built in the 1590s, and acquired in 1623 by Talboys, who then bought the Manor and Lordship of Doughton in 1628 and ‘enlarged the existing manor house’.