- Heritage

The Ancient House

The Ancient House is one of the best known houses in Suffolk, situated on the High Street in Clare opposite the main entrance to the parish church of St Peter and St Paul. Its chief glory lies in the rich, boldly moulded pargeting - the plaster decoration that covers its north facade. Supporting the chamber window is a finely carved oak bracket containing the arms of the Hamelden family, supported by two leaf-clad woodwoses (wild men of the woods)…

Anderton House

The Anderton House (formerly known as Riggside) is one of the best-known designs of Peter Aldington of Aldington & Craig, one of the most influential architectural practices of post-war domestic housing in Britain. The significance of the Anderton House is recognised by its Grade II* status and is one of only a few buildings which date from the 1970s to be given this accolade…

Appleton Water Tower

In 1871, the then Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) fell ill with typhoid while at Sandringham. Three years later, so too did his eldest son. Both royal illnesses must have vividly brought to mind the death of the Prince’s father, Prince Albert, from the same disease while at Windsor Castle. Following that tragedy the engineer Robert Rawlinson was asked to report on the drainage of the Castle (it proved to be underlain by numerous foul cesspools, almost certainly the source of the Prince Consort’s infection)…

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…