The generation game

The allure of the West Country has kept these two houses in the hands of their owners for more than 30 years

- Penny Churchill

THE camellias are already blooming in the West Country, where the coming weeks will see the launch onto the market, for the first time in a generation, of some of the region’s lesser-known, but most appealing, country houses.

One of the most enchanting is secluded, Grade II-listed The Manor House at Glanvilles Wootton, which stands in some 88 acres of lush parkland and pasture, gardens and woodland to the east of the village, seven miles south of Sherborne and 12 miles north of Dorchester in the heart of Dorset’s Hardy Country.

For sale for the first time since 1985— at a guide price of £4.75 million through Strutt & Parker (020–7629 7282) and Symonds & Sampson (01305 261008)—the exquisitely symmetrical Georgian manor house, which incorporates an earlier 17thcentury house, has been restored, redecorated and improved by its present owners during their 35-year tenure.

Set in an area renowned for growing timber, notably oak and elm, the quiet village of Glanvilles Wootton—the name of which derives from the ‘wooded place’ mentioned in Domesday and that of the de Glannvyl family who held the manor in medieval times—has long been the centre of a prosperous farming community. To the north and east is the dairy farming country of the Blackmore Vale and, to the west, open chalk downland, with Dorset’s famous Jurassic Coast some 20 miles away. No ‘pigs, planes or pylons’ mar the landscape in these parts.

The original 17th-century section of The Manor House was probably built by George Williams, scion of a Welsh landowning family that was long established in mid Dorset, In 1616, he inherited lands at Glanvilles Wootton and neighbouring Mynterne that he had previously leased from his father, Sir John Williams of Hersingston.