- Heritage

Arra Venton

You will no longer find a village called Porthmeor on a map and the name has passed instead to one of Cornwall’s most famous surfing beaches, a few miles round the headland in St Ives. Lower Porthmeor, in its grouping and siting and the forces that have gone into its continuation, is representative of many other hamlets on this northern shelf of Penwith, and is also among the most attractive of all the groups of buildings along a visually staggering stretch of coast…

Ascog House

In 1312 Robert the Bruce is said to have given Ascog to the Bute family of Glass. In 1594 the estate, including a mill, Loch Ascog and Nether and Over Ascog, was bought by John Stewart of Kilchattan, a distant kinsman of the Stewarts of Bute who later became Earls and later Marquesses of Bute…

Astley Castle

Strictly speaking a fortified manor more than a castle, the site at Astley Castle has been in continuous occupation since the Saxon period. As Grade II* listed, the castle is counted of national significance. Its site includes the moated castle, gateway and curtain walls, lake, church and the ghost of pleasure gardens in a picturesque landscape…

The Banqueting House

The Banqueting House is one of several buildings added between 1730-60 to the remarkable landscape garden at Gibside for its owner, George Bowes. In the course of his lifetime, besides improvements to the house itself (the home since 1540 of his mother’s family, the Blakistons) and James Paine’s magnificent chapel begun just before his death in 1760, Bowes built a Palladian stable block, an Orangery, a bath house (vanished), a Column of British Liberty, a Gothic tower (vanished and perhaps never built) and the Gothic Banqueting House itself…

The Barn

Various farm buildings were built on Lundy by Sir John Borlase Warren in the 1770s, and a barn was mentioned in the letters written by the Irish steward, Mr Mannix, to Sir Aubrey de Vere Hunt in the 1820s…

The Bath House

‘The stucco… is meant to represent a wall worn by water drops, with icicles sticking to it. The festoons of shells are additional ornaments; or how could they come in that form unless some invisible sea nymph or triton placed them there for their private amusement? I should not wonder, indeed, that so pretty a place allured them.’ Mary Delany 1754…

Bath Tower

When Edward I came to build his castle at Caernarfon in the late 13th century he would have been aware of the legend which establishes the city as the seat of Imperial power in the Welsh imagination. So instead of a castle of simple limewashed rubble walls like Conway or Harlech, Edward commanded his Master of the King’s Works, James of St George, to design ‘a great castle (with) many great towers of various…

Beamsley Hospital

The inscription above the archway as you enter the Hospital announces that it was founded by Margaret, Countess of Cumberland in 1593, and completed by her daughter, Lady Anne Clifford. Queen Elizabeth gave her consent to the foundation in a special charter. In this the need for a Hospital or Almshouse was explained: the Countess had seen that there were “many old women in and around Skipton, decrepit and broken down by old age, who were in the habit of begging for their daily bread”…

Beckford's Tower

Beckford’s Tower was built between 1825 and 1827 by William Beckford (1760-1844) to designs drawn up by H.E. Goodridge. It was built by Beckford as a daily destination of retreat from his main house, No. 20 Lansdown Crescent. He would retire to the sumptuously furnished Tower to read, appreciate the many fine objects and paintings he had amassed and contemplate the view from his belvedere…

Belmont

Belmont is a fine, early example of a maritime villa, a new building type that sprang up in the second half of the 18th century with the rising popularity of sea bathing and holidays by the seaside. Our research has shown that the house was built before1784 by Samuel Coade. This is the date he transferred the house to his niece, Mistress Eleanor Coade (1733-1821), one of the most intriguing figures in 18th-century architecture…