Guided Tours

Stella and Stephen Huyshe-Shires will personally provide your guided tour of the house. Our visitors always tell us that this helps to relate to the building as a home, and gives a fascinating insight into the delights and problems of living in an historic house. We hope you too will find it more enlightening than being left to wander round picking out snippets of information from cards or a guide book. We usually manage to tell you some of the things you might not think to ask about – from drains and damp to death watch beetle!

On the tour we take you round the outside to explain the structure and history of the building, and then inside to see the main rooms - all of them lived in and all revealing the history of the house, back to its Tudor origins. Children will be fascinated by the alligator, and maybe even the ghosts! There is something for everyone - facts, family stories, history and heraldry - all of it alive and relevant.

We also show you the adjacent mediaeval hall house with its original roof structure still intact.

During the tour you will be able to see documents relating to the house and the family, going back as far as the 13th century (when England was ruled by Henry III).

After your visit to the house, you will be able to relax with tea and cake in the tea room, or wander round the gardens at your leisure.

The Garden

A former lady tenant who was an enthusiastic gardener laid out most of the garden around 1911. Now much effort is being put in to ensure that this gracious rural setting is shown to its best advantage and to make it easier to maintain through to the 21^st century.

There are mature trees to provide architectural stature; beautiful magnolia, wisteria and many unusual flowering shrubs provide a spectacle of colour and texture. Birds and butterflies add to the beauty. There are natural woodland walks to intrigue you; the lawns and decorative borders will delight you. If you want simply to soak up the scene of this captivating setting in the Roncombe valley, there is the long terrace leading from the Elizabethan stone summer house to the Edwardian summer house, or seats around the garden, from which you can watch the afternoon pass slowly by.

Walk the paths amongst our Christmas trees during early summer and experience the magnificent spectacle of the different varieties all ‘flushing’ with their new growth – a wonderful sight if you have never seen it.

The garden is developing and changing all the time. You will be able to see the work in progress now and follow up on the changes next year.
Future projects will include the restoration of the traditional kitchen garden, as well as setting a tranquil water feature into the natural lie of the woodland fringe.